Jennifer Krasinski on Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina

For Bookforum, Jennifer Krasinski reviews Ingeborg Bachmann's novel, Malina, originally translated from the German in 1990 by Philip Boehm and published now by New Directions in a revised edition. "Malina is a work of harrowing, head-spinning magnificence," writes Krasinski. More:

...Bachmann’s is a deft miscreation, relaying the deranging realities of being a woman by way of sentences that rush forth like life force from an open jugular. As Bachmann told her audience in one of her landmark Frankfurt Lectures of 1959 and 1960: “If we had the words, if we had the language, we would not need the weapons.” Malina will perhaps be most perplexing to readers who believe that the most one can make of literature is perfect sense. Some of the novel’s firmer facts: The narrator is a writer of high repute who lives in the comfort and safety of “Ungargassenland,” as she dubs her quiet nation-street in Vienna. She is drafting a text that may be titled Death Styles, or Egyptian Darkness, or Notes from the Dead House. “Should this book appear, as someday it must,” she muses in a fleeting mood, “people will writhe with laughter after only one page, they will leap for joy, they will be comforted, they will read on, biting their fi sts to suppress their cries of joy.” These are perverse paroxysms, given that she also dreams her book will be about Hell.

Read the full review at Bookforum.