Malina: Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Bachmann, Ingeborg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241366240 ISBN 13: 9780241366240

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2019

Synopsis

Here is the story of lives painfully intertwined.

An unnamed narrator is haunted by nightmarish memories of her father and desperate for the attentions of her lover. Her only companion is the androgynous Malina with whom she lives, an initially remote and dispassionate man who ultimately becomes an ominous influence. Plunging towards its riveting finale, Malina lays bare the struggle for love and the limits of discourse between men and women.

Part detective novel, part love story, part psychoanalytic case study, Bachmann's 1971 masterpiece brings us to the broken heart of human experience, eros, neurosis and history.

About this title

Review:

A writer of genius (The New York Times)

Rare and strong (Los Angeles Times)

It seems in Malina there is nothing Bachmann cannot do with words (New York Review of Books)

A passionate tour de force (Village Voice)

About the Author:

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) was an icon of postwar literature in Europe. A poet and a philosopher, she wrote radio plays, short stories, essays and a single novel universally recognized as her masterwork, Malina.

Born in 1926 in Klagenfurt, Austria, Bachmann was the daughter of a Nazi party member. She rose to prominence in the 1950s with two collections of poems that grapple with what she considered to be the jarring dissonance of writing poetry in German "after Auschwitz". She steadily produced poetry and philosophical essays, as well as co-writing two operas and a ballet, and becoming politically involved with Heinrich Boll, Gunter Grass and Uwe Johnson against the Vietnam War. She was the constant subject of interviews, documentaries, and dissertations, and featured the front covers of Der Spiegel. She won all the major German and Austrian literary awards, including the prestigious Georg Buchner prize. But she was a naturally shy person and, sick of the sustained attention to her life and work, she left Austria for Ischia, then Naples, then Munich, Zurich, Berlin and finally Rome. In her final years she became dependent on alcohol and sedatives; she died in a fire in her bedroom in 1973, which police concluded was caused by a lit cigarette.

Since her death she has been recognized as a significant influence on such writers as Günter Grass, Max Frisch, Christa Wolf, and Peter Handke. The annual Ingeborg Bachmann Prize is one of the most important awards for literature in the German language.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0241366240
• ISBN 13: 9780241366240
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304