This novel reads like the genius clandestine work of a marginal figure. It comes as some surprise to discover after finishing it that Bachmann was a central pillar of Austrian culture, a reference for the likes of Bernhard and Jelinek, who adapted the novel for the screen. Malina is a dense, complex read, structured around the thoughts of a woman who lives with one man, Malina, and has an affair with another, Ivan, although her relationship with Malina is probably platonic. The book is composed of three sections, one where the primary emphasis is on her relationship with Ivan, another, the last, with Malina, and a section in the middle where the focus is her father. This section is the most nightmarish, as it becomes increasingly evident that the relationship between father and daughter was incestuous.
There is so much going on in Malina that the threads sometimes seem to run away from the reader, perhaps even the writer, but that is part of the novel’s complex glory. The game of the novel involves following these threads, sometimes getting caught up in their unlikely logic, sometimes trying to make sense of them. The phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ is perhaps used too much when discussing female writers, but it’s clear that Bachmann delights in leading the reader up the garden path and back again, at times with sequences that don’t even pretend to make grammatical sense, at others with a ragged challenging brilliance. At the same time, this is also a novel which explicitly details the joys and sufferings of being an independent Viennese woman.
“I’ll sleep on my questions in a deep intoxication. I’ll worship animals in the night, I’ll lay violent hands on the holiest icons, I’ll clutch at all lies, I’ll grow bestial in my dreams and will allow myself to be slaughtered like a beast.”
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