Malina

This book is the only novel by the author, an Austrian intellectual more known for her poetry, essays and short stories. According to my Bright Leaf circle, the interest in this 1971 novel has resurfaced as of late. It was translated to English in 1990. Bachmann died at 47, ostensibly due to burns from a fire caused when she fell asleep with a lit cigarette and also serious substance abuse that had accumulated during her short adult life. This happened a couple of years after completing the novel

I was not surprised that the book would be one of the more challenging ones the club would suggest and indeed it was narrated in a stream of consciousness style. I likened it to a literary counterpart of abstract expressionism in the art world. Therefore what the book was trying to get across--its meaning--I could only shrug.

However I persevered through it. I could offer a simplistic description thus: There were three main characters: An unnamed narrator who was a female journalist; her apparent love interest, Ivan, who lived in a nearby apartment; a companion she lived with, the book’s namesake, Malina. There were three main sections, perhaps intended to be chapters: The first is the most comprehensible. It describes her life living in an empty loveless relationship with Malina and the barely veiled affair she has with Ivan. She describes Malina joylessly and Ivan adoringly. Yet it seems that both treat her somewhat similarly--passionless with little regard for her. The second section describes darker memories--wartime during childhood and incest by her father--that seem to draw her into a state of mental illness. The final section has Malina counseling her like a psychotherapist to try to bring her back to a normal state. In the end, she seems to suggest that Malina, having control now of her thoughts, psychologically “murders” her, bringing the book to a close.

I was happy enough that I could pick that cursory overview out of the book. But even beyond that I wondered about the title Malina as I thought of him as almost a secondary character. At least undeserving as being the book’s title. That led to my conclusion that the nameless narrator was the author and Ivan and Malina were just two manifestations of her psyche. She was, after all, self-destructive. Malina won the eponymous title since he was the inner demon that brought her down.

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