Malina

Malina is a novel published in 1971 by the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973). It is narrated in the first person by an unnamed woman, a writer and intellectual living in Vienna in the second half of the twentieth century, who examines with intense precision her existential situation as a woman and as an author, both through personal reflection and in dialogue form.

The book is organised in three chapters. In the first, "Happy with Ivan", the narrator describes her relationship with Ivan, a Hungarian who lives on the same street, the Ungargasse, and works in finance. She seeks in him a happiness and security he can barely provide: he travels often, responds little to her intense emotionality and does not know how to accompany her growing psychological troubles. When Ivan is away, she talks with Malina, her flatmate, a calm and orderly military historian who is always there for her. The second chapter, "The Third Man", is the climax of the novel: in dreams and trance states the horrors of the Second World War return, including gas chambers and rape. A "father" figure embodies that horror; the narrator recognises that it refers not only to her biological father, a former NSDAP teacher and Wehrmacht officer, but to the terror-filled world dominated by men of Nazism. Malina also suggests that this is an inner war. In the third chapter, "From Last Things", the narrator tries to overcome her situation in dialogue with Malina, and it becomes clear that a life "according to the secret", once the root of her despair has been discovered, is impossible. She understands that a relationship with Ivan is not viable and that, probably, no relationship will be. "I lived in Ivan and I die in Malina," she declares. Her death is figured in her symbolic disappearance into a crack in the wall, and the final sentence, "It was murder", extends to the act of writing itself, which she regards as an inadequate substitute for love and a futile remedy for the wounds inflicted by society.

The novel has been read as an exploration of the love triangle and of power and gender relations, but also as a poetic account of illness. Bachmann described it as a spiritual and imaginary autobiography rather than an account of facts. Many readers linked it to her relationship with Max Frisch and read it alongside his novel Mein Name sei Gantenbein; Konstanze Fliedl qualified that roman à clef reading, noting that both authors practised a postmodern deconstruction of identity.

Its reception was uneven. Marcel Reich-Ranicki regarded it as a psychogram of a grave illness, and the composer Hans Werner Henze praised it enthusiastically. Other reviews, such as the 1991 notice in Publishers Weekly, highlighted its flashes of beauty and insight but criticised its cryptic, fragmented prose. The novel was filmed in 1991 by Werner Schroeter, with a screenplay by Elfriede Jelinek and Isabelle Huppert in the lead role, and has since inspired other stage adaptations.