Malina

byIngeborg Bachmann

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'I was subordinate to him from the beginning, and I must have known early on that he was destined to be my doom'

A woman in Vienna walks a tightrope between the two men in her life. There is her lover Ivan, beautiful and unavailable, who obsesses her. And there is Malina, the civil servant with whom she shares an apartment: reserved, fastidious, exacting, chillingly calm. As the balance of power between them starts to shift, she feels her fragile identity unravelling, gradually revealing the dark, bruised heart of her past.

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.

Introduced by Rachel Kushner.

About the series

Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop

A portrait, in language, of female consciousness, truer than anything written since Sappho's Fragment 31. Once you're in, you're in ... You're racing along, deep in the rhythms of the narrator's thoughts, which are bone-true and demonically intelligent

Rachel Kushner, author of THE MARS ROOM

About Ingeborg Bachmann

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) was author, poet and philosopher, writing short stories, radio plays, essays and a novel, Malina. Born in Austria to a Nazi party member, she rose to prominence in the 1950s with writing that grappled with the German language “after Auschwitz”. She was the constant subject of media attention for her celebrated writing, her social critique, and her famous affairs. She won all the major German and Austrian literary awards, including the prestigious Georg Buchner prize, and 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 German.
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