Malina, by Ingeborg Bachmann, was published in Austria in 1971. It was not available in English until 1990, and released in a new translation (by Philip Boehm) in 2019 and published by New Directions. Bachmann is considered one of the greatest women writers of the twentieth century. She was a poet, essayist, lecturer, playwright, among other creative endeavors. Her PhD was on Heidegger which she ultimately rejected in favor of Wittgenstein. Her work contributed to feminism in major ways, particularly with the insight that Fascism/Nazism did not end with the world war, but became infused in men and became expressed in the abuse of women on a large scale in male/female relationships. She suffered from major addictions and died tragically at the age of 47. Malina was her only completed novel.

Malina, for me, was unlike any novel I have ever read. “Can a man understand this book,” asks Rachel Kushner in her Introduction. “Completely,” she answers. ‘’He doesn’t have to suffer it.” Kushner says that a woman reader will suffer it, like the burns the narrator suffers. I would add, like the burns the author suffered when her cigarette ash burned her skin which had become insensitive to pain as a result of her drug addiction. I believe Kushner is right, that a man experiences this writing from a distance, which also is one of the narrator’s complaints about both of the men she relates to in the novel.

The narrator is an unidentified female “”I” who is a writer. Malina is the man she lives with. Ivan is the man who is her lover. You can forget about all the so-called rules of the novel. None of the usual expectations are at work here. Reading Malina is like being a voyeur to the narrator’s descent ending with her disappearance into a crack in a wall as if she had never existed. The last line: “”It was murder.”

As a writer, when I read a novel, part of me reads a word, or a line, a paragraph and then muses on what I would write next. My musings are never exact, of course, but often they are in the same ball park as those of the author I am reading. Malina was difficult and jarring for me because everything was a surprise. I was constantly jolted to the point I would have to stop reading for a bit and catch my breath.

One might think of this writing as in the style of so-called “stream of consciousness” writers, all of which Bachmann noted in her various prose writings. But a stream has banks, and the water has direction, and the water flows within the banks of the stream. What Bachmann has done is to write from floodplain, as if everywhere at once. This is perhaps what is so maddening for the male mind.

But what I got from Malina was a gift. As I read, I was continually flooded with desire to write, and deluged with images of what to write. And now faced with the difficulty of writing something from what has inundated me.