'An intense, courageous novel, equal to the best of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett' The New York Times
Part detective novel, part love story, part psychoanalytic case study, Malina is a staggering portrait of a writer trying to tell her own story in a world dominated by men.
'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 postwar 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.
"A variation on the detective novel: Malina’s first-person narrator proceeds from the 'universal prostitution' of Vienna to the proximate causes of her destruction."
― Los Angeles Review of Books
"An existential portrait, a work of desperate obsession, a proto-feminist classic, and one of the most jagged renderings of female consciousness European literature has produced."
― Dustin Illingworth, The Nation
"It seems in Malina there is nothing Bachmann cannot do with words."
― The New York Review of Books
"A feminist classic."
― The Paris Review
"The most intelligent and important woman writer our land has produced this century."
― Thomas Bernhard
