Reviewed by Jules Lewis

I read Malina, Ingeborg Bachmann's only published novel, during a stormy spring weekend on the fifth floor of the Toronto Reference Library. Looking over the city—an endless jumble of half-built condos, cranes and construction sites—I thought about how the unnamed narrator watches the state-employed construction workers in her home of Vienna with such frightful reverence. These pothole fixers and cement-layers work daily to pave over the "world's schizoid soul, its crazy, gaping split." They perform the task of enforcing what the narrator refers to as the reality of "Today"—a blind belief in the healthiness of the present—onto the populace. What exists below the world of "Today" in the 1960s Vienna of Malina is a lava-pit bubbling with terrifying disunities: the past and the present; sanity and madness; love and murder; war and peace. The battle between these competing realities is the tension that holds together this cryptic, mesmerizing, and singular novel about the unending nature of catastrophe.

Many writers consider their profession to be the result of a split personality. This is especially true of Bachmann, who once said in an interview, "I exist only when I am writing," as if the world outside of her study were a sort of dream. The unnamed narrator of Malina, who shares a similar biography to Bachmann, is in many ways a portrait of this writing self. Both Bachmann and her narrator were born in the Austrian city of Klagenfurt and came of age during World War II. Bachmann's father was an SS Officer; the narrator's father, who we only encounter in a forty-three-page long nightmare, is a sadistic, raping ruler, who at one point leaves her to perish in "the biggest gas chamber in the world." The success of Bachmann's two collections of poetry, Die gestundete Zeit and Anrufung des großen Bären, made her famous as a young woman; the narrator is a writer of considerable repute. Two years after the publication of Malina, in 1973, Bachmann fell asleep in her Rome apartment with a lit cigarette in her hand and the ember set her bedroom ablaze; a few weeks later she died in a hospital, aged forty-seven. Near the end of Malina, the narrator also perishes in her apartment. "I walk into the wall," she writes, "holding my breath." Although there is no fire, one can easily imagine this as her last dreamy expression before being consumed by smoke and flames. It is as if Bachmann, through her narrator, anticipated her own death two years later.

Bachmann wrote Malina in Rome, where she had been living in self-imposed exile for twenty years, but her imagination occupied an apartment on a quiet street in Vienna, 6 Ungargasse. The modest book-filled flat, where the narrator lives with her roommate, Malina, is the psychic core of the novel: at once a reflection of the narrator's mind and a microcosm of Vienna in the mid 1960s, two decades after Hitler's fall. The narrator refers to the apartment as "Ungargassenland," a made-up name that has, buried within it, the German word for Hungary (Ungarn)—an allusion that we can imagine is there to invoke Vienna's storied past as the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. To her, the city has paved over swaths of recent bloody history in order maintain a false Eden of grand opera houses and world-famous symphonies. It has become a place "retired from history;" a "necropolis, researched, labeled, described in great detail on enameled plaques." Bachmann's Austrian peer, Thomas Bernhard, remorselessly attacked this perverse landscape in his satirical plays and raging, monologic novels. But unlike Bernhard, whose characters are tangled up in manias of their own disgust, through the consciousness of her narrator, Bachmann focuses on what she calls a fragile, "schizoid" self that emerges in such a repressed metropolis, unwilling to confront the blood on its hands.

The novel is divided into three acts. In the first, "Happy with Ivan," a love affair between the narrator and a "much younger" Hungarian man named Ivan plays out in the clean, orderly rooms of 6 Ungergasse, while Malina lurks in the shadows. The narrator's immediate connection to Ivan has a mystical quality. "I recognized Ivan too instantaneously and there was no time to get closer to him through speech," she writes. "I had already belonged to him before a word was said." The two appear to communicate on a subliminal level. They play chess, smoke, drink whiskey. When they speak, it's in stilted language. They never talk "about feelings, since Ivan never pronounces one and since I don't dare create the first." As the affair intensifies, Ivan retreats further into himself. The less emotive he is, the more desperately she needs him. "I live in Ivan," she says. "I will not outlive Ivan." Like the city workers of Vienna, Ivan maintains an immaculate surface in order retain power over all that lies beneath.

The authority Ivan wields over the narrator's emotional life leads her deeper and deeper into a hazy dream-like state. Through journal entries, unsent letters, unfinished manuscripts and snippets of dialogue, we witness her plummet into hopelessness and desperation. There is often a doomed giddiness in her tone, as if rejoicing in her own captivity. "I'm absentminded," she writes, from her study in "Ungargassenland":

my mind is absent, what is absence of mind? Where is the mind when it's absent? Absentmindedness, inside and out, the mind here is absent everywhere, I can sit down where I want to, I can touch the furniture, I can rejoice at my escape and once again live in absence. I have returned to my own land which is also absent, my great-hearted country, where I can sleep securely.

In the second act, "The Third Man," what little scaffolding is left of the narrator's world has collapsed.  We encounter her in the throes of an apocalyptic nightmare that has, up until now, been simmering below her tortured affair with Ivan and the immaculate streets of Vienna. The reality of "Today" has cracked open into a time that "could have been yesterday, it could have been long ago, it could be again, it could continually be." In the nightmare, Ivan has morphed into the narrator's father, an all-powerful authority in "shiny black boots." He chases her through a shifting hell-scape—a "cemetery of murdered daughters," gas chambers, dungeons—bullying her, beating her, and raping her. World War II has not ended, and the brutality of her father, an SS officer, is given free reign. The ever-present reality that war left inside of her—the other side of "the world's schizoid soul, its crazy, gaping split"—has finally taken over her consciousness.

Malina, the novel's namesake, remains the most cryptic character. Although he has a slippery omnipresence throughout the first two acts, he only comes to the forefront in the third, "Last Things," which is written as an extended dialogue between him and the narrator. Yet, even here, we are never sure if Malina is real, or simply an expression of her divided being. Near the conclusion of her nightmare, the narrator briefly wakes up to find Malina sitting next to her bed. "It's war," he tells her. "And you are the war. You yourself."