Volume 47, Number 5 · March 23, 2000
On Borrowed Time
By Gabriele Annan
The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann
by Ingeborg Bachmann, Translated from the German and with an introduction by Peter Filkins
Northwestern University Press, 233 pp., $26.95
In October 1999 the London Guardian published an article by a columnist called Joan Smith. It was entitled 'Death and the Maidens,' and its theme was that 'we live in a culture that fetishizes dead women.' In the article Smith points to Marilyn Monroe's suicide as the start of this phenomenon, but doesn't go on naming names: so the Princess of Wales is spared, and so is her almost look-alike, the popular blond TV newscaster Jill Dando, who was mysteriously shot outside her home in a London suburb earlier last year. Her murderer has still not been identified, and her name and face continue to crop up in the British media, sometimes as 'the second Diana.' Relentless coverage of the more recent murder of a Suffolk schoolgirl was the trigger for Smith's piece.
Review, 3149 words
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