Volume 39, Number 5 · March 5, 1992
From the Eternal War
By Gabriele Annan
Malina
by Ingeborg Bachmann, translated by Philip Boehm
Holmes and Meier, 244 pp., $24.95
Ingeborg Bachmann's writing career follows an unorthodox curve. She published her first poems in Vienna in 1948, when she was twenty-two. A literary Wunderkind, she quickly became an icon, occupying a niche somewhere between Marilyn Monroe and Simone de Beauvoir. She combined beauty and vulnerability with moral insight and authority. Prizes, honors, and invitations rained upon her. Ten years later she virtually gave up poetry for prose. She had never read much poetry, she said afterward, or enjoyed reading it. What she liked was writing it, and reading prose—Tolstoy, Kafka, Musil, Josef Roth, Flaubert, Proust. She told an interviewer that
Review, 3190 words
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