I recently finished reading Malina, the 1971 novel by Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, and I was pretty stunned by how good it was. (It seems less good in English.) I would say I enjoyed it more, and found it deeper, than any of the famous 19th-century Victorian novels by women. The initial storyline follows a woman involved with two different men: one she lives with, and another who is married, more charismatic, and lives right up the street. Malina was the only novel Bachmann published in her lifetime — she died in 1973 at age 47 — and it formed part of her planned "Todesarten" ("ways of dying") cycle of prose works, which helps explain the novel's dark, obsessive intensity.

That sent me looking further into Bachmann, one of the major figures of postwar German-language literature, known first as a poet before turning to prose and radio work. Her volume of letters with Max Frisch — her lover and the leading Swiss novelist of his time — is the best "letters book" I know. Their relationship, which began in the late 1950s and lasted several years, ended painfully, and the correspondence traces that arc in full. After four hundred pages, with another 180 or so to go, I am still not bored. It is called "Wir haben es nicht gut gemacht." Der Briefwechsel. An English edition is due out this November, and the letters probably work well in English too. What stands out overall is how many ups and downs a relationship can endure and still persist. It works best to read only a few letters at a time, so the story does not pass too quickly. One begins to see connections between the letters and the unfolding of Malina.

She also has published volumes of letters with Paul Celan, the poet with whom she had an earlier, famously intense bond, and with the composer Hans Werner Henze; those are in my pile as well. (She and Henze were just friends.) And just this year a wonderful new biography of Bachmann appeared: Dieter Burdorf's Dieses unruhige Ich: Ingeborg Bachmann. I have started it.

There is a film adaptation of Malina, an opera as well, and a biopic about Bachmann and Frisch, Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert. I have heard that Max Frisch's Montauk is partly about the Frisch–Bachmann relationship too. And we haven't even gotten to Volker Schlöndorff yet, have we?

Bachmann also wrote poetry in German, and a new English edition of her short stories, Ingeborg Bachmann: The Complete Stories, is coming out this fall — part of a broader wave of new English translations of her work now reaching readers.

It is wonderful to discover something — someone — so new and unexpected. As I get older and know more, it happens less frequently than it used to.

I will continue with this. Amazing, and charming, how many words people can spill about "stuff"!

Source: Marginal Revolution