Tyler Cowen’s recent dive into Ingeborg Bachmann: Malina, letters, biography, and adaptations

The useful part

You've been successfully added to the Marginal Revolution email subscription list. Recently I finished read Malina, by Ingeborg Bachmann, an Austrian novel published in 1971. I was pretty stunned by how good it was (it seems less good in English), and I would say I enjoyed it more, and found it deeper, than any of the famous 19th century Victorian novels by women.

How it works

• (This November coming out in English …and probably the letters work well in English?) Overall, it is remarkable how many ups and downs a relationship can have and persist.
• It works best to read only a few of the letters at a time, so that the story does not go by too quickly.
• Amazing (and charming) how many words people can spill about "stuff"!
• The initial story line is a woman having relationships with two different men, one she lives with and the other who is married, more charismatic, and lives right up the street.
• Her volume of letters with Max Frisch, her lover and the leading Swiss novelist of his time, is the best "letters book" I know.

What to take from it

After four hundred pages, with another 180 or so to go, I still am not bored. She also has letters volumes with Paul Celan and Henze, those are in my pile too. (She and Henze were just friends.) And just this year there was a wonderful new biography of Bachmann, namely Dieter Burdorf's Dieses unruhige Ich:

Example or evidence

• I have heard Max Frisch's Montauk is partly about the Frisch-Bachman relationship as well.
• Bachmann has poetry in German, and a new edition of her short stories is coming out this fall in English.

Details worth keeping

It is called "Wir haben es nicht gut gemacht." Der Briefwechsel. One sees connections between the letters and the unfolding of Malina. We haven't even gotten yet to Volker Schlondorff, have we?

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