![]() It is an allegory, written as if indifferent to allegory, with unnerving immediacy and detail. As her most experimental fiction and also one of the last texts she would finish, Malina can be an incongruous introduction to Bachmann’s writing. It’s sui generis within Bachmann’s own body of work as well, and was written in part to address an issue-how female subjectivity is menaced and ultimately extinguished-that posed a problem of narrative within that work. But two decades later, it remains the only one of its kind, unique in its paradox of familiarity and strangeness. It was such a deeply familiar and congenial book, from the very first page, that I was certain that many more like it were waiting for me. The translator, Philip Boehm, has updated his text for this new release from New Directions, Malina’s third foray into the English-speaking market. The edition I read was the out-of-print 1990 Holmes & Meier hardcover, just months before its re-release in paperback. ![]() I first read Malina twenty years ago, more than half my life ago, on the sixth floor of a university library where I didn’t have borrowing privileges.
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