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There's the sense of a very clever literary trick waiting to happen in this novel. It revolves around the character Malina. Why is the novel called Malina? Malina sounds to me like a woman's name, not a man's. He's the man the female narrator lives with, a shadowy presence to begin with. At face value he seems a secondary character. So there must be far more to him that we haven't yet learned. You begin theorising. Perhaps he is an invention of the narrator's, a double or alter ego. And all will suddenly blaze into coherence at some point. So you're expecting some eureka moment when you understand why Malina is placed at the forefront of the novel. Perhaps the trick is simply creating the illusion of a trick because I never quite understood why this novel is titled Malina.
The female narrator is overly dependent on men for her sense of identity. She is pathologically obsessed by a man called Ivan who is elusive. Meanwhile she lives with the orderly dispassionate Malina. And we learn she has grown up with an abusive father. All takes place in Vienna, still haunted by its Nazi past. When her men begin failing her the narrator's identity comes apart.
It's a very convincing depiction of madness. The problem perhaps is that, by its own definition, madness is excessive and this novel has excesses. The sense everything is a figment of imagination sometimes works splendidly, other times seems a cheapish trick. Malina is an enigmatic book, rather uneven, brilliantly inspired at times, a little clichéd and self-indulgent at others. Once again I was forced to think about Roland Barthes' claim that an author's biography should play no meaningful part in the reading of a novel's text. I generally don't like to know much about an author's biography. But I think there are times when felt misgivings about a book find explanation in learning about the life of its author. Bachman's father, I learned after finishing, was a member of the Nazi party. This explained to me the rather heavy handed deployment of Nazi imagery and the bombastic repetitive section dealing with the father which for me let the book down. I don't think anyone would claim Malina is a subtle novel. It's intense and raw and sometimes gets carried away with itself, but there's no question it displays a virtuoso talent at work. It's tragic that she died before she could write another novel. There's the sense she was still finding her feet as a novelist. And that she was exorcising demons in this novel.
The female narrator is overly dependent on men for her sense of identity. She is pathologically obsessed by a man called Ivan who is elusive. Meanwhile she lives with the orderly dispassionate Malina. And we learn she has grown up with an abusive father. All takes place in Vienna, still haunted by its Nazi past. When her men begin failing her the narrator's identity comes apart.
It's a very convincing depiction of madness. The problem perhaps is that, by its own definition, madness is excessive and this novel has excesses. The sense everything is a figment of imagination sometimes works splendidly, other times seems a cheapish trick. Malina is an enigmatic book, rather uneven, brilliantly inspired at times, a little clichéd and self-indulgent at others. Once again I was forced to think about Roland Barthes' claim that an author's biography should play no meaningful part in the reading of a novel's text. I generally don't like to know much about an author's biography. But I think there are times when felt misgivings about a book find explanation in learning about the life of its author. Bachman's father, I learned after finishing, was a member of the Nazi party. This explained to me the rather heavy handed deployment of Nazi imagery and the bombastic repetitive section dealing with the father which for me let the book down. I don't think anyone would claim Malina is a subtle novel. It's intense and raw and sometimes gets carried away with itself, but there's no question it displays a virtuoso talent at work. It's tragic that she died before she could write another novel. There's the sense she was still finding her feet as a novelist. And that she was exorcising demons in this novel.