|
|
Article: The Book of Franza & Requiem for Fanny Goldmann.(Review)
- Article from:
- The Review of Contemporary Fiction
- Article date:
- September 22, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 Review of Contemporary Fiction. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
Ingeborg Bachmann. The Book of Franza & Requiem for Fanny Goldmann. Trans. Peter Filkins. Northwestern Univ. Press, 1999. 233 pp. $26.95.
In 1973 Ingeborg Bachmann died in a hotel fire in Rome. She had completed the first novel, Malina, of a trilogy on ways of dying, Todensarten. In these drafts of the novels she never finished, Bachmann identifies the psychology of torment as the inability to say the unspeakable. For each victim, the lack of language leads to an insidious uprooting, breeding passivity from which recovery is impossible.
Bachmann's heroines are much abused by those they love. Their quiet catastrophes wrench their personalities beyond ...