Both of these stories are remarkable. I particularly liked "The Book of Franza", finding Franza to be a very intelligent and introspective heroine in a painful marriage. "Requiem" was similarly written, and Bachmann's style is unlike anything else I have read. Bachmann writes with considerable detail and originality, but her prose retains its clarity despite this, and both books are easily enjoyed. It is a shame that Bachmann is no longer around, for these two books demonstrate a quality that isn't always present in modern literature

Malina is a strange book that provoked my interest in what it means to love and live -- is the love-obsession justifiable? When there is noone else but a single person in your life, because you are just this way, does it mean that there are many people like this one but you have not found them yet. Because Bachmann's stream-of-consciousness style, the book is really difficult to follow, especially the part 'The third man' but once you have the patience to read and think continuously, to be shocked and still know who you are -- it gives an enormous pleasure to know a little more of the world that is inside!

Ingeborg Bachmann is a truly great and underappreciated writer, and this is her masterpiece. It is also the earliest novel I'm aware of on the subject of the lasting impact of child abuse in adult life, written at a time when the possibility of such an experience was almost unspeakable. Her approach is never polemical, but dreamy and suggestive, and the ending is one of the most devastating in literature. Check out her poetry, too.

I couldn't even begin to speak of the value of Bachmann's poetry, personal and phenomenological as it is; can only be silent on the subject of its beauty. The two stars in this review are all hers, and the three missing are because Peter Filkins has made a tremendous effort to misconstrue and mutilate every line she wrote, leaving a horrible, pedantic, confused and leaden mess of English doggerel to stand in for her richly efficient Austrian-German poetic. If you can read German, all the German is here, so by all means buy the book and treasure it; if you can't, consider her poems as yet untranslated. May not be the worst abuse to good poetry I've seen (neither is the Hamburger Celan, although that's also pretty strange), considering that I don't for instance read Chinese -- but it's the one that has caused me the most genuine anger and frustration.

I don't think Filkins' translation was in poor faith; he appears to be a poet himself, which is surprising, and he does take pains to retain word order from the German and, most jarringly, preserve rhyme schemes. (Remember high school "translations" of Chaucer? Oh, the grief...) But there are just as many flat-out semantic errors in translation as ingenious attempts at preservation, and it's clear he has no intuition for Bachmann's thought patterns and her ear for sound. Here's hoping someone who does eventually replaces this "standard" text with a more sensitive rendering.

For the record, this reviewer has disagreed strongly with everything Susan Sontag has said about Central European literature, notably Peter Nadas' "A Book of Memories."