Book review: Ingeborg Bachmann portrays the confusion of the tongues between men and women

Some people use silence as a language. Some talk incessantly, but never speak the truth. It is unpleasant. As if we did not have enough communication problems without having to protect us behind the unspoken or obscure. None of us can truly understand the other. In spite of language and the brain, we are extremely solitary animals.

The austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmanns short stories in the ”Simultaneous” is all about the different types of communication problems, if the ”oöversättbarheten” between both the silent and talking people.

book review: Ingeborg Bachmanns ”Wipe out the phases”

up in the prosaprojektet ”Ways to die” when she herself died in the year 1973. ”Simultaneous” was the last thing she wrote, in parallel with the novel ”Malina”. Now, these five short stories published in English in the subtly beautiful translation by Linda Östergaard. Bachmann must be very difficult to translate, because all the short stories with the help of the linguistic nuances that embody the impossibility of translating the soul. The winding and precise language is poetic, complex and requires careful reading, but it is, nevertheless, not obscure or repulsive.

The female protagonists in the short stories relate in different ways to men who are less nuanced than they themselves. These women moving in the vicinity of an unspoken autism spectrum disorders, but they are still not the conventional autistics indeed, because of their reduced emotional life is more of the unhappy, slightly self-pitying kind. It is, however, no snyftarvåp we are talking about, no martyriska drama queens. The for all with välansad elegance.

And sure, the living conditions are well not exactly wonderful, either for them or someone else. The only thing that remains is to choose the approach to which does not help and accept the fact: even if two people are trying to be simultaneous, so they can never be concurrent. A word is never exactly the same meaning for two people, much less can meaning be transferred unchanged between the two different languages, not even between synonyms in the same language. Two languages can never meet, or rather – they can meet in overlapping fragments but never in full compliance. Basically, it is understand about to endure loneliness.

book review: Ingeborg Bachmanns ”Malina”

uses Bachmann of refractive error in eyes and astigmatism in order to visualize the asymmetry. Even those who believe themselves to draw benefits of bias is liable to make themselves and others a disservice, as when Miranda, in the novel tries to be cross-border and live in the gap between the overlapping realities. She tries to see the good in everything by refusing to correct vision, thus shielding itself from the hyperdetaljerade and experience the utslätades beauty. But, in fact, devotes herself only to the unconscious and manipulative destructiveness, and it ends with her being crushed against a revolving door of glass.

thus, It is a provocative loneliness these women choose, contiguous to the voluntary isolation that unpleasant masochists rather than harmonic solitaires. I simply get a bit of the princess and the pea-the vibes of them all. I get irritated on their way to demand perfection of reality and respond with självpisk when the environment and the language does not behave exactly in accordance with their requirements. If you had seen them from the outside in rather than from their subjective perspective, they would have seemed just as insensitive as the men they smygföraktar.

Maybe the reaction Bachmanns intention. But my empathy fails because the novellpersonerna not take very much empathy for themselves, they are for fjära and aesthetic. Bachmanns observations on the interpersonal languages, are certainly fascinating, but unfortunately they are untranslatable into flesh and blood. It is not superfrestande to hang out with abstract whiners by five long short stories.