Bachmann, Ingeborg. Malina. Teaneck, NJ: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1999. Print.
“...feeling oppressed and guilty, like a dog with a new master when he runs into his old one and doesn’t know who deserves the most affection.” (5)
“I was also convinced I wanted Malina, and that whatever I desired to know must come from him.” (6)
“I was furious with Malina for having allowed me to squander so much time with other people and things.” (7)
“...the stability of his existence and the instability of my own.” (8)
“Then it seems to me that his calm comes from my ego being too familiar, too unimportant for him, as if he had rejected me as waste, a superfluous something-made-human, as if I were merely the dispensable product of his rib, but at the same time an unavoidable dark tale accompanying and hoping to supplement his own bright story, a tale which he, however detaches and delimits.” (8-9)
“...why should someone start living when a human spirit expires?” (11)
“Often I don’t want to listen and often I can’t look. Like when I couldn’t bear the sight of the dying horse which had fallen off the cliff at Hermagor, for whose sake I walked for miles to fetch help, but I felt it behind with the shepherd boy who couldn’t do anything either, or the time I couldn’t stand the sound of Mozart’s C-Minor Mass or the gunshots in the village during Carnival.” (11)
“...What everything within my reach, the telephone, receiver and cord, the bread and the butter and the kippers I save for Monday evening because they’re Ivan’s favorite, or the special sausage I like best, everything bears Ivan’s brand, from the House of Ivan.” (13-4)
...throttle marks on my neck... (13)
“The tremulous anxiety, the high tension hovering over this city and presumably everywhere has almost completely abated here, and schizothymia, the world’s schizoid soul, its crazy, gaping split, is healing itself imperceptibly.” (14)
...the virus... (17) —mental handicap?
“...the world is sick and doesn’t want a healthy force to prevail.” (18)
“—as long as it allows me to hear his voice then it’s all the same to me whether we understand each other well, barely, or not at all due to a breakdown in the Viennese phone network which lasts for minutes, it’s also unimportant what he has to say, so expectantly, with renewed vigor or complete fatigue; I start the conversation up again with a simple ‘Hello?”. But Ivan doesn’t realize that, he either phones or he doesn’t pone, yes, he phones.” (22)
...and if he doesn’t want to construct sentence with me... (25)
“Ivan asks, out of the blue: Who is Malina?” (25)
“I’m not anything to be afraid of, you shouldn’t be afraid of anything, what are you concocting in your head full of lettuce and beans and peas, you silly princess on your pea, I’d like to—no, I don’t want to know who’s causing you to wince, jerk your head back, shake your head, turn your head away.” (26)
“We have a lot of head-sentence, hoards of them just like the telephone sentence the chess sentences or the sentences about life in general, but we’re still missing a lot of sentences sets, we don’t have a single sentence about feelings...” (26)
pg. 32 —Signs of Aspergers
“with some man whose name is not Ivan.” (33)—Ha!
“As a child the princess had heard of this extreme severe land along the Danube, about the magic islands where people died of hunger, hallucinating and enjoying supreme ecstasy in the fury of their ruin.” (39)
“You will not think I have bad manners and thus keep you waiting out of rudeness; manners are about the only ting I still have and if they had ever taught “manners in school, it certainly would have been the subject which would have appealed to me the most and in which I would have had the best grades.” (42)—Ha!
“We have a whole bundle of fatigue sentences, Ivan and I, since he’s often terribly exhausted...” (43)
“I start crying again, but now only because it feels so good...injections of reality...each of his sentences affects me and the ocean of the earth and the constellations, I chew on a sausage sandwich in the kitchen and put the plate in the sink, while Ivan is still saying “I have to go right away,” I clean the dusty gramophone and gently stroke the records lying around with a velvet brush, “I want you here at once?” says Ivan as he’s driving up to the Hohe Warte, because he has to see the children right away, Bela has sprained his hand, but Ivan said “I want you here at once!” and I must accommodate this dangerous sentence between eat sausage sandwiches and opening letters and dusting, because a fiery explosion might occur at any moment among all the everyday things which are no longer everyday.” (45-6)
“I shake my head, Ivan raises his hand in jest, as if he were about to hit me, the fear returns, I say to him, choking: Please don’t, not my head.” (46)—What is really going on in her head.
“Let’s hope so.” (49)—Speaking about hoping the book will end nicely.
—Malina knows about Ivan? (pg. 53)
“More and more I find myself saying, as people used to say: the House of Austria, because a country would be too big for me, too roomy, too uncomfortable, I only say country when I’m talking about smaller entities.” (59)
“I will tell you a terrible secret: language is punishment. It must encompass all things and in it all things must again transpire according to guilt and the degree of guilt.” (60)—this seems to be at odds with Bachmann taking refuge in the German language.
“...for a man is a somber being, only in the darkness is he master of himself and during the day he goes back to being a slave.” (63)
“I am also Malina’s creation.” (65)
“A good, easy basis, whatever fall on my ground thrives, I propagate myself with words and also propagate Ivan, I beget a new lineage, my union with Ivan brings that which is will be God into the world.” (65)
“Ivan who has dozed off, wakes up, I come back from the equator, marked by a once-in-a-million-years event.” (64)
—Letter to Mr. President (pg. 67) hilarious!
“Friday is the day of the week I find threatening.” (68)
“...I would be blond and wearing a spring coat...” (71)
“I smoke and keep quiet and wait, I have twenty schillings on me, it’s past five o’clock the bank is closed, the disease is there.” (72)
“...but the “gyerekek,” as the children as known collectively, do not say hello...” (77)
“I conclude nothing.” (79)
“I never heard a woman say “Sie” so beautifully.” (81)
“I didn’t know that children’s bodies were warmer and nicer to the touch than the body of a grownup, jealous Bela also presses closer to me, it’s only because of Andras, they’re push in a way I can’t get enough of, as if they had been missing someone a lone time, someone they could hang on to and push and pull, Ivan helps dole out the nuts and bananas because we’re laughing and hanging on to each other and Bela is throwing the nuts, missing.” (83)
“...obscured by a diplomat’s limousine.” (86)
“First both demolish Lina’s marble cake, scarcely eating it, and I clear away all sharp and dangerous objects, all sticks and stones. I didn’t know my apartment was so full of them, furthermore, I fet the door ajar for Ivan but Andras as already escaped into thr stairwell.” (93)
“...he must belong to me, the children will be all mine.” (94)
“...the number 31 may not, under any circumstances, be used and profaned.” (95)
—the first sign of romance: “...I immediately see a letter. First I wash my hands, carefully I pour the water into the wash bowl and replace the pitcher, then sit down on the bed and hold Iva’s letter, which he had already mailed before my departure, he didn’t forget, he didn’t lose the address, I kiss the letter many times and debate whether I should carefully open the edge or whether I should slit the letter with nail scissors or a paring knife...” (101)
Parrot-like responses: “...what do you mean by strain?”...”During the drive I’m too strained...” (109)
“I am married it must have come to marriage. I will no longer wait for postcards from the Mondsee...” (112) —is she really married?
“I realize his voice is the only one audible in this duet anyway, because my father wrote the whole part for him, and nothing for me of course, since I don’t have any training and am only supposed to be shown. I’m just supposed to sing to bring in the money, and I do not fall out of the role which isn’t mine, far from it: I sing for my life so that my father can’t do anything to me.” (123)
“He says to me, don’t forget it again, it’s called: Facile! And I misunderstand, I scream voicelessly: Facit!” (127)
“...but I already know what I’m not supposed to know: that on the shore of the lake lies the cemetery of the murdered daughters.” (130)
“...I glide down I will stay within a sentence written in the snow. The sentence could be from my early days, broadly written in the snow left from my youth with the unskilled and of a child.” (141)
...Animus. My child would prefer not having any name, but he understands.” (149)
“...but I knew it is a prophecy: I shall fall three times before I can rise again.” (150)
“Malina: Yes. But you will act, you will have to act, you will have to destroy all the people in one person” (152)—I think he is advocating suicide.
“True confidants can only be found among people you scarcely know, among irregular mailmen like this one.” (157-8)
“By false or insufficient return address he realized everything immediately, naturally he could distinguish a family letter from a business letter without a moment’s hesitation, somewhat friendly letters from those wholly intimate, and this significant mailman, who took whatever risks his profession required as a cross to bear for all other, must have been seized by horror faced with the postal mountain growing in his apartment, he must have suffered indescribable pangs of conscience, inconceivable to others, to whom a letter is just a letter and printed matter merely printed matter.” (159)
“Tonight all the mailmen in Vienna are to be tortured, so people can see whether they are equal to the privacy of mail.” (161)
“Of course men have always interested me, but that’s precisely why they don’t have to be liked, in fact I didn’t like most of them, they always only fascinated me, just because of the thought: what’s he going to do once he’s finished biting my shoulder, what does he expect will happen next?” (179)
(181)—Did this really happen?
“For it is precisely beauty which is more important, beauty which I lack and which I want to seduce.” (183)
“Because someone has killed me, because someone has wanted to kill me constantly and then I began killing someone in thought, that is to say, not in thought, it was something else, it never has much to do with thoughts...” (184)
The three murders (185)
“I can’t talk about the fourth [murderer], I don’t remember him, I forget, I don’t remember.” (186) —Is this murderer Malina?
“You watch too much and that’s why you don’t notice anything.” (187)
“...for I need double existence, my Ivanlife and my Malinafield, I cannot be where Ivan isn’t, just as I cannot return home when Malina isn’t there.” (188)
“Life is reading a page that you have read, or reading over your shoulder, reading with you and not forgetting, because you don’t forget anything.” (192)
“I have only watched one unknown woman slide further and further into another.” (194)
“It’s the table where today I’m eating my last supper before the execution.” (200)
- I realize that I want Malina to talk more.
“..what is to be done? It would be inhuman to do nothing...Balm the commotion. Disturb the calm.” (205)
“Soon we will know everything. Because it can’t go on like this for very long. A day will come. A day will come, and there will be the dry cheerful voice of Malina, but no more beautiful words for me, pronounced in great excitement.” (217)
“I have lived in Ivan and die in Malina.” (223)
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