The word echoes through the text: “kill, kill, kill”. In it, the narrator’s charismatic voice is repeatedly interrupted by a collage of letters (that are never sent), of phone calls (that may have never taken place), of dialogues with Malina, of his insistence that she must kill Ivan. The third section, Last Things, returns to the calm of erotic despair. There is no longer war and peace, “only war”, and “you are the war”, Malina tells her. Here, finally, are the gas chambers themselves. Here, in sentences that last so long you want to scream, are ice and fire and blackened skin murdered daughters and whips and instruments of torture. Into these brutalising dreams swarm the horrors of war and its aftermath. She dreams of her father, the violent third man who murders and rapes and next to whom Sylvia Plath’s Daddy seems positively sweet. But with the second chapter, The Third Man, we are in “non-times”, in a sequence of hallucinatory nightmares that the narrator suffers. In this opening chapter there is a time – “today”, which in its boundlessness is an impossible word, one that “only suicides should use” – and a precise geography: a named street in Vienna where all three characters live. He’s a military historian, a man of reserve and order, chilly, enigmatic, watchful. Meanwhile Malina, the man she lives with, embodies an increasingly sinister masculinity.

She waits for him to turn up, tries to call him on phones that are sometimes dead, smokes, drinks, feels “always in a panic”, her mouth full of cotton wool and throttle marks on her neck, death lurking in the shadows. The first, Happy with Ivan, evokes the narrator’s obsessive relationship with a heedless younger man who withholds himself and to whom she is in thrall. Malina is made up of three long chapters. There might not be the comfort of a narrative, but a clear structure attempts to hold chaos at bay. Intended as the first in a three-volume series entitled Death Styles, Malina is above all a “story within the self” – though self is an increasingly unstable concept in this novel in which nothing is fixed, everything is unsafe, and an ill wind blows through the text. There is the buried detective story struggling to surface the story of female subjectivity and trauma, and male violence of the nightmare of the war that tore her century (Bachmann was born in Austria and was the daughter of a Nazi party member) of the impossibility of love between a man and a woman of the disintegration of words and meanings. In the astonishing desolation and wonder that is Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, first published in 1971, there is no certain narrative, but there are many, deeply internalised, stories.