Simultan: neue Erzählungen | Ingeborg Bachmann
"Three paths to the lake"
of Ingeborg Bachmann
Adelphi Press - 1994 - p. 237
the 5 Viennese women
"The Stories of Three Ways to the Lake... are one of the great collections of short fiction of our century.
Without knowing it and wanting it, Bachmann distanced herself a little from herself: she erased or blurred the obsession in which she had lived; and the last story, which gives the title to the Italian collection, is in some way a reconciliation with the paternal figure and with the maternal Austria, although the encounter and farewell are so painful" (Pietro Citati).
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For Nadia, the translator in the story “Simultaneous”, the journey from Rome to Maratea with her friend Frankle becomes a moment of reckoning: before the statue of Christ, she lies on the ground with her arms outstretched, symbolically crucifying and “destroying” herself as she, a committed feminist, acknowledges the “patriarchal reality”.
Shielded by these vivid shadows, Bachmann has managed to approach with clairvoyance the dark and silent center of the female nebula, to that extremely tight intertwining of vitality and despair that here manifests itself in the destinies of her five “Viennese women”.
( text taken from the revised and corrected book cover)
the writer
Ingeborg Bachmann, born in Carinthia in 1926, was a writer, poet, radio presenter, and radio program author.
She began very young with a collection of poems, immediately reaching the heights of modern lyricism and quickly establishing her fame.
In the last years of her life, tragically cut short in 1973, she devoted herself to prose, with an important novel of which only the first part, Malina, remains, and a few, but long, other chapters; in parallel, she wrote five stories about women, which formed her last book, whose title, "Three Paths to the Lake," echoes that of the final story, the longest and most elaborate.
In Bachmann's airy and precise style, in her penetrating gaze that spares nothing, we feel the great legacy of clarity and lucidity that belongs to her Viennese masters: above all, Musil and Roth (and the homage to Roth is evident here in the longer story, where the male protagonist is the last representative of the Trotta family, whose saga we know through The Radetzky March and The Crypt of the Capuchins).
Ingeborg Bachmann is one of the foremost authors in the German language, and a literary competition is held annually in her hometown of Klagenfurt in Carinthia (Austria) on the anniversary of her birthday in her honor.
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