I've just re-read my previous post. I need to adjust what I said about siding with the victim as explaining my current attraction to Bachmann*. I am a huge fan of Bachmann's work and have been since the 80s when I read her for the first time. In other words, I have had a strong attraction to her writing since then. And this comes from her extraordinary writing which demonstrates great psychological and poetic strength (in the best sense of the word) as well as an ability to transform language into something so agile that I had not necessarily thought possible before reading her. You would need to read Malina, her novel, to understand what I mean by victimhood in her. In some senses she is all about the victim, in that she embodies (in her characters and in her tragic premature death) what it is to be on the receiving end of brutality. But at the same time there is such an extraordinary power and strength (again, in the best sense of the words) to what she achieves and it is this unfathomable co-existence of weakness and confidence that baffles me and is one reason for my enormous admiration for her oeuvre.
She also happens to be one of Hirschhorn's mentioned preferred authors.
*Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973), Austrian writer, author of short stories, poetry, plays and a novel, Malina.
