Ingeborg Bachmann received the Gruppe 47's annual prize while still in her twenties and was one of the first writers to deliver the now legendary Frankfurt lectures on poetics and to receive the prestigious Georg Büchner Prize.
Prize-winning Austrian-born Bachmann ( Malina ; The Thirtieth Year ) has influenced such writers as Max Frisch, Peter Handke, Christa Wolf and Gunter Grass; she died in 1973. Translated into English from the German for the first time, each of the five stories that make up this complex, finely wrought collection is a portrait of an Austrian woman in the late 1960s. Bachman's women are either fiercely independent, as Nadja, the well-traveled translator in ``Word for Word,'' Elisabeth, the successful photographer in the introspective ``Three Paths to the Lake,'' and Beatrix, the young woman who lives only to sleep and visit the beauty parlor in ``Problems Problems''; or they're neurotically tied to their men, as Franziska, who fears her emotionally sadistic husband in ``The Barking.'' Bachmann's central theme is the power of language to transform women's experience in a patriarchal society; the work is not only intellectually charged, but imaginative and evocative as well. Clearly influenced by Robert Musil, this powerful book could well become a classic. (Nov.)
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