“Me: Not me.

“Malina: We all are, you included.”

It’s worth noting, before the anguish piles up too high, that Bachmann can be funny, her humor another shade of darkness on her palette.

Image Credit... Patricia Wall/The New Yor Times

“Sometimes a person gets lucky, but I’m sure most women are never lucky. What I’m talking about has nothing to do with the supposition that there are some men who are good lovers, there really aren’t,” she writes. “At most there are men with whom it is completely hopeless and a few with whom it’s not quite so hopeless.”

You might wonder while reading “Malina” who is really in it and who isn’t. Rachel Kushner, in a new introduction to the novel, writes: “The male characters in the book, some have speculated, are mere alter egos, not ‘real’ men, but part of her own psyche.” One can make a convincing case that Malina especially is, in fact, just a facet of the narrator’s mind.

“He never forgets,” the narrator writes, “I never have to ask him to do anything.” When Ivan suddenly asks, “Who is Malina?” she thinks, seeming more stumped than secretive: “I don’t have an answer for that.” In lines frequently cited as evidence, she writes: “I don’t want to lead Ivan astray, but he’ll never realize that I am double. I am also Malina’s creation. Unconcerned, Ivan sticks to the appearance, my living bodily self gives him a reference point.”

Reading Malina this way, he seems like a civilizing drive inside the narrator, for better and worse — both protecting her from the full rawness of her traumatic memories and wanting her to begin making an uneasy peace with them.

Ivan, given his children and other details, seems more reliably corporeal, but who knows. Nothing is nailed down in this book, not even at the very end. Its terse and chilling final line lands with enduring ambiguity. (Bachmann planned this to be the first in a trilogy, but the other books were unfinished when she died, at 47, from injuries sustained in a fire at her apartment.)