Imprints Literary Supplement
The Best Books You've Never Read
The Thirtieth Year
The Thirtieth Year
Ingeborg Bachmann
Reprinted by Holmes & Meier in 1995
This hard-to-find paperback is the first story collection by Ingeborg Bachmann, an Austrian poet, fiction writer, and radio playwright who died young in 1973 under rather gruesome circumstances (she accidentally set herself on fire). Although 47 at the time of her death, she'd already been acknowledged as a major German-language writer of the era and a serious influence on Max Frisch, Günter Grass, Peter Handke, and Christa Wolf. This collection contains her best-known story, "Everything," a strange, elliptical, and deeply ambivalent portrayal of a man whose misanthropic/idealistic desire to remake the world through his son keeps him from loving the child in his utter ordinariness. Other beautifully wrought pieces take up some classic postwar German themes—rebellion and obedience, parochialism, human cruelty—in subtle but provocative ways. As one of the few prominent female writers to have been allowed into the boys' club of European postmodernists and writers-of-ideas, Bachmann avoids pat realism without becoming boringly emotive (like much of Marguerite Duras) or overly cerebral (like much of Christa Wolf).
More Stories
In Praise of the Short Story (9/20/2000)
Word Processing (9/20/2000)
Clicking on the Web's Short-Fiction Offerings
Whistling Dixie (9/20/2000)
Short Stories Built Southern Fiction, but All That's Left Now Is Redneck Lit
That's All She Wrote (12/25/2002)
If you want someone to blame or to thank, let me suggest the novelist Paul Auster as a pretty good...
People Like Us (12/11/2002)
So I'm out there on Thursday afternoon trying to dig my car out of the snow, and this old white guy...
Going Green (11/27/2002)
Sometimes it feels like the good, right, personally healthful, environmentally responsible choice.
