T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION WEDNESDAY, JULY 31, 2019| 15
culture
The Marvel Universe and I grew up to-
gether.
I was there when Peter Parker got bit
by that rogue radioactive spider. I was
there when the Avengers found Captain
America frozen in a block of ice. I was
there during the very first Kree-Skrull
Wa r.
For me, the Marvel Universe — born
in 1961 with the publication of The Fan-
tastic Four No. 1 — isn’t about the re-
cently concluded 22-movie, multibillion-
dollar cycle spun by Marvel Studios. Or
the recent X-Men dud, “Dark Phoenix,”
or the hit Spider-Man now web-slinging
his way across movie screens. But it is
totally about childhood solace and sal-
vation — at just 12 cents per comic book.
When I was in fourth grade at Daniel
J. Bakie Elementary School in very rural
Kingston, N.H., in 1966-67, my 26-year-
old mother broke down. There wasn’t
enough money. My father worked two,
sometimes three jobs to try to make
ends meet. And my mother, who had
three children under 10 to care for, im-
ploded. She constantly smoldered near
tears. Abyssal sighs were her main
parts of speech.As the oldest child, only 9, it fell upon
my skinny shoulders to take care of her.
I was a tiny nail asked to hold our rickety
home together, so my dad could go to
work and not worry about what my
mother might do. I missed about half of
school that year — and I hated that. I
loved school. It spoke to me of necessary
escape from small-town New Hamp-
shire, of fleeing to a world where brain-
power mattered more than brawn.
And there were no questions, no con-
cerns, from Bakie School. My teacher,
Miss Gove — who tried to dress like
Jackie Kennedy and drove a lipstick-red
Corvette convertible — wrote just one
comment on my report card that whole
year: “Dana has missed a great deal of
math instruction and this is reflected in
his work.”
I was cut off from friends — they did-
n’t live close — and deprived of school,
so books provided relief and freedom in
my rural solitary: Chip Hilton sports
novels, Kipling’s “The Jungle Book,”
“The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”
But what spellbound me most, helped
keep me sane, was my well-worn stack
of Marvel Comics: Tales of Suspense
(with Captain America and the Invinci-
ble Iron Man), Tales to Astonish (with
the Incredible Hulk and the Sub-Mari-
ner), The Amazing Spider-Man, The
Mighty Thor and, yes, the now-famous
Avengers.
So, I guess, this is my secret comic-
book origin.
I read and reread and reread those
Marvels, was transported to heroic
realms, other, better worlds. Steve
Ditko’s awkward but brilliant Peter
Parker — a.k.a. the Neurotic Spider-
Man — was the kind of sly and strong kid
I imagined myself to be. He had his
sickly Aunt May to look after, too. And I
had my mother, as I learned that what
your family asks of you can be much
more dangerous than any threat posedby a cackling and semi-insane supervil-
lain.
I understood deep down the tongue-
tied rage of the Hulk and the invisibility
of the Fantastic Four’s Susan Richards
(she was called the Invisible Girl in
those less-enlightened times). After all,
I was furious at being denied the haven
of school. And you become merely a
phantom classmate — nobody’s real
friend — when you show up just half the
time.So I burrowed into those bold, incan-
descent comics for hours on end, keep-
ing a wary and bitter eye on Mom and
my 2-year-old brother, Tim, as I tried to
imagine a future as some kind of artist... some kind of writer... maybe, even,
some kind of mutant.
I counted the number of panels in
each comic book. I soothed myself to
sleep each night, not worrying about my
mother, but envisioning myself hanging
out — family-free — with the Avengers
or even the teenage X-Men.
Like many working-class kids, I
dreamed myself into being, had to in-
vent an alter ego out of pencil, paper and
books. But where the Fantastic Four had
the futuristic Baxter Building and Tony
Stark (Iron Man) his ultra-top-secret
labs in which to perform their experi-
ments, I had the humble kitchen table —
that all-purpose family altar — and the
porch of summer.
That’s where I read, drew and wrote,obsessively, compulsively, trying to fig-
ure out how to create the self I sensed I
was meant to be. I knew I couldn’t de-
pend on some glowing spider to trans-
form my life. I had to do it myself. So I
shut my eyes and imagined conjuring
the same kind of comfort and bliss that
the creations of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko
and Stan Lee gave me.
Without knowing, my parents had im-
prisoned me in a bleak dungeon of fam-
ily obligation. But my Marvel Comics —that young, ever-expanding universe —
offered me escape in the moment and,
ultimately, into a future where I would
become a novelist, a memoirist and a
newspaperman.
Our sleek Marvel movies are all well
and good. But for me they can’t hold a
candle to the seduction of a simple spin-
ner rack wobbling and squealing under
the weight of the latest Lee-Kirby phan-
tasmagorias, waiting for me at some
country store way back in 1966.Marvel expanded my universe
How comic books shaped
the life of one boy whose
family was in deep distressBY DANA JENNINGSARMANDO VEVEI read and reread and reread
those Marvels, was transported
to heroic realms, other, better
worlds.The Austrian poet Ingeborg Bach-
mann’s teenage years overlapped
almost precisely with the official begin-
ning and end of World War II. Her
father was a Nazi. The one novel Bach-
mann finished, “Malina,” is very much
a war story, if not in conventional
ways.
Published originally in German in
1971, and in English first in 1990 and
now in an extensive reworking by the
same translator, Philip Boehm, “Mal-
ina” is also a psychological thriller of a
tormented, existential sort. And it’s a
love triangle, though a triangle most
accurately drawn with dotted lines,
given that it’s debatable how many of
its members are real.
The unnamed narrator, a female
writer, lives in Vienna with a man
named Malina who works at a military
museum, and she is conducting an
affair with a Hungarian man named
Ivan, who lives nearby and has two
young children.
The first of the book’s three distinct
sections, its longest, is devoted primar-
ily to the narrator’s relationship with
Ivan, whom she met outside a florist’s
shop.She implies that love is a “virus,”
and thinks: “I’ve accumulated more
antibodies than you need to be immune
— mistrust, indifference, the fearless-
ness which comes from too much fear,
and I don’t know how Ivan coped with
such resistance, such impregnable
misery.”
There are brief flashes of the narra-
tor’s wartime trauma in this first sec-
tion — memories of being evacuated to
a border town in 1945, and of someone
threatening to shoot her and a young
friend — but this trauma fully lights up
the book’s blazing second section. It’s a
stunning stretch, filled with the re-
counting of vivid nightmares, which
include gas chambers and incest and
being slowly poisoned.
The narrator dreams of being left
alone to die in a gas chamber after her
father disappears through a door he
hadn’t shown her. “While I am dying
my wish to see him once more and tell
him just one thing dies as well,” she
writes. “My father, I say to him who is
no longer there, I wouldn’t have told
anyone, I would not have betrayed you.
There’s no resistance going on here.”
In this section, in a technique that
will begin to appear more frequently
throughout the rest of the novel, the
narrator and Malina have conversa-
tions formatted as scripts.
“Malina: There is no peace in you,
not even in you.
“Me: Don’t say that, not today.
You’re terrible.
“Malina: It’s war. And you are the
war. You yourself.
“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.
“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 com-
pletely 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 intro-duction 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 ap-
pearance, my living bodily self gives
him a reference point.”
Read this way, Malina seems like a
civilizing drive inside the narrator, for
better and worse — both protecting
her from the full rawness of her trau-
matic 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.)
Taken in bites, Bachmann’s prose is
often lucid and powerful, enlivened by
her poetic gifts. At length, she can be
tough chewing. She wrote a doctoral
dissertation on Heidegger and was a
devoted reader of Wittgenstein’s “Trac-
tatus Logico-Philosophicus,” though
she’s nowhere near that tough. For
every aphoristic dart she throws at the
human condition (“the world is sick
and doesn’t want a healthy force to
prevail”), there is a sentence or mean-
ing that remains tightly knotted, and a
general lack of clear orientation pre-
vails. Whatever verifiable facts about
the plot and characters might exist
beneath the novel’s psychological
static, you can imagine Bachmann
insisting, are none of your business.
The churn of the narrator’s mind and
the absurdist exchanges betweencharacters earned the novel compar-
isons to Virginia Woolf and Beckett.
This revised translation appears at a
time when the book feels quite contem-
porary. Though even innovative main-
stream fiction now being published
reads like “A Is for Apple” compared
with “Malina,” there’s no question that
the book shares a spirit with any and
all books about the unsought psycho-
logical challenges of being a woman in
this world. (“Can a man understand
this book? Completely,” Kushner writes
in her introduction, which gave me the
courage to continue.)
“Women face an unhappiness which
is particularly inevitable and abso-
lutely unnecessary,” the narrator says.
She envisions that she will become “an
unknown woman murdered by some
unknown man.” The specters not just
of the father figure, but of fascism and
patriarchy on scales large and small,
hang over every line of the novel.
Like a lot of existential literature,
“Malina” has digressive depths and
charms impossible to summarize in
such a small space, including the start
of its final section, which begins: “At
the moment my greatest fear may be
the fate of our postal officials.”
In the closing pages, the narrator’s
thoughts accelerate toward break-
down. “I am completely incapable of
thinking straight, but who ever did
think straight?” she wonders.
Her racing confusion seems to con-
firm something Malina has earlier
explained to her: “Once one has sur-
vived something then survival itself
interferes with understanding.”Postwar love triangle, drawn with dotted lines
BOOK REVIEWMalina
By Ingeborg Bachmann. Translated from
the German by Philip Boehm. 283 pp.
New Directions. Paper. $16.95.BY JOHN WILLIAMSIngeborg Bachmann, the author of “Malina,” in Rome in 1962.HEINZ BACHMANNРЕ
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