I'm going to have to pass this up for a second reading, and - judging by the reviews on this site - apparently I'm not the only one. It fits perfectly what my book friend Lisa writes: “this (is a) novel of internalized female pain”, a hallucinatory portrait of a woman in Vienna whose psyche is at the mercy of different men. The first part was fairly easy to follow, with a clever evocation of a woman who swings back and forth between the 'adventurous' Ivan and the somewhat shadowy 'tower of strength' Malina. But then the second part, with a succession of what appears to be hallucinations of the same woman, admitted in a psychiatric institute and with bizarre scenes in which incest is explicitly discussed. I have to admit that in the course of the third part (200 pages into the book), after another chain of fragmented scenes which barely seemed to make sense, I gave up. Maybe external circumstances were at play when I read it, but I just couldn't put myself in the masochistic world of this writer anymore. I know that Bachmann is regarded as Thomas Bernard's source of inspiration, and a great deal of that was recognizable. But personally I think a link with Elfride Jelinek is much more obvious. As said, I'm putting this aside for a second reading, because the fact is that this book, this struggle, won't let you go.