‘Simultan’ (‘Three Paths to the Lake’) by Ingeborg Bachmann (Review)

During this year’s Women in Translation Month, I finally got around to a book I’d long wanted to try, namely Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s only novel, Malina.  Having enjoyed it immensely, I decided that I’d follow that up with another of her works for German Literature Month, hence today’s post.  However, the eagle-eyed (and German-speaking) among you may have noticed something amiss here in the form of a rather free translation of the book’s title.  Patience, dear reader – there is a method in my madness, and all will be revealed in due course 😉

*****
Simultan (Simultaneous) is a collection of Bachmann’s shorter work comprising four decent-length stories and a novella, all of which look at life through the eyes of Austrian women.  In different ways, the pieces collected here are reminiscent of Malina, both in subject matter and tone.  The stories can be deceptively light and fluffy at times as the protagonists prattle on with a sunny smile, but there are frequently clouds on the horizon, and you can be sure that someone’s going to get drenched before too long.

A couple of the stories focus on low-grade socialites, reminiscent of the protagonist of Malina.  ‘Probleme Probleme’ (‘Problems Problems’) is a mocking portrait of a spoiled young woman, in which we accompany her to a beauty parlour as she prepares for a date with her married lover, a day of pampering with a bitter ending.  Then ‘Ihr glücklichen Augen‘ (‘Her Happy Eyes’) introduces us to another frustrating airhead, this one marked by her refusal to wear glasses despite her poor vision – you see, she shrinks from seeing the word in all its ugliness…

‘Das Gebell’ (‘The Barking’) takes a slightly different tack, though.  Here we have an elderly widow living in a small house just outside Vienna, virtually abandoned by her famous psychologist son.  When he remarries, his new wife sees it as her duty to visit her mother-in-law and keep her company:

Obwohl es ihr sonst vielleicht nicht gerade in den Sinn gekommen wäre, ihre freien Stunden mit einer alten Frau zu verbringen, wurden die, im Gedanken an Leo, zu etwas besonderem, zu einer Handreichung, einem Liebesbeweis für ihn, damit er seinen Kopf ganz frei hatte für die Arbeit.
‘Das Gebell’, pp.103/4 (Piper Verlag, 2017)

Although it wouldn’t ordinarily have crossed her mind to spend her free hours with an old woman, in thinking of Leo these hours became something special, a helping hand, a proof of love so that his mind was completely free for his work. ***
(my translation)

Eventually, a friendship develops between the two women, but the more the daughter-in-law learns about her husband, the more she understands the fate that awaits her if he happens to loses interest in her.

After our stay in the Austrian capital, the title story takes us away from Vienna in the company of a simultaneous interpreter on a short holiday on the Italian coast.  It’s a relaxing break with a new, temporary lover, a diplomat who is also originally from Vienna, and the nature of their relationship, and the fact they both speak the same language, means she can unwind and forget the stresses of her exhausting work.  However, their shared background also forces her to reflect on her past, and (as is the case with several of our heroines here) a breakdown is inevitably just around the corner – or, to be more accurate, up the hill…

*****
All four stories are excellent in their own right, but they’re overshadowed somewhat by the final piece, a ninety-page novella which takes up almost half the book.  ‘Drei Wege zum See’ (‘Three Paths to the Lake’) lends its name to the English-language edition of the collection (translated by Mary Fran Gilbert, published by Holmes & Meier Publishers in their Portico Paperback Series) and is a fitting way to end the collection.  It’s a well-paced tale which takes elements of the earlier stories and expands upon them, leaving us with an intriguing story of a woman reflecting on her life.

The protagonist here is Elisabeth, a celebrated photojournalist approaching fifty years of age.  Having just come from London where she attended her younger brother’s wedding, she’s now taking a week off to relax at the family home in Klagenfurt with her widowed father.  It’s a trip she’s been looking forward to, a welcome break from her hectic job travelling the world, and from her Parisian lover.

‘Drei Wege zum See’ is a story in two strands.  One involves her quiet country holiday, focusing on the walks she takes in the hope of reaching the nearby lake for some swimming, an endeavour that proves to me more difficult than she’d expected.  The other has her looking back at her life over the course of these walks, reminiscing about lost loves, her career and her youth.

It’s a beautiful story, steeped in regrets and nostalgia.  The construction of a new motorway running past her home prevents her from reaching the lake, and it’s not a stretch to read this as a metaphor for her inability to go back in time and make changes.  The time spent reflecting on her life allows her to realise that enjoyable as it is, it’s not really what she expected.  She has had men, but none that have lasted, and she even has doubts about the importance of her work, seeds sown by a previous lover:

“Ich sage nur, es ist eine Zumutung, es ist eine Erniedrigung, eine Niedertracht, einem Menschen auch noch zu zeigen, wie andere leiden.  Denn es ist natürlich anders in Wirklichkeit.  Also so etwas zu tun, bloß damit einer seinen Kaffee einen Moment stehen läßt und murmelt, ach wie schrecklich!”
‘Drei Wege zum See’, p.144

“I’m just saying that it’s impertinent, humiliating, vile to show people how others are suffering.  Because it’s different in reality, of course.  I mean, doing something like that just so someone will forget their coffee for a moment and murmur, oh, how awful!” ***

Still, having come this far, there’s no turning back.  Having made her bed, there’s no point in complaining that it’s uncomfortable…

*****
Simultan is superbly written, and just as Malina had a mix of tones, swinging from ecstasy to brooding, the stories here have several different styles.  Another connection I noticed is a sense of a wider universe connecting the stories.  Names of minor characters from the novel popped up in some of these stories, and the same is true between the pieces; for example, the unpleasant doctor in ‘Das Gebell’ crops up as a potential lover for young Elisabeth in ‘Drei Wege zum See’.  Of course, a further thread running through Bachmann’s work is a preoccupation with her country and its history.  It’s not quite Bernhardian, but there’s a definite feeling of a country whose best days are far in the past.  For any British reader, these post-empire blues will probably be rather familiar…

Overall, it’s an excellent collection, and I only have one regret, and that’s my failure to do my homework thoroughly enough before making the purchase.  You see, for readers proficient in German, the stories in Simultan are actually available in a more substantial collection, which also contains Bachmann’s earlier collection Das dreißigste Jahr (The Thirtieth Year) and an assortment of other pieces.  I suppose there are worse problems to have, but now I have to decide whether to splash out on that one, too 😦