The Threshold and the Ledger
A timely exploration of Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann by Booker-shortlisted author Tom McCarthy.
Since her untimely death in 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann has come to be regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most important writers. Unpacking a single Bachmann poem, novelist Tom McCarthy latches onto two of its central terms — the eponymous threshold and ledger — and takes off on a line of flight: through the work of Franz Kafka, David Lynch, Anne Carson, Sappho and Shakespeare. Can writing be understood as an experience of the threshold, a limit- or boundary- state? A condition of ecstasy or ec-stasis, standing outside of oneself? If so, then how might such experience be archived, jotted down, notated? And when the boundaries of the…