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 20th 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? With identity ruptured and surpassed, how – and by whom – might such experience be recorded? Appearing on the eve of Bachmann’s centenary year, McCarthy’s book argues for the centrality of her vision to the very act of literature itself.