'I was subordinate to him from the beginning, and I must have known early on that he was destined to be my doom' A woman in Vienna walks a tightrope between the two men in her life. There is her lover Ivan, beautiful and unavailable, who obsesses her. And there is Malina, the civil servant with whom she shares an apartment: reserved, fastidious, exacting, chillingly calm. As the balance of power between them starts to shift, she feels her fragile identity unravelling, gradually revealing the dark, bruised heart of her past. Part detective novel, part love story, part psychoanalytic case study, Bachmann's 1971 masterpiece brings us to the broken heart of human experience, eros, neurosis and history.