Simultaneous (Bachmann)

Simultan is a collection of stories by Ingeborg Bachmann from 1972.

content

Bachmann's prose volume Simultan contains the following five stories.

Simultaneously

A simultaneous translator travels for a few days through central Italy with the diplomat Ludwig Frankel, who has just met, to recover from her stressful working life. First they spend the night in a hotel near Paestum. After a drive they arrive in a small coastal town of Maratea , where they stay in a small hotel. After a swim in the sea, the two of them take a trip to the nearby mountains, where the translator feels nauseous after driving down the steep roads and seeing a statue of Christ . After this event, the two leave the hotel.

Problems problems

Beatrix would like to lie in bed all day. In order to maintain her social contacts, she has to do without them. Since she still has no work at the age of 21, her friend Erich constantly urges her to continue her education. But the only thing Beatrix likes to do is go to René's hair salon. When she once again had her hair washed and made up there, she lost her nerve and destroyed the entire beauty regimen by smearing the make-up with a cream that was not suitable for wiping away and walking into the rain with her fresh hairstyle. Her favorite thing to do is sleep.

Your happy eyes

Miranda is extremely nearsighted, 7.5 diopters including astigmatism , and sees her eye defect as a godsend, as it means that she does not have to see the horrors of the world. In addition, she forgets and loses her glasses out of unconscious intent. That's why she only recognizes people when they are facing her, greets lampposts and bumps into glass doors.

The bark

The old woman Jordan lives in a small apartment in Vienna and is rarely visited by her son, who is a doctor. Franziska, the son's wife, realizes the loneliness of the old woman and begins to take care of her. After a few conversations, she realizes that Ms. Jordan is afraid of her son. The old woman also mentions more and more often that she can hear dogs barking even though they are not there. Franziska later learns that the old lady once owned a dog, but only gave it away because her son didn't like the dog. After this conversation, Franziska never visited the old woman again, and the son calls his mother more often and tells about a new friend. At the end, it is casually noted that both the old woman Jordan and Franziska died shortly afterwards.

Three ways to the lake

Elisabeth Matrei, around fifty years old, visits her old father in a suburb of Klagenfurt after an exhausting stay in London , where she attended her brother's wedding . Inspired by the scenes of her childhood, she mentally processed her whole life, especially her love affairs, there, among other things on hikes to the nearby Wörthersee . From Vienna, Elisabeth has worked her way up from a journalist to a star photographer and has traveled all over the world as a result. In Paris she had met a certain Trotta, who comes from a noble family from the former Habsburg Empire (see Joseph Roth's Radetzkymarsch ). This was the only true love in Elisabeth's life, but Trotta broke this relationship after a while. Elisabeth later found out that Trotta had committed suicide. After that Elisabeth had constant love affairs, but none of them were on such a high intellectual level as those at Trotta. When Elisabeth's stay in Carinthia becomes too boring, she travels to see Philippe, her current boyfriend, in Paris. At the airport in Vienna she meets a cousin Trottas, whom she had met briefly in the course of their relationship with Trotta and who slips her a note saying that he has always loved Elisabeth. In Paris, she ends her relationship with Philippe and receives a job in Saigon , which she accepts.