The Threshold and the Ledger

Published just before the centenary year of one of the German-speaking world’s most extraordinary post-war writers, Tom McCarthy’s short book unpacks a single poem by Ingeborg Bachmann. Latching onto two of its central terms – the eponymous threshold and ledger – McCarthy takes off on a line of flight that carries the reader through the work of Franz Kafka, David Lynch, Anne Carson, Sappho, and Shakespeare.

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) may have spent her career in shadow of her lover Paul Celan; but since her untimely death her star has outshone even his. In recent years more and more Anglophone writers and readers have been switching on to her importance.