On Hannah Regel’s “The Last Sane Woman”

In an interview with Montez Press, Hannah Regel recommends Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina. Published two years before Bachmann’s death in 1971, Malina was to be the first entry in her Todesarten cycle, meaning “Death Styles.” Set in post-war Austria, the book’s narrator is driven to madness by two men and the memory of war: the middle section of the book is nightmares of abusive fathers and scenes of torture. Meanwhile, she fails to keep up with her correspondence. When the narrator sits at her typewriter, she instead composes fantasies about a princess riding a horse along the Danube who happens upon a mysterious, kind man. Near the end of the novel, weak and confused, she drafts letters to her lawyer regarding the creation of her will, which she signs from “an unknown woman.” In Regel’s first novel, The Last Sane Novel, she seems to have taken up Bachmann’s figure of an “unknown woman” tortured by the social and political world of Europe after the Second World War. But in her story, instead of a single unknown woman, there are three, each contending with the ramifications of Margaret Thatcher’s United Kingdom.