The Threshold and the Ledger
Sep 2025 · New York Review of Books
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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 twentieth 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.
Since her untimely death in 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann has come to be regarded as one of the twentieth 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.
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 twentieth century’s most important writers. Unpacking a single Bachmann poem, novelist Tom McCarthy latch...
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About the author
Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre, and radio. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. His first novel, Remainder, won the 2008 Believer Book Award; his third, C, was a 2010 Booker Prize finalist, as was his fourth, Satin Island, in 2015. He is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and of the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. His latest novel, The Making of Incarnation, was published in 2021. McCarthy has held Visiting Professorships at the Royal College of Art London, Columbia University New York and Städelschule Frankfurt. Born in Scotland, he is now a Swedish citizen, and lives in Berlin.
Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre, and radio. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. His first novel, Remainder, won the 2008 Believer Book Award; his third, C, was a 2010 Boo...
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