Ingeborg Bachmann

Life-in-death: an agonizing in-between

A review of 'The Agony of I.B.' by Pierre Joris

Photo of Pierre Joris by Kelly Writers House staff.
Photo of Pierre Joris by Kelly Writers House staff.

We’re all going to die; very few of us will have a death as remarkable — or perhaps as unremarkable — as Ingeborg Bachmann’s. It is against this canvas, the final days of Bachmann’s life as she lay comatose in an Italian hospital, suffering from burns — the result of a fire caused by a wayward cigarette — and the pursuant withdrawal from sedatives, that Pierre Joris sets his play ​The Agony of I.B. (2016)​.

We’re all going to die; very few of us will have a death as remarkable — or perhaps as unremarkable — as Ingeborg Bachmann’s.

'Reading List' 2016

 

I was asked to write this piece in late December for the January issue of the Harriet blog The Reading Lista feature of Poetry magazine’s Editors’ Bloga

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