The text deals with themes including gender relations, guilt, mental illness, writing, and collective and personal trauma in the context of post-Second World War Vienna.

[1] The novel focuses on an unnamed female narrator, known only as I., who explores her existential situation as a woman and writer both through personal reflection and in dialogue form.

The writer shares a flat with the calm and rational Malina, a historian, who offers her the necessary support as she is often confused and seems to be losing touch with reality.

The book was reviewed in Publishers Weekly in 1991: "This demanding work contains flashes of great beauty and insight but is ultimately marred by Bachmann's cryptic, fragmented prose and internalized story line that is based entirely on the narrator's emotional responses to events conveyed only obliquely to the reader.

Part of the problem derives from the veiled yet critical references to Austrian history, which are satisfactorily explained only in the excellent afterword.