Simultan

Ingeborg Bachmann's five stories present masterfully depicted images of women living in a world of absurd synchronicity, parallel use of languages, and coexistence of experiences and feelings. The heroine of the title story, a qualified translator, discovers during a short vacation with a man she barely knows that neither she nor he has anything to say to each other; an inert young girl whose greatest happiness is sleeping until noon or spending days at the hairdresser's; Miranda, who considers her nearsightedness a "gift from God" because it allows her not to see the malice, vileness, and disgustingness of this world in all its details; old Mrs. Jordan, who was generously condemned by her only son to a lonely existence in a small apartment; a successful photojournalist who comes to visit her father in the old house of her youth - all of them, with naive emotion or painful realization, experience that long moment of horror during which they discover what was, what is, and what could have been.