false 7745 20 0 male Heerlen 1931/02/09 1989/02/12 92570 1400077540 9781400077540 50 <![CDATA[The Loser: A Novel]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1217968626m/92570.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1217968626s/92570.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92570.The_Loser_A_Novel 4.13 350 The Loser (1983) poses an irresistible drama of failed excellence. In 1953 three friends, among whom is the famed Glenn Gould, study with Horowitz. Rarely sleeping, hardly eating, they burn intensely with the white and ruthless flame of virtuosity. Only Gould ascends. But this is no conventional narrative--neat, action-driven, or linear. It opens with the specter of death--Gould's at 51, and a suicide. Art exalts even as it destroys, when the aspirant is found wanting. Both Wertheimer, the suicide, and the narrator turn their backs on their musical careers, thus triggering their process of "deterioration." What is the consequence of throwing it all away? And yet, what are the rewards of realized genius? After Gould becomes, indeed, Glenn Gould, the two friends go to visit him in Canada. "He had barricaded himself in his house. For life. All our lives the three of us have shared the desire to barricade ourselves from the world. All three of us were born barricade fanatics."

Bernhard fans will recognize the restrained rant, the execution of an idea carried to a logical, caustic extreme. The rant creates, of the novel, a grand philosophical speculation: What is devotion to one's art? What is it to truly understand one's art and to not misuse one's gift? And, alas, The Loser can also be read as the profound consequence of perfectionism, whereby all efforts to create or execute anything of note are squashed in the critical mind's ruthless self-scrutiny. The narrator works, for example, on his Glenn Gould essay for nine years, grateful, in the end, that he has published nothing. "How good it is that none of these imperfect, incomplete works has ever appeared, I thought, had I published them.... [T]oday I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness." The one regenerative act seems to be that of self-destruction. Destruction, indeed, becomes the flip side of perfectionist rigor. Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) was his own unique genius and in The Loser, one of his most acclaimed novels, he creates a chilling portrait of tragic compulsion, teasing and testing our assumptions human behavior. --Hollis Giamatteo

]]> 7745 4.14 1991 233 1983 92578 0226043924 9780226043920 22 <![CDATA[Wittgenstein's Nephew]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249535m/92578.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249535s/92578.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92578.Wittgenstein_s_Nephew 4.13 166
"[Wittgenstein's Nephew is] a meditative fugue for mad, brilliant voices on the themes of death, death-in-life and the artist's and thinker's role in society . . . oddly moving and funny at the same time."—Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune

"Mr. Bernhard's memoir about Paul Wittgenstein is a 'confession and a guilty homage to their friendship; it takes the place of the graveside speech he never delivered. In its obsessive, elegant rhythms and narrative eloquence, it resembles a tragic aria by Richard Strauss. . . . This is a memento mori that approaches genius.'"—Richard Locke, Wall Street Journal</div>]]> 7745 4.14 1991 233 1982 92571 1400077559 9781400077557 19 <![CDATA[Gargoyles: A Novel]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249533m/92571.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249533s/92571.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92571.Gargoyles_A_Novel 4.10 135 Gargoyles, one of his earliest novels, is a singular, surreal study of the nature of humanity.

One morning a doctor and his son set out on daily rounds through the grim mountainous Austrian countryside. They observe the colorful characters they encounter -- from an innkeeper whose wife has been murdered to a crippled musical prodigy kept in a cage -- coping with physical misery, madness, and the brutality of the austere landscape. The parade of human grotesques culminates in a hundred-page monologue by an eccentric, paranoid prince, a relentlessly flowing cascade of words that is classic Bernhard.]]> 7745 4.14 1991 233 1986 162606 0226044025 9780226044026 15 <![CDATA[The Voice Imitator]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172302652m/162606.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172302652s/162606.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/162606.The_Voice_Imitator 4.01 136 The Loser, Bernhard has rarely received the audience he deserves. The Voice Imitator, while unlikely to change this basic fact, does give us Bernhard's singularly pessimistic worldview in perhaps more digestible little chunks--some of them very little, indeed. (Here is the entirety of the short story "Mail": "For years after our mother's death, the Post Office still delivered letters that were addressed to her. The Post Office had taken no notice of her death.")

In fact, none of the 104 stories collected here are longer than a page--and with the tremendous variety of disaster and tragedy they contain (e.g., suicide, disappearance, murder, madness, corruption), there's not much room for characterization or plot. These read more like fragments, anecdotes, or snippets of news stories than conventional short narratives. Despite their brevity, however, these stories display all the signature elements of the Bernhardian oeuvre: cynicism, misanthropy, contempt for his native country, and withering scorn for the futility of all human effort. They might be an acquired taste--but one with undeniable force. With his black humor, deadly satire, and loathing for bureaucracy, Bernhard is the spiritual heir of writers such as Kafka, Grass, and Beckett--perhaps on a very bad day.

]]> 7745 4.14 1991 233 1978 92576 0226043967 9780226043968 11 <![CDATA[Woodcutters (Phoenix Fiction Series)]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249534m/92576.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249534s/92576.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92576.Woodcutters 4.53 102
"Mr. Bernhard's portrait of a society in dissolution has a Scandinavian darkness reminiscent of Ibsen and Strindberg, but it is filtered through a minimalist prose. . . . Woodcutters offers an unusually intense, engrossing literary experience."—Mark Anderson, New York Times Book Review

"Musical, dramatic and set in Vienna, Woodcutters. . . .resembles a Strauss operetta with a libretto by Beckett."—Joseph Costes, Chicago Tribune

"Thomas Bernhard, the great pessimist-rhapsodist of German literature . . . never compromises, never makes peace with life. . . . Only in the pure, fierce isolation of his art can he get justice."—Michael Feingold, Village Voice

"In typical Bernhardian fashion the narrator is moved by hatred and affection for a society that he believes destroys the very artistic genius it purports to glorify. A superb translation."—Library Journal</div>]]> 7745 4.14 1991 233 1984 92573 009944254X 9780099442547 16 <![CDATA[Correction]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249533m/92573.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249533s/92573.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92573.Correction 4.36 106 Times Literary Supplement

"Correction is something exceedingly rare among novels of recent years: a paradigm of consciousness and not simply a product . . . . Bernhard has said that 'the art we need is the art of bearing the unbearable,' and his novel joins that small group of literary works which nobly help us to do that."—Richard Gilman, The Nation

"It is high time that we keep Bernhard firmly in our mind, as European readers have been doing for many years now."—Peter Demetz, Christian Science Monitor</div>]]> 7745 4.14 1991 233 1978 92575 0226043983 9780226043982 16 <![CDATA[Concrete (Phoenix Fiction Series)]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249534m/92575.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249534s/92575.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92575.Concrete 4.26 104
"Certain books--few--assert literary importance instantly, profoundly. This new novel by the internationally praised but not widely known Austrian writer is one of those--a book of mysterious dark beauty . . . . [It] is overwhelming; one wants to read it again, immediately, to re-experience its intricate innovations, not to let go of this masterful work."--John Rechy, Los Angeles Times

"Rudolph is not obstructed by some malfunctions in part of his being--his being itself is a knot. And as Bernhard's narrative proceeds, we begin to register the dimensions of his crisis, its self-consuming circularity . . . . Where rage of this intensity is directed outward, we often find the sociopath; where inward, the suicide. Where it breaks out laterally, onto the page, we sometimes find a most unsettling artistic vision."--Sven Birkerts, The New Republic

</div>]]> 7745 4.14 1991 233 1982 112801 0226043916 9780226043913 8 <![CDATA[Old Masters: A Comedy (Phoenix Fiction Series)]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171662470m/112801.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171662470s/112801.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112801.Old_Masters_A_Comedy 4.29 101 summoned by his friend Reger to meet him in a Viennese museum. While
Reger gazes at a Tintoretto portrait, Atzbacher--who fears Reger's
plans to kill himself--gives us a portrait of the musicologist: his
wisdom, his devotion to his wife, and his love-hate relationship with
art. With characteristically acerbic wit, Bernhard exposes the
pretensions and aspirations of humanity in a novel at once pessimistic
and strangely exhilarating.

"Bernhard's . . . most enjoyable novel."--Robert Craft, New York
Review of Books.

"Bernhard is one of the masters of contemporary European fiction."
--George Steiner

</div>]]> 7745 4.14 1991 233 1985 162611 0226043975 9780226043975 8 <![CDATA[The Lime Works]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172302670m/162611.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172302670s/162611.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/162611.The_Lime_Works 4.30 63
"A masterfully dense set of esthetic, social and political metaphors about contemporary life, about art, about obsessive commitment to anything....The book is a jungle of meaning, the opposite of simplistic allegory, and a major achievement."—William Kennedy, The New Republic</div>]]> 7745 4.14 1991 233 1971 162612 0704370859 9780704370852 3 <![CDATA[Extinction]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1238384069m/162612.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1238384069s/162612.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/162612.Extinction 4.47 57
Extinction, Bernhard's last work of fiction, takes the form of the autobiographical testimony of Franz-Josef Murau, the intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family. Murau lives in Rome in self-imposed exile from his family, surrounded by a coterie of artistic and intellectual friends. On returning from his sister's wedding to the "wine-cork manufacturer" on the family estate of Wolfsegg, having resolved never to go home again, Murau receives a telegram informing him of the death of his parents and brother in a car crash. Not only must he now go back, he must do so as the master of Wolfsegg. And he must decide its fate.

Divided into two halves, Extinction explores Murau's rush of memories of Wolfsegg as he stands at his Roman window considering the fateful telegram, in counterpoint to his return to Wolfsegg and the preparations for the funeral itself.

Written in the seamless style for which Bernhard became famous, Extinction is the ultimate proof of his extraordinary literary genius. It is his summing-up against Austria's treacherous past and -- in unprecedented fashion -- a revelation of his own incredibly complex personality, of his relationship with the world in which he lived, and the one he left behind.

A literary event of the first magnitude.]]> 7745 4.14 1991 233 1986