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Three Novellas

by Thomas Bernhard, Peter Jansen (Translator), Kenneth J. Northcott (Translator), Brian Evenson (Foreword)

3.91 of 5 stars 3.91 · rating details · 53 ratings · 9 reviews

Thomas Bernhard is "one of the masters of contemporary European fiction" (George Steiner); "one of the century's most gifted writers" (New York Newsday); "a virtuoso of rancor and rage" (Bookforum). And although he is favorably compared with Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Robert Musil, Thomas Bernhard still remains relatively unknown in America.

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Hardcover, 184 pages

Published June 23rd 2003 by University Of Chicago Press

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Jan 03, 2013 Rise rated it 4 of 5 stars

Why is Thomas Bernhard so funny? Three Novellas could hint at an answer. His subjects are as un-funny as can be: committing suicide, becoming mad, walking and thinking, thinking and walking. His characters can be pitiful and pathetic. His worldview can be tragic. His voice is vitriol. The commas, as well as the ellipses, are just so damn plentiful. They usher in a collapse of thinking, of thought. "Every existence is a mitigating circumstance, dear sir. Before every court, before every self-judg...more Why is Thomas Bernhard so funny? Three Novellas could hint at an answer. His subjects are as un-funny as can be: committing suicide, becoming mad, walking and thinking, thinking and walking. His characters can be pitiful and pathetic. His worldview can be tragic. His voice is vitriol. The commas, as well as the ellipses, are just so damn plentiful. They usher in a collapse of thinking, of thought. "Every existence is a mitigating circumstance, dear sir. Before every court, before every self-judgment." Mere existence is a burden.

The three novellas are called "Amras", "Playing Watten", and "Walking". Each is a journey into the interior, into the mind of darkness, the twisted thought processes and sense impressions of a hypersensitive man. Each is an intricate mental adventure that can be maddening and infuriating. The prose style is at least infuriating. By the time I reached the third novella, I felt like a helpless victim in a Kafkaesque story. I was ready to admit myself into a mental institution. I just felt incapable. The awareness of mortality is etched in every word.

I am walking into the bell jar of our sensations ... pointless attempt at a swift escape from hopelessness ... with my head schooled in darkness, welded to darkness, from one extreme to the other ... conflicts ... forever into the depth through depth, guided by the power of imagination ... In that thought I pursued my self for a while ... To avoid suffocation, I suddenly turned back in that thought ... as if for dear life I had run back into myself in that thought ... [from "Amras", ellipses and italics not mine]

This collection of novellas shows that there is a method to madness in Bernhard's constructions. His use of repetition must be a form of political resistance. His use of nested narrative attributions ("the landlord said to the traveler, the truck driver said") must be a form of fictional resistance.

The narratives hover between a broken record and a crazy monologue. It is freewheeling poetry, definitely not for the faint of prose. Bernhard must be so funny because otherwise he is so unremittingly bleak, so unrelentingly despairing, and deadly poisonous. In his fiction, one recognizes that the world is nothing more than an insane asylum. Is it a comedy? Is it a tragedy?

The truck driver says: if you go and play watten again, doctor, I will tell the others you are going to play the watten again. You can hear everything more clearly in the dark, I say, you see nothing, you hear everything more clearly. In desperation, no matter where you are, no matter where you have to stay in this world, I say, you can, from one moment to the next, out of desperation, exit the tragedy (you are in) and enter the comedy (you are in), or vice versa, at any moment exit the comedy (you are in) and enter the tragedy (you are in). [from "Playing Watten"]

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Jun 29, 2012 Lisa rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: abandoned

Holy run on sentences Batman, the first story was almost impossible to get through, but I found a way to finish it, I read it before bed time, because as someone who has to get up ridiculously early and who is also a chronic night owl, I found it extremely helpful to read only a few pages every night, which had the awesome power of putting me to sleep no matter how wired I was, and allowed me to make it all the way to the end of the boorish nightmare of the first story, but I found it impossible...more

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Sep 10, 2008 Eugene rated it 4 of 5 stars

maybe not the bernhard book to start with, but very useful to see the young old master's development--and the early, shocking bang of his talent.

AMRAS--originally published in 1963--shows the large ambitions of his theme and iconoclasm are already in place, driving the writing. this one literally breaks down. it begins coherently though darkly with the assessment by the sons of a family's partially failed suicide pact (the parents were successful) and then becomes beautifully and infuriatingly f...more maybe not the bernhard book to start with, but very useful to see the young old master's development--and the early, shocking bang of his talent.

AMRAS--originally published in 1963--shows the large ambitions of his theme and iconoclasm are already in place, driving the writing. this one literally breaks down. it begins coherently though darkly with the assessment by the sons of a family's partially failed suicide pact (the parents were successful) and then becomes beautifully and infuriatingly fragmented. as if to document the approach to death or insanity... if anything this earlier novella is more sincerely nihilistic than the later bernhard in that when bernhard arrives at his later method, at least there's the minimal solace of continuous (albeit repetitive) form. and the dark jokes seem to have punchlines and don't just break off into menacing silence like they do here. on the other hand, the devastation seems more complete and impressive in the (later) long, relentless, incantatory voice without the--in comparison--cheaper gimmickry of the fragmentation here.

on its structural self-decimation, brian evenson's excellent, brief intro has this particularly good insight::
"(C)ollapsing into fragmentation... (AMRAS) opts for the modernist solution of using a formal collapse. GARGOYLES, on the other hand, offers a voice that tears itself apart from within while leaving the edifice of monologue intact. We have the sense that, like Becket's Unnamable, Prince Sarau (in GARGOYLES) is probably only getting started" (ix).

PLAYING WATTEN i think is the most memorable of the three, maybe only because it has the most concrete central metaphor: four citizens travel to an inn--which is tucked into a treacherously disorienting wood--in order to play a card game (the eponymous WATTEN). dense, repetitive (and here, the repetition is boring in a way the later bernhard somehow manages to avoid), but also beautiful and (already) devastating. an early--maybe the first?--version of his unparagraphed style.

WALKING is at times (too) straight-forwardly didactic, so that bernhard's fiction gets almost turgid (at least for me) carrying the freight of its philosophical rhetoric. but if it's didactic, it's also ambitious, marching uninhibitedly through its themes: the misery of existence; the baseness of the (austrian) state; madness; language, thinking itself.
the translation throughout seems incredible, almost transparent. WALKING in particular, with its dependence on abstractions and its recursive structures, would seem mind-bogglingly difficult to translate. (less)

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Jul 14, 2011 Jeff Bursey rated it 4 of 5 stars

This could be mind-numbing if you don't like repetitive-seeming or long sentences, but it's a good introduction to this brilliant austrian writer of novels, novellas, plays and memoirs.

See my review for Books in Canada here:

http://www.amazon.ca/Three-Novellas-T...

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Feb 08, 2011 lyell bark rated it 5 of 5 stars

c00l book, amras ggets 4 stars and playing watten and walking get 5 stars i guess. bye.

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Apr 19, 2013 M. Sarki rated it 5 of 5 stars

This was my second time through this collection. Amras, the first novella, is my least favorite and I still am not sure what Bernhard's fuss was all about regarding how much he personally liked it. Playing Watten and Walking were both far superior to me, and I loved them both very much. These are some of the very best writing he had ever done, even though they may have been composed a bit earlier than his other recognized masterpieces.

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Nov 18, 2009 Stephen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012

Amras is very early Bernhard, reminding me of the stories collected in Seagull's "Prose." As such, it's probably not the best introduction to Bernhard's work.

Playing Watten is the strongest work in this collection: controlled, provocative, and at times, eerily Poe-ish.

Walking exasperated me in a way that only Bernhard can. As much as I love his work, god it can be awful to get through some times.

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Dec 21, 2007 Jes rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: postmodernists, modernists, german-philes

This collection of novellas by Thomas Bernhard is poignant, beautiful, and full of the aesthetic. Amras is my favourite novella in the collection. Bernhard's observations about annihilation and nature is unparalleled. Bernhard is considered a contemporary of Beckett, and while several thematic and structural strains are similar in the two author's prose, Bernhard is a much easier read.

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Jul 10, 2007 Jason rated it 3 of 5 stars

i'm reading the 3rd novella: "walking" it is one long paragraph. very slow and odd.

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Shelves: 20th-century, german

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About Thomas Bernhard

Thomas Bernhard was an Austrian author, who ranges among the most distinguished German speaking writers of the second half of the 20th century.

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