The Rest Is Slander: Five Stories

by Thomas Bernhard, Douglas Robertson (translator)

A collection of previously untranslated stories from a master of twentieth-century Austrian literature, Thomas Bernhard.

“The cold increases with the clarity,” said Thomas Bernhard while accepting a major literary prize in 1965. That clarity was the postwar realization that the West’s last remaining cultural reference points were being swept away by the ever-greater commodification of humankind. Collecting five stylistically transitional tales by Bernhard, all of which take place in sites of extreme cold, this volume extends that bleak vision of the master Austrian storyteller.
 
In “Ungenach,” the reluctant heir of an enormous estate chooses to give away his legacy to an assortment of oddballs as he discovers the past of his older brother, who was murdered during a career in futile colonialist philanthropy. In “The Weatherproof Cape,” a lawyer tries to maintain a sense of familial solidarity with a now-dead client with the help of an unremarkable piece of clothing. “Midland in Stilfs” casts a jaundiced eye on the laughable efforts of a cosmopolitan foreigner to attain local authenticity on a moribund Alpine farmstead. In “At the Ortler,” two middle-aged brothers—one a scientist, the other an acrobat—meditate on their unusual career paths while they climb a mountain to reclaim a long-abandoned family property. And in “At the Timberline,” the unexpected arrival of a young couple in a mountain village leads to the discovery of a scandalous crime that casts a shadow on the personal life of the policeman investigating it.
 

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, German Literature, Literature

212 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2022

About the author

Thomas Bernhard was an Austrian writer who ranks among the most distinguished German-speaking writers of the second half of the 20th century.

Although internationally he’s most acclaimed because of his novels, he was also a prolific playwright. His characters are often at work on a lifetime and never-ending major project while they deal with themes such as suicide, madness and obsession, and, as Bernhard did, a love-hate relationship with Austria. His prose is tumultuous but sober at the same time, philosophic by turns, with a musical cadence and plenty of black humor.

He started publishing in the year 1963 with the novel Frost. His last published work, appearing in the year 1986, was Extinction. Some of his best-known works include The Loser (about a student’s fictionalized relationship with the pianist Glenn Gould), Wittgenstein’s Nephew, and Woodcutters.

Reviews

[Lee Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Five early Bernhard stories from 1968, '69, and '71 (circa the Gargoyles, Lime Works, Walking era). The first four, mostly from '71, read like the early stages of the pure style Bernhard we know and love, ranting in this case about "acrobatic artistry" in the first few pages in such a way that literally turned my frown upside down as I read in bed at the end of a stressful day, a smile of recognition bloomed, like first glimpse of an old returning friend coming down the gangway, not that Bernhard is a friendly writer but the style of course is so his own and sometimes so audacious on a formal level that it's amusing. There's another passage in the fourth story about how all Austrian walkers distrust non-walkers that also caused a loud laugh while reading half-asleep in bed. And in the last story there's a note echoing the comedy/tragedy story in Prose: "A predilection for comedy: mortal terror."But generally because this is still early Bernhard, when for the most part he's discovered his mode but hasn't yet refined and perfected it, it's interesting for fans and worth it but essential for completists or near-completists (not just posthumous scraps exhumed for profit), especially the nearly novella-length story at the end of the collection about two brothers from "a manorial family," one living in Africa and another (an apparent stand-in for the author, at least in his mode of expression) teaching chemistry at Stanford, having to deal with their father's death and inheritance of an enormous forested estate, a walled-in manor only accessible after an hour's walk through the woods (later evolved into a cone in the middle of the forest?). Although this one includes some stretches in the expected mode, there are letters and notes -- it's organized differently, variously patterned, and although it's at the end of the collection it was published earliest, in '68, but also tracks along the lines of the stories presented at the beginning of the collection, published in '71, involving two brothers for example hiking through an alpine forest to reach their inherited manor house. I don't have too much to say other than that I "enjoyed" spending some more time back in this world, constructed of this very particular texture of language. Douglas Robertson's translation reads really well, conveys the expected Bernhardian syntax and spirit, and the book itself is a beauty as well, as usual, from Seagull Books -- I was aware of the print in the paper, almost as though it had been typed. A must for completists and anyone interested in a 78-page early novella diverging from Bernhard's typical formal mode.

[Nathanimal · Rating 5 out of 5]

New book by a favorite dead writer! I always approach these with skepticism. But never fear, Bernhardians! This is not some leftover scribbles found glued by a coffee stain to the bottom of TB’s desk drawer; these are terrific stories! At least two of them I would declare core Bernhard.

“Midland at Stilfs” is notable as a mirror image of the Bernhardian trope of the high-minded idler retreating from society, which to those who live in the retreat is neither high-minded or idle or even away from society. Bernhard does love to abuse and disabuse with sentences. In “Ungenach” he takes a fragmentary approach to some of his favorite subjects (degeneration, the hideousness of modern Austria, demonic walking). The fragments of speeches and letters create such an interesting space I kinda wish he’d explored that more in his writing.

I also really liked “The Weatherproof Cape” which felt a bit like Gogol or Dostoevsky. The first story “On the Ortler” is one that, if you’ve read TB before, you’ll recognize, perhaps know it before you’ve read it. Demonic walking to a retreat from society. But are you really going to complain about that?

That leaves one more story, which I didn’t have an opinion on. There was no walking in it, or retreats from society, so, whatever.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This attractive hardcover edition published by Seagull Books is the latest in a series of English translations from various publishers of Thomas Bernhard's transitional prose work—stylistic and formal antecedents to the monolithic novels he would come to be known for. For the most part, much of Bernhard's thematic groundwork is already intact here, if not always explicitly in the form of his trademark rants, certainly in a tacit way that readers familiar with his work would recognize. I would say the one outlier is 'At the Timberline', which recalls a type of piece common to The Voice Imitator collection, except drawn out into longer form. I suspect this story was, like others in that collection, inspired by Bernhard's time on the crime desk during his brief tenure as a journalist.

Some might say this is a collection for completionists only, although the more I read of Bernhard's shorter fiction, the more I think that any one of these English translation collections (with the probable exception of The Voice Imitator) could serve as a serviceable introduction to his work for English language readers, if one doesn't desire to dive headlong into the heart of his corpus. It really depends on whether as a reader you're one who prefers to wade cautiously into the work of a writer with a somewhat formidable reputation or if you prefer immediate immersion.

As a final note, Douglas Robertson has done a fine job with the translation here, following up his English translation of Bernhard's novel The Cheap-Eaters about an obsessive dog-bite victim and a group of diners at a low-cost restaurant who he becomes fixated on, published in 2021 by Spurl Editions. Robertson has been excellently, though unofficially, translating various works of Bernhard and interviews with him on his blog for years, so it's really great to see these new translations of his in print. Hopefully, it's just the start of more to come.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Our endurance of what is insufferable is a lifelong talent for anguish and sorrow possessed by every single one of us, a couple of ironic elements within each of us, an irrational idiom of idiocy; all the rest is slander.

The Rest Is Slander is Douglas Robertson's translation of 5 stories, or perhaps 4 stories and a novella, by Thomas Bernhard.

Three of the pieces here are from the collection Midland in Stilfs (1971):
"Midland in Stilfs" - translated as "Midland at Stilfs"
"Der Wetterfleck" - translated as "The Weatherproof Cape"
"Am Ortler" - translated as "On the Ortler: A Message from Gomagoi"

The two earlier stories are:
"Ungenach" (1968) translated as "Ungenach"
"An der Baumgrenze" (1969) translated as "At The Timberline"

This places the original stories around the time of Bernhard's 2nd and 3rd novels: Verstörung, 1967 (translated as Gargoyles by Richard and Clara Winston, 1970) and Das Kalkwerk, 1970 (translated as The Lime Works by Sophie Wilkins, 1973). But before perhaps the first of his greatest works Korrektur, 1975 (translated as Correction by Sophie Wilkins, 1979).

Douglas Robertson had been publishing translations of pieces by Bernhard on his blog (http://shirtysleeves.blogspot.com/) but in 2021 published (as The Cheap-Eaters) a re-translation of Die Billigesser (1980), the original translation by Ewald Osers (1990) having been long out of print. He discussed that translation here.

The thematic link of the five stories is their setting in remote mountain communities where the protagonists live in deliberate, yet simulteneously reluctant, isolation, one that amplifies their manias.

We dread visitors, indeed, we loathe them, and at the same time we cling to the outside world, with all the despair of those who are cut off from it. Our destiny’s name is Stilfs, everlasting solitude.

This is perhaps best expressed in my favourite of the 5 pieces, On the Ortler: A Message from Gomagoi, a story told in retrospect from one of two 50-ish year old brothers who set off from Gogamoi (itself c1300m above sea level) further up the slopes of the Ortler mountain range towards a stone farmhouse left to them by their parents 35 years earlier, where they intend to spend 2-3 years in solitude, perfecting their respective obsessions, the younger (the narrator) his 'scholarly work on atmospheric strata' and the elder his 'acrobatic artistry'. A mission that ends in inevitable failure.

‘… existence is always extreme and the effort to exist is intrinsically quite megalomaniacal . but it is a genuine art,' said Moro, 'to segregate yourself a hundred per cent from other people and at the same time to merge with them a hundred per cent . . but indeed the whole of humankind has been living,' he said, 'in complete exile for the longest time; it has bowed and scraped itself away from nature, shooed itself away from her in a manner that is extremely ingenious precisely because it is extremely ruthless towards humankind itself;..’

The novella is the earliest work, Ungenach. I'm not aware of the history of this work, but it suggests an intriguing different direction Bernhard's novels could have taken since, far from the concentrated unbroken prose for which he is known, this consists of a series of ephemera - jottings, aphorisms, parts of unsent letters, transcripts of conversations - from again one of two brothers, this the heir to a family estate which he, living in America, is determined to break up.

My 3 star rating here is not absolute, but relative to Bernhard's general ouevre, which (as Sebald said of Krasznahorkai) 'far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing' as this isn't his finest work, nor an ideal access point, but still highly worthwhile.

[e · Rating 4 out of 5]

English translation of Midland in Stilfs (1971), plus two other stories, "At the Timberline" (1969) and "Ungenach" (1968). So, Lime Works era.

All the stories take place in remote, cold locations. Often the remoteness of the location is the draw for the narrator or the protagonist but in every case it is that remoteness which is the narrator's undoing. This narrative idea of the seemingly perfect place in which to really do some thinking, really sit with one's life's work, really shut out the world which lies below and in which one could never get anything done, as in fact the only place in the world where one can never accomplish these things and can only realize their impossibility, would be developed further in The Lime Works (titular), Correction (the great cone in the Kobernausser), Concrete (the Peiskam house), and in a sense Old Masters (Reger's beloved bench in the Kunsthistorisches Museum). In this way, these stories feel preparatory for the novels. But Bernhard's prose holds them up on their own despite the narrative similarities.

"On the Ortler" details a futile climb two brothers take up to a chalet left to them by their parents decades before, a climb they have resisted taking for years. The narrative is largely the younger, an atmospheric scientist, relating the breathless speech of the older, a retired acrobat, as they make the ascent. The prose grows more breathless as the two ascend, and phrases start to get mindlessly repeated, as if there solely for the mind to hold onto something at all in such straits.

"At the Timberline" feels slight by comparison, or maybe more "normal" for Bernhard. It details the beginning of an investigation into a murder by a provincial officer. The prose is short and choppy, maybe befitting someone of that character.

"Midland at Stilfs" is my favorite in the collection, an absolutely demented single-paragraph fugue folding in a benevolent Englishman, two increasingly deranged brothers locked in a remote estate, their paralyzed sister, and someone named "Roth" who descends into town by crossing the river with all his clothes on and who routinely increases the "number of chickens he keeps inflating with the bicycle pump until they explode." Very much a classic Bernhard story.

"The Weatherproof Cape" is the titular focus of the protagonist, lawyer Enderer, who sees it draped over the being of a man consulting him for advice on how to open a lawsuit against his son and daughter-in-law who have moved him out of his ground-floor apartment to the first floor (because they got married and moved in), then to the second floor (because a child was on the way), then the third floor of the building, an absolutely uninhabitable space, one which everyone will agree is "completely unsuitable for habitation," because a second, and third, and fourth etc. child was on the way, a cape, however, that Enderer is convinced belonged to his uncle who drowned eight years ago. Enderer increasingly becomes absorbed in the man's story such that he is unable to focus on the distraction the cape affords him and accordingly forgets about the cape altogether until the man dashes out of his office suddenly. This one was also very enjoyable to me.

The last story, "Ungenach," is about 30 pages of a notary's increasingly misanthropic ramblings to a mostly taciturn narrator who is selling off the vast estate he has inherited, and then about 40 pages of notes, observations, letters sent and unsent, and miscellany from the narrator's brother leading up to his death. This narrative approach, which resembles to me what Zukofsky called a "raft of stuff," feels very different for Bernhard. It stands out in his work. Some of the book's most acidic, venomous observations and aphorisms appear in this story, but it also feels like an over-long draft of the first and third stories in the collection.

Obviously one is going to like some stories more than others in any short story collection, but ultimately I'm glad I read this. It couldn't come out at a better time; it's a perfectly frigid companion for winter.

[Steven R. Kraaijeveld · Rating 4 out of 5]

"'When we,' your guardian said, 'when we were in Hongar on Corpus Christi that one time,' said Moro, 'are standing on this undoubtedly loveliest of all rising grounds in the Alpine foothills and looking down into such a landscape from such a height, you seem we instantaneously think about everything that is happening in the landscape, that ever happened and that will ever happen there, everything, do you understand, my dear Robert, the entire past and present and future that pertains to this landscape…it is not possible to look down into this landscape in any other way.'" (146)

This collection of early stories (1968-1971) by Thomas Bernhard includes On the Ortler: A Message from Gomagoi, At the Timberline, Midland at Stilfs, The Weatherproof Cape, and Ungenach. You'll find acute psychological observation, obsessive striving, incessant walking, stifling places and people, injustices large and small—in short, classic Bernhardian themes—concentrated in the mountains of Austria.

[M. Sarki · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review can be read here:
https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/th...

[Richard Cho · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book showcases Bernhard's writing before it became the full-fledged Bernhardian. These five stories are written between 1969-1971 (hence, after his first two novels Frost and Gargoyles but before his masterpieces), and they contain themes that will appear in more completed forms in his later novels.

In these stories, the intense focus is on location, the environment and weather that affect his characters (this is true in all of his masterpieces). Mostly cold and isolated mountainous areas that render everything void, that attacks sanity of its inhabitants. Destruction from the force unknown.

As with books that coms to us for the first time decades after the author's death, we should consider this work cautiously, especially if you are not familiar with Bernhard's work.

Bernhardian repetition is crude here, not as sophisticated as that which appears in his later novels. Suicide is always considered by these characters. There is one family member who is seriously ill.

But this human obsession that reaches the level of God... How does Bernhard makes it so envious, although we are fully aware that it is destructive? What does this say about human nature? An obsession that will destroy everything, annihilate everything, especially the self, yet we yearn for it so much.

Pouring onto pages as words what Bernhard was as a character, the style emerges from the author's character, hence the breathlessness of un-paragraphing, the incessant repetition, the path to the destructive sublime that embodies true art, and...

My favorite story here was "Midland at Stilfs" (manifestations of absolute nature)
-----------------
"When you were observing me penetratingly, unrelentingly and penetratingly, said my brother, I was always thinking and when I was always observing you just as penetratingly and unrelentingly, when we were observing each other always unrelentingly and penetratingly with regard to my feats of acrobatic artistry and your scholarly work, each of us was unrelentingly and with an ever-increasing, ever-more ruthless penetrativeness observing what the other was doing and how he was doing it..."

"I would set to work on it and develop it and develop it all the way to the stage of its perfection, which as the same time was the stage of its dissolution, of its disaggregation, he said."

"Everything having to do with human beings and everything they do and try to come up with, he says, is bogus, and he adds that when one considers it thoroughly, all of life itself is bogus."

[Eric Cartier · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's exhilarating as always to be swept into the current of this writer's language, and it's also a relief to step out of it: when I finished reading two of these five stories I exhaled aloud "Goddamn." Bernhard carries his readers into mind-bending zones like no other.

I thought I had read everything that was available in English, so I was thrilled to find this new paperback alongside all of Bernhard's major novels on the shelves at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. Highly recommended to anyone in need of more of his unmistakable voice.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘At the Timberline’ was the standout story of the five
stories collected here.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

"If my existence outlasts my interest in existence, for the remainder of it I shall be as good as dead."

This slender volume constitutes translations of five previously untranslated Bernhard stories, "On the Ortler", "At the Timberline", "Midland at Stilfs", "The Weatherproof Cape", and "Ungenach". These are all earlier stories and reflect Bernhard on the cusp of his delightfully bitter, unbroken phase of novel-length sentences. There are some common themes: walking uphill, the results of the deaths of one's elders, the ambiguity of crime, and so on, all common Bernhardian topics. Likely for the Bernhard completist only, since they will appear disjointed and strange to those unfamiliar with his caustic, single-minded style.

[Terry Pitts · Rating 3 out of 5]

Five stories from 1968-1971 translated from the original German by Douglas Robertson. This is Bernhard in full fine fettle, with his narrators rattling on and complaining endlessly. For me, the gem of the book is “Ungenach,” a story about a young man who has decided to outright refuse his inheritance of a large estate upon the death of his father. His arguments for this are wonderfully circular and self-negating, while the lawyer he visits gives one of the most confusing and hence most delightful rants that I have read.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

lots of walking and talking and talking about walking. Bernhard takes us into the pessimistic Austrian walkers and talkers and thinkers and tells stories of sickness and death and familial betrayal in a style that is uniquely his.