Prose

Local Description

The sublimely cantankerous and ostensibly misanthropic novels of Thomas Bernhard are not nearly as well known in English as they deserve to be. With their indirect narratives, looping structure, claustrophobic pacing and delectably excoriating sentences, Bernhard presents his characters’ psychological ruin as evidence of the ultimately ludicrous and harmful nature of all human thought and aspiration. After a while, though, you begin to realise there is even something strangely compassionate in these attempts to exhaust misery in words, and the books can be very funny, too. The Loser is my favourite of Bernhard’s novels; Correction the most devastating. I have just read The Lime Works, in which, by amassing hearsay from various, often conflicting, sources, an insurance salesman recounts the fate of a man who withdraws into isolation (which he also inflicts upon his crippled wife) in order to research and write a book on the sense of hearing. Due to incapacitating perfectionism coupled with a fatal atrophy of his mental and physical resources, he, of course, never even begins to write, and instead both slowly and quickly destroys both his wife and himself.  Better-known in English than Bernhard are writers who have been influenced by him: W.G. Sebald and the Tim Parks of Destiny spring to mind. - Thomas

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Description

"His manner of speaking, like that of all the subordinated, excluded, was awkward, like a body full of wounds, into which at any time anyone can strew salt, yet so insistent, that it is painful to listen to him," from The Carpenter

The Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is acknowledged as among the major writers of our time. The seven stories in this collection capture Bernhard's distinct darkly comic voice and vision--often compared to Kafka and Musil--commenting on a corrupted world.

First published in German in 1967, these stories were written at the same time as Bernhard's early novels Frost, Gargoyles, and The Lime Works, and they display the same obsessions, restlessness, and disarming mastery of language. Martin Chalmer's outstanding translation, which renders the work in English for the first time, captures the essential personality of the work. The narrators of these stories lack the strength to do anything but listen and then write, the reader in turn becoming a captive listener, deciphering the traps laid by memory--and the mere words, the neverending words with which we try to pin it down. Words that are always close to driving the narrator crazy, but yet, as Bernhard writes "not completely crazy."

"Bernhard's glorious talent for bleak existential monologues is second only to Beckett's, and seems to have sprung up fully mature in his mesmerizing debut."--From Publishers Weekly, on Frost

"The feeling grows that Thomas Bernhard is the most original, concentrated novelist writing in German. His connections . . . with the great constellation of Kafka, Musil, and Broch become ever clearer." --George Steiner, Times Literary Supplement, on Gargoyles

Reviews

"His manner of speaking, like that of all the subordinated, excluded, was awkward, like a body full of wounds, into which at any time anyone can strew salt, yet so insistent, that it is painful to listen to him." - from "The Carpenter"

"Bernhard's glorious talent for bleak existential monologues is second only to Beckett's, and seems to have sprung up fully mature in his mesmerizing debut." - Publishers Weekly, on Frost.

"The feeling grows that Thomas Bernhard is the most original, concentrated novelist writing in German. His connections... with the great constellation of Kafka, Musil and Broch become ever clearer." - George Steiner, Times Literary Supplement, on Gargoyles.

"What is extraordinary about Bernhard is that his relentless pessimism never seems open to ridicule; his world is so powerfully imagined that it can seem to surround you like little else in literature." - New Yorker

Author description

Thomas Bernhard grew up in Salzburg and Vienna, where he studied music. In 1957 he began a second career as a playwright, poet and novelist. He went on to win many of the most prestigious literary awards of Europe.

Martin Chalmers is a translator and editor whose translations include works by Hubert Fichte, Ernst Weiss, Herta Mueller, Alexander Kluge, Emine Sevgi Oezdamar and Erich Hackl.