Thomas Bernhard, Three Days

An English translation of "Drei Tage" by Douglas Robertson

From The Philosophical Worldview Artist:

…my first impressions, on my way to register at the elementary school, on the very first day of first grade…my route took me past a butcher’s shop, and on its open doors there were hooks, hammers, knives hanging in rows, all very nicely organized, on the one hand bloody, on the other hand glaringly white and tidy, slaughtering-gun apparatuses…then the sound of the horses, as they quite suddenly slump to the ground, those enormous bellies that are swelling, collapsing, bones, pus, blood…then from the butcher’s a couple of flights of stairs up to the cemetery, a hall for lying in state, a tomb…I still cannot quite recall my first day of school, a pale youth in the hall for lying in state, a cheese-maker’ s son…and from there, my heart pounding, to the classroom…a young schoolmistress.

My grandmother, who always took me with her, by the way—in the morning I would walk through the cemetery on my own, in the afternoon she would go with me into the charnel-houses—would lift me up, say: “Look there’s another woman laid out.” People who were dead and nothing else…And this is of considerable significance for everybody…and one can draw conclusions about everything from it…

Childhood is just one piece of music after another, of course they’re all non-classical pieces. For example: in 1944 in Traunstein I had a rather long walk to school. My grandparents lived [just] outside the city limits, hence four kilometers from the school. And halfway to the school [there was] a thicket, I don’t know what else. And every time I walked past it, a woman would jump out and scream: “I’ll get your grandfather packed off to Dachau yet.”

In 1945 another story, another piece of music, perhaps a twelve-tone composition. A friend of my brother, who was seven years old, I was fourteen, stuck his hand into the barrel of a bazooka, and he was completely blown to bits. The place is called Vachendorf. And I go with my brother to the funeral there on our bicycle. And so I can just barely get my feet past the top tube, and he is sitting on top, in front on the handlebars.[1] Along the way we pick flowers. But halfway to the site of the funeral a young man suddenly jumps out of the woods, pulls my brother and me off the bike, tears up the flowers, and stomps the bike flat—in other words starting with the spokes, then he cuts the handlebars to pieces, then he ruins the mudguards, then he boxes my ears, then he throws my brother into the creek. And it all struck me as so--I don’t know whether he was a Pole or a Czech…it was quite remarkable. And we sat there on the bank of the creek and cried and went back on foot, and so there was no more talk about the funeral. And then when we got home we told this remarkable story. And there’s an entire series of stories just like it. [Read More]

Find Thomas Bernhard on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Thomas Bernhard
• Youthful reading: Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky
• George Steiner on Thomas Bernhard
• Notes on Thomas Bernhard's Correction
• Reading Thomas Bernhard

The Letters of William Gaddis

Paul Griffiths reviews the volume in the TLS

William Gaddis

From Paul Griffiths (TLS):

“Another damned thick, square book.” It is easy to imagine William Gaddis responding thus to the publication of his letters, quoting, as he regularly did in connection with his novels, a remark thrown at Edward Gibbon by a royal duke of the time. One can also guess that such a comment would not in this case have been a cover, as surely it was with his fictional works, for pride in achievement. Gaddis worked for seven years on his first novel, the thousand-page page-turner The Recognitions, which appeared in 1955, when he was thirty-two, and another two decades passed before he published his second, JR, a narrative almost as long, and unbroken. A believer in the “P. E.” (Protestant Ethic), he knew very well what these books represented in terms of hours at the typewriter, and what they required, too, not only of imagination and stamina but also of rage. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• William Gaddis: J R and The Recognitions
• Editing Beckett's Letters: An Interview with Dan Gunn
• Fan Letters: Famous Authors to Famous Authors
• Auster and Coetzee, Here and Now: Letters 2008–2011
• Blanchot and Beckett's Letters

Outside Literature: Lars Iyer on Exodus

Tim Smyth talks to Iyer about his latest novel

Lars Iyer, Exodus

From The Quarterly Conversation:

Since the appearance of his novel, Spurious, in 2011, Lars Iyer has made a challenging and vigorous contribution to our sense of the importance of literature and thought in our vexed cultural moment. The intellectual anguish and inventive bickering of his two UK philosophy professors sees him steer a middle course between Mercier and Camier and Withnail and I. His combination of almost-total bleakness and bracing humour enables him to dip perilously close to despair, only to escape at the last minute.

With the sequel to Spurious, Dogma, Iyer confirmed his importance as part of an “enclave outside literature,” whose work extends the territory outside the contemporary canon to new and challenging distances. This novel extended W.’s and Lars’s itinerary across America, with little more than Plymouth Gin and the word omoi for company. As the humour deepens, so too does the despair, recalling both the Thomas Bernhard of Frost and Mark and Jeremy from Peep Show.

The final instalment of Iyer’s trilogy, Exodus, is the funniest, most hopeful, most despairing, and most gin-soaked episode of the three. Despite the impossibility of true endings, it is a final instalment—and a satisfying one at that. I talked to Lars, via email, over the course of nearly two months, during which we talked about hot tubs, the Bible, endings, and the collapsing borders of literature. [Read the Interview]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Lars Iyer on Max Brod and Franz Kafka
• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Lars Iyer on Blanchot's Vigilance
• Lars Iyer on Literature's Antagonistic Couples
• Extracts from Lars Iyer's Dogma available online
• Lars Iyer talks to Biblioklept
• Lars Iyer on Writing, Reading and Thinking
• Literary Influences on Lars Iyer's Spurious
• Lars Iyer, Spurious

László Krasznahorkai: Similar Writers

Stephen Sparks identifies a number of like-minded artists

László Krasznahorkai

Stephen Sparks (Tin House): 'In March of last year, English-language readers were finally presented with Satantango, the first novel by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the writer Susan Sontag once called “the contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse.” The novel, considered a masterpiece in the author’s native country since its original publication in 1985, adds to his work now available in English, revealing in the process one of the most singular oeuvres in contemporary literature. And, though the time between translations of Krasznahorkai’s novels appears to be shortening (New Directions will publish his Seiobo next spring), readers suffering withdrawal from his bleak, absurdist universe have much to explore. Below is a short, non-exhaustive list of writers, all Mittel-European, who share affinities with Krasznahorkai.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• László Krasznahorkai, War and War
• The Guardian interviews László Krasznahorkai
• László Krasznahorkai, Sátántangó
• Hari Kunzru on Krasznahorkai's Hipster following
• The Mythology of László Krasznahorkai
• László Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann, Animalinside
• Béla Tarr, The Turin Horse

10 Grumpiest Writers in Literary History?

Flavorwire compiles its list of favourites

Thomas Bernhard

From Flavorwire: 'Berhard is a famous ranter, constantly raising his voice against his country, the culture, life, the universe and everything. Upon being presented with an Austrian national award in 1968, Berhard shrugged, “Everything is ridiculous, when one thinks of Death,” causing some minor public outrage. In his memoir, he wrote, ”I did not want to be anything, and naturally I did not want to turn myself into a mere profession: all I ever wanted was to be myself.” That, at least, he was in spades.'

Also included among the list are Norman Mailer, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, Vladimir Nabokov, and Patricia Highsmith. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Thomas Bernhard
• Patricia Highsmith's Greenwich Village
• Brian Boyd, Stalking Nabokov
• Dorothy Parker Telegram

Notes on Thomas Bernhard's Correction

Edwin Turner presents his reflections on Bernhard's novel

Thomas Bernhard

Edwin Turner (Biblioklept) presents 'Three Notes on Thomas Bernhard’s Novel Correction (Plot, Prose, and a Riff)'. Here is a snippet:

Correction reminded me often of Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

Correction reminded me often of W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, although Correction obviously came first, and Sebald clearly cited Bernhard as an influence.

At some of its rantier points, Correction reminded me of Notes from Underground. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Thomas Bernhard
• Thomas Bernhard: Graphic Essay
• Thomas Bernhard: Playing cards
• Reading Thomas Bernhard

Samuel Frederick, Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter

Jen Craig assesses a new literary study

Jen Craig (Being in Lieu):

It is appropriate that I should first write about Samuel Frederick’s new book, Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter, on this blog, which itself is nothing but a collection of many digressive acts. In fact, I'll start with one: The Oxford English Dictionary credits Chaucer with being the first to use the term in English, in the sense of ‘[d]eparture or deviation from the subject in discourse or writing’: ‘It were a long disgression Fro my matere’, Troilus & Criseyde i. 87 (143). Almost from the very beginning of vernacular English fiction, then, the digressive possibility is noted and taken up in the very same breath: ah, the delight of breaking the fine crystal of one narrative illusion just as you are spinning the glass of another; the joy of fashioning a story from nothing more than a narrative voice. Of course digression is not exclusive to English and, as Frederick points out, neither it is confined to any particular literary period. In his Introduction, in an evocation of a small shuffling (digressive) dance, he describes the way his study has been organised to cover the work of three writers in their three distinct but not sequentially arranged moments in Germanic language literary history. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Thomas Bernhard
• Robert Walser, The Walk
• Robert Walser, The Microscripts
• Robert Walser, Selected Stories

Teju Cole on Sebald's Poetry

A review in the New Yorker

W. G. Sebald

Teju Cole, author of Open City, looks over W. G. Sebald's poetry: 'Throughout his career, W. G. Sebald wrote poems that were strikingly similar to his prose. His tone, in both genres, was always understated but possessed of a mournful grandeur. To this he added a willful blurring of literary boundaries and, in fact, almost all his writing, and not just the poetry and prose, comprised history, memoir, biography, autobiography, art criticism, scholarly arcana, and invention. This expert mixing of forms owed a great deal to his reading of the seventeenth-century melancholics Robert Burton and Thomas Browne, and Sebald’s looping sentences were an intentional homage to nineteenth-century German-language writers like Adalbert Stifter and Gottfried Keller. But so strongly has the style come to be associated with Sebald’s own work that even books that preceded his, such as those by Robert Walser and Thomas Bernhard, can seem, from our perspective as readers of English translations, simply “Sebaldian.”' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: W. G. Sebald
• Why You Should Be Reading W. G. Sebald
• W. G. Sebald, Across Land and Water
• W. G. Sebald as Academic

Thomas Bernhard: Graphic Essay

Espen Terjesen's beautifully drawn essay on Bernhard's writing

I'm very excited to share a beautiful and concise 'comic essay' on the work of Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. The essay was written, drawn and designed by Espen Terjesen, an illustrator, cartoonist, pixel artist, teacher/lecturer and writer working in Bergen, Norway. In addition to the original essay, Terjesen has also been kind enough to provide A Piece of Monologue with an English translation.

Terjesen's work not only presents themes from Bernhard's writing with striking, icy accompaniments, but offers a playful approach to the traditional academic essay. By combining elements of literary criticism with the graphic novel, Terjesen's reading of Bernhard becomes, in itself, a creative act. What we are left with is something both thought-provoking and accessible.

To see the strip in its original format, please find links to Terjesen's essay at the bottom of this post. In its complete form, the essay includes a number of footnotes and recommended reading. You can click any of the images to enlarge them. Enjoy!

The Essay

Page 1
Title: Refutations / The prose of Thomas Bernhard / By Espen Terjesen

Panel 1: An abandoned lime works. / An intellectual. / A disabled woman. / A murder.

Panel 2: A visitor tries to clear up the circumstances surrounding the murder. He collects gossip and rumours in the local tavern, Laska...

Panel 3: The Lime Works (1975) is in many ways a typical Bernhard text...

Panel 4: The narrator and the text's fictitious writer, a nameless insurance salesman, meticulously repeats the reports he gets from his informants, Fro and Wieser...

Panel 5: ...but the information is usually second- to fifth-hand...

Panel 6: The Lime Works seems to linger on in a state of probability and uncertainty. The text is abound with narrators and readers...

Panel 7: ...who construct and reconstruct subjective and incompatible worlds...

Panel 8: Where modernist prose portrays different "psychologies"...

Panel 9: ...and how these face (the same) world...

Page 2
Panel 1: ... Bernhard's prose seems to portray a narrative form of "the whispering game". / ...Author1 creates Text1 (and World1). Reader1 reconstructs World1 - and becomes, therefore, the creator of World2 etc.

Panel 2: [figure demonstrating this process]

Panel 3: The nameless, unreliable insurance salesman is the last in a long line of narrators - and our only entry into the chinese boxes that is The Lime Works... Still, he does not make any attempts in sorting or verifying the information (gossip?) he receives...

Panel 4: With that, the text raises ontological questions: what is literary truth? ...

Panel 5: ... what is the nature of fiction?; what constitutes a world? ...

Panel 6: ... The hypothesis works as a poetic trope in the works of authors like Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, and André Gide. Best known is perhaps Proust's expansive hypotheses in In Search of Lost Time ...

Panel 7: ... Bernhard's "answer" is contradictions and refutations ... / There's no longer any "reality" that can verify the hypotheses...

Panel 8: ... Reality is nothing but a composition of ...

Panel 9: ... interpretations and fictions...

Page 3
Panel 1: ... Hypothetical thinking's inherent defects, weaknesses and inaccuracies become an obsession for Roithamer - an architect based on Ludwig Wittgenstein - in Bernhard's Corrections (1975)...

Panel 2: ... He corrects his thoughts until there's only one logical conclusion left...

Panel 3: ... to negate his own existence...

Panel 4: ... Is it at all possible to write truthfully? ... / ... The Lime Works and Correction problematize literary truth-searching in, at least, two ways: 1) by using exceedingly indirect and complicated narrative techniques - which makes first-hand information an impossibility...

 
Panel 5: ... 2) by portraying isolation, resignation and defeat - how persons positively obsessed with truth ...

Panel 6: ... and perfection...

Panel 7: ... go...

Panel 8: ... under...

Esper Terjesen: About the Strip

While working at the University of Bergen, I started thinking about combining my interest in literature and drawing. It was only a few years later, though, that I sat down to draw a graphic essay on Thomas Bernhard, my favourite author. My aim was, first and foremost, to develop a visual language that would suit future essays on academic topics. This essay was, therefore, improvised on the spot. I didn't plan or write anything in advance. I just followed my own train of thoughts while drawing. Needless to say, the result is somewhat unfocused, but I'm still happy with the overall mood and feel of the essay.

When it comes to the contents itself: To me, a lot of Thomas Bernhard Criticism seems to be founded on realistic-mimetic and psychological theories (often of a biographic-affirmative nature) and the idea that Bernhard is a modernist (along the lines of authors like Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Marcel Proust). I would argue that it makes more sense to associate Bernhard with postmodern literature and writers. Modernist literature seems, to me, at least, to raise epistemological questions (what can we know?). We are presented with different "psychologies", and how these view and/or meet the (same) world. Postmodern literature, on the other hand, raises ontological questions (what constitutes a world?). It deals with literary truth (is it at all possible?), the nature of fiction, and how (fictional) worlds relate.

One of the most important literary tropes in Bernhard's prose, is "refutation". Where Proust writes extensive hypotheses, Bernhard's prose seems to consist of nothing but refutations. This is perhaps best viewed in Bernhard's Das Kalkwerk and Korrektur, which I discuss in the essay. The former having up to five levels of narration, muddling up the narrative. The latter describing how an architect "corrects" and adjusts his philosophy until the only logical conclusion is to negate his own soul.

Website

You can see the complete essay, along with photographs of the project's development, on Esper Terjesen's website.

Completed essay:

• Thomas Bernhard, Comic Essay, page 1.
• Thomas Bernhard, Comic Essay, page 2.
• Thomas Bernhard, Comic Essay, page 3.

Development:

• On the Drawing Board (1)
• On the Drawing Board (2)

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Thomas Bernhard

Gehen (Walking): An Homage to Thomas Bernhard

A short film uploaded by DB Projections

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Thomas Bernhard

Thomas Bernhard: Playing cards

An extract from Amras

Thomas Bernhard

From Thomas Bernhard's Amras, translated by Peter Jansen: 'Playing cards is a diversion to me, the many different possibilities of the game, the finest human game, it affords me peace, even if it is a peace that is dangerous in the long run.'

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Thomas Bernhard

All Things Considered: Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

'[The Loser is] obsessing unflinchingly about the things that have always obsessed me'

Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

Claire Messud reviews Thomas Bernhard's novel The Loser in a 2007 edition of NPR's All Things Considered: 'I picked up Wittgenstein's Nephew by chance in the American Library in Paris, early in '99, and read it in an afternoon, a mesmerized afternoon in which I ought to have been writing fiction, but could not stop myself from reading. / Then I picked up The Loser, and was not only mesmerized, and horrified, but felt, also, profoundly spoken to: here was a book — a ranting monologue, more naturally than a novel — obsessing unflinchingly about the things that have always obsessed me. About art, and ambition, and failure, and delusion, and death. / It is a book about anger. A book without paragraphs, which in its very form enacts anger. A book prone to wildly long sentences, preposterously violent judgments and enraging constructions. A deeply musical novel, about music — about Glenn Gould, or a fictional Glenn Gould, with all the structural complexity of The Goldberg Variations, to which allusions are repeatedly made. The Loser is willfully oppressive and agonizing to read, hilarious and awful by turns. And, above all, it couldn't care less about the reader.' [Listen]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Thomas Bernhard

On Philosophical Novels

From Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky to Sartre and Bernhard

Leo Tolstoy reading, pencil portrait by Ilya Repin (1891)

Jennie Erdal writes a survey of the philosophical novel in the Financial Times, and Geoff Dyer lists five examples of memorable philosophical fiction:

At St Andrews University in the early 1970s, philosophy was still a required subject for entry into an honours course. To leave the way clear for reading modern languages, I decided that the requirement would best be dispatched in my first year. Before I knew it, I was hooked and ended up dropping one of the languages in favour of a joint degree in moral philosophy and Russian. For me it seemed the dream ticket. Russian literature was awash with existential difficulties and moral disorder, from the problem of free will in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880) to the meaning of life itself in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) – not to mention all the ungovernable passions, suicide, murder and suffering humanity encountered along the way. Philosophy on the other hand, with its categorical imperatives and systematic approach to concepts of right and wrong, would provide a disciplined moral analysis. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Can Literature be Philosophical?
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Poor Folk
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• Tolstoy: The Greatest Writer of all Time?
• 'Accursed Questions': Translating Russian Literature
• Byatt on Dostoyevsky and Execution
• Dostoyevsky on Politics and Personal Vanity
• Dostoyevsky: A Writer In His Time

That Other Word: Episode 2

A free online podcast discussing literature and translation

An announcement from That Other Word:

That Other Word is a podcast run jointly by Daniel Medin (Center for Writers and Translators, Paris) and Scott Esposito (Center for the Art of Translation, San Francisco).

Each episode features a discussion between Daniel and Scott on recent noteworthy literature in translation, and then an in-depth interview with writers, translators, editors, and publishers. The podcast hopes to celebrate and explore various and under-appreciated aspects of translation, not only into and out of English, but other languages as well.

In this episode, Scott Esposito eagerly anticipates the Dirty War in Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets, and Daniel Medin shares a delightful description of a freeloader from Nescio’s Amsterdam Stories. They discuss Daniel Sada’s Almost Never and the general robustness of contemporary Mexican fiction, attempt to explain why reading Can Xue’s Vertical Motion is like running downhill in the dark, then hesitate over whether to call Daniel Levin Becker’s Many Subtle Channels a memoir or a work of criticism, but agree that it is about Oulipo and very candid.

Daniel Medin then speaks to Petra Hardt, head of the rights department at Suhrkamp Verlag and author of Rights: Buying. Protecting. Selling. Suhrkamp is one of the most prestigious presses in Germany and in Europe, and since its founding in 1950 has published not only many of the greatest German-language writers of the twentieth century — among them Paul Celan, Theodor W. Adorno, and Thomas Bernhard — but foreign authors as well, including Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, and Julio Cortázar. In a series of wonderfully engaging anecdotes, Petra describes her work in rights and foreign rights, how that work is changing in the digital age, and why her book is intended for new presses in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.

That Other Word is available on iTunes (along with the Center for the Art of Translation’s other audio programs) here. Episode 1 has gone over very well and we’re hoping to reach even more listeners this time. We’ll be promoting the podcast throughout this next week via Facebook and Twitter, and we hope you’ll help us spread the word. (And in return, just give us a shout if you’d like us to help spread the word about other related projects!)

In the meantime, happy listening, and stay tuned for episode 3, airing next month and featuring an interview with Benjamin Moser, translator and author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector.

Podcast

Listen to Episode 2 on That Other Word website.

Links

The American University of Paris: Center for Writers and Translators
Center for Writers and Translators: Facebook
Center for Writers and Translators: Twitter

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• That Other Word: Free Literature Podcast
• Praise for The Cahiers Series
• László Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann, Animalinside
• Sylph Editions at Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011
• George Craig, Writing Beckett's Letters

Reading Thomas Bernhard

Thomas Bernhard,
Gathering Evidence including My Prizes

What is the secret behind Bernhard's new popularity?

With the new Vintage reissue of Thomas Bernhard's autobiographical pieces, Gathering Evidence and My Prizes, Sam Allingham explores why the writer has garnered new public attention: 'How did such an unpleasant author fashion such a stunning coup? Is it because he isn’t as unpleasant as everyone says he is? What if all this talk about the Bernhard’s “blood-sport” amounts to a colossal mis-reading of the entire canon, a mis-reading which says more about the readership than it does about Bernhard?' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Thomas Bernhard
• Who is Thomas Bernhard?
• George Steiner on Thomas Bernhard

Thomas Bernhard, My Prizes (Notting Hill Editions)

Frances Hill talks about a new edition of Bernhard's autobiographical work

Notting Hill Editions publishes an English translation of Thomas Bernhard's My Prizes (via Stephen Mitchelmore).

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Thomas Bernhard

Thomas Bernhard, 'Burst into Flames'

English translation of Thomas Bernhard short story

Christiaan Tonnis, 'Thomas Bernhard #1', pencil and coloured pencils on paper, 1985

The website The Philosophical Worldview Artist has posted a translation of Thomas Bernhard's 'In Flammen aufgegangen. Reisebericht an einen einstigen Freund'. The piece has been translated as 'Burst into Flames. A Travel Journal to a Former Friend', and you can read it by following the link [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Thomas Bernhard

Modernism Then and Now

A conversation published in 3:AM Magazine

In 3:AM Magazine, David Winters and Anthony Brown discuss modernism, then and now [Read More]

Lars Iyer on Literature's Antagonistic Couples

Lars Iyer picks his favourite literary 'frenemies'

Ian McKellen and Roger Rees as Estragon and Vladimir in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Photo by Sasha Gusov

Lars Iyer, author of Spurious, Dogma and two books on Maurice Blanchot, names his favourite literary 'frenemies'. He choice picks a number of classic antagonistic couples from the works of Samuel Beckett, Cervantes, Thomas Bernhard, D. H. Lawrence, J. G. Ballard, Thomas Mann, Patricia Highsmith, and Saul Bellow, to name just a few. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Extracts from Lars Iyer's Dogma available online
• Writers: J. G. Ballard
• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Writers: Thomas Bernhard
• Lars Iyer talks to Biblioklept
• Lars Iyer on Writing, Reading and Thinking
• Literary Influences on Lars Iyer's Spurious
• Lars Iyer, Spurious

Douglas Glover on Thomas Bernhard's The Loser

An analysis of Bernhard's novel

Thomas Bernhard

A big thank you to Ready Steady Book for drawing my attention to Douglas Glover's recent piece on Thomas Bernhard's The Loser: 'Thomas Bernhard is dead. He had a terrible life, at least the early part. He was born in Holland where his Austrian mother had fled to escape the shame of her unwanted pregnancy. He never knew his father who died far away and in obscurity (and obscure circumstances). His mother mistreated him because of the shame he represented. Back in Austria he wanted to be an opera singer and studied music but caught a cold working at a menial job to make ends meet; the cold turned into tuberculosis. He was hospitalized repeatedly, his treatment was bungled, he was given up for dead, and survived just to prove how stupid his doctors were. Since opera-singing was out, he became a writer. He became a famous writer of deadpan, mordant, hilarious, difficult (modernist) novels and plays that often portray depressed characters with lung diseases.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Thomas Bernhard
• Thomas Bernhard on self-discipline
• Thomas Bernhard on Perfection and Failure
• Glenn Gould and Beethoven's Tempest Sonata