Thomas Bernhard / The Art of Extinction

 

The Art of Extinction

By Ruth Franklin

December 17, 2006

In 1988, to commemorate Austria’s annexation by Adolf Hitler fifty years earlier, a new play was commissioned from Thomas Bernhard. The author of eleven novels and more than twenty plays, Bernhard had a well-deserved reputation as the country’s most provocative postwar writer: he spent his career alternately mocking and mourning Austria’s Nazi legacy, which, with typical bluntness, he once represented as a pile of manure on the stage. At first, he declined to participate in the commemoration, saying with caustic humor that a more appropriate gesture would be for all the shops once owned by Jews to display signs reading “Judenfrei.” But the author of plays like “The German Lunch Table,” in which family members gathered for a meal discover Nazis in their soup, could not resist such a rich opportunity to needle Austria’s political and cultural élite. “All my life I have been a trouble-maker,” he once wrote. “I am not the sort of person who leaves others in peace.”

 

Fleur Jaeggy

The Single Most Pristine Certainty: Fleur Jaeggy, Thomas Bernhard, and the Fact of Death

October 3, 2019   •   By Sophie Madeline Dess

WE ARE TOLD that novels are meant to teach us something. It’s as if the objective goals in life can be projected outward in the imagination, and novels are there to help us discern our trajectory through this projection. Each character’s choice marks the carving of a particular path, by which we might judge our own. There are some out there (Malcolm Cowley, among others) who believe that even an author’s choice to use a “hard” word as opposed to an “easy” word is an inherently moral decision — one that, we can assume — impacts the reader’s engagement with the text on moral terms (whatever those might be). It is tired news now to note that even when novels are not explicitly instructional, they can still be read as guides, with subtle ethical or behavioral insinuations. One can walk away from Madame Bovary — a novel in which moral and aesthetic tropes are continuously undermined — still having “learned” something: do not — you impressionable fool! — be brainwashed by popular, romantic novels, lest you run the risk of becoming the vulnerable, reckless, impulsive, naïve eponymous Emma.

The Loser / Thomas Bernhard's Stream-of Consciousness Novel About Glenn Gould

Thomas Bernhard

The Loser: Thomas Bernhard's Stream-of 
Consciousness Novel About Glenn Gould
by Ted Gioia

In any contest to pick the most vitriolic novelist of the 
20th Century, Thomas Bernhard makes the short list of 
leading candidates.   His pugnacious and acerbic manner 
is now known worldwide, but the closer one gets to 
Vienna and Salzburg, where he lived
for so many years, the greater the
antipathy—indeed, no award-winning
author of the modern era is less be-
loved in his homeland than Bernhard.
There he is known as a nestbesch-
mutzer—a German word, with no
English equivalent, signifying some-
one who befouls his own nest. 

Thomas Bernhard / Prose / Review

Classics corner

Prose by Thomas Bernhard — review

Bernhard's neuroticism and his loathing of the everyday are palpable in these newly translated short stories

Mina Holland

Sunday 2 January 2011

T

he neuroticism and cruelty on display in these seven newly translated short stories leave you short of breath but entirely absorbed – or, more accurately, entrapped. The theme of imprisonment runs through the collection, and Thomas Bernhard forces us to confront his characters' sense of confinement with dizzying, claustrophobic whirls of syntax. We too feel the craze-inducing "sleeplessness" (the word hypnotically repeated throughout the narrative) of the new tutor in "Two Tutors", and grasp the pain of Georg's deformity in "The Crime of an Innsbruck Shopkeeper's Son": "Every morning he woke up in the firmly locked cell of a new age-old day." What translator Martin Chalmers describes as Bernhard's "verbal logjam" evokes madness and suffering to the extent that we experience them ourselves.

The stories are preoccupied with mental illness and a sense of disappointment at the world. Bernhard's loathing of the everyday is palpable. Vienna is viciously referred to as a "cemetery" with "silent megalomania". The city is busier but no less isolating than jail, physically imprisoning its inhabitants and mirroring their mental states. Rural Austria doesn't fare any better; the narrator in "Jauregg" spits blood about a small mining community: "general exhaustion prevails and a general will to nothing." And while one tale, "Is it a comedy? Is it a tragedy?", is specifically about the theatre, thespian imagery is used throughout the collection to convey the crudeness of modern life, "a repulsive operetta".

In theme and style, Prose, which was originally published in 1967, closely echoes Bernard novels such as Old Masters and Concrete. It provides an excellent introduction to his work, or a satisfying reading experience in itself for those who like angst in small doses.

THE GUARDIAN