Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Publication
Amsterdam Atlas 2002
User reviews
LibraryThing member byebyelibrary
One of the darkest and strangest and most unforgettable books I have ever read. Kind of a Tuesdays With Morrie for dark geniuses with aspergers.
LibraryThing member alex1234
One of the book descriptions says this is a story of a friendship - I'm not sure I would use that word. Bernhard alternates between the semi-coherent ramblings of the old man under observation and stories about or descriptions of the village in which the action takes place. I don't know if I should
I wanted to put the book down a few times because I had no interest in either of the main characters, but the author was good enough and forced me to keep going. There are also a few passages that are worth remembering, and Bernhard is still good when he deals with the issue of mediocrity and provincialism.
If you are thinking about reading Bernhard, I would recommend The Loser instead.
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have tried to understand what the painter was saying - I did try, but perhaps that isn't the point. I wanted to put the book down a few times because I had no interest in either of the main characters, but the author was good enough and forced me to keep going. There are also a few passages that are worth remembering, and Bernhard is still good when he deals with the issue of mediocrity and provincialism.
If you are thinking about reading Bernhard, I would recommend The Loser instead.
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LibraryThing member fieldnotes
Here is Thomas Bernhard once again offering the “philosophy of the exacerbated bird’s-eye view of impure thought” as it goes “through the nitrogen of the primal condition of the devil,” “pitch[ing] wildness and quiet alternately at the disquiet of others.” His voicebox is the painter,
Strauch’s disdain is breathless. Bernhard ensconces him in an environment, “where vulgarity carries its head as high as royalty. Brutality wanders along like the epitome of gentleness, celebrated, ethical, inimitable.” Strauch deplores the liquor-soaked, “cretins” who surround the rural inn to which he retreated after burning all of his paintings and breaking contact with anyone who might have been in the habit of tolerating him. His brother, a medical doctor, sends an aspiring medical student to observe Strauch’s behavior for thirty days. The book transpires in this implausibly short time period, narrated by the medical student, who quotes Strauch nearly as much as he articulates thoughts of his own. The reflections of the medical student are rapidly contaminated and overrun by the timbre of Strauch’s own inexhaustible venom and while peripheral characters register a few pages worth of speaking, they and the medical student all end up sounding like the painter, which is one of the book’s weak points.
If you had a friend like the painter, you would not often pay attention to what he said. When it resonated with your mood or your conclusions, you might perk up; but by and large you can tune out such a person with ease and discover twenty minutes (or pages) later, that they are oblivious to your level of alertness and disinterested in your reception. Worse, you can pretty much immediately get back into the flow of their discourse because it is predictable in its trajectory and stance. It can be difficult to get traction in this book. When I skim through the parts where I made fewest notes, I find passages that I don’t remember reading. At the same time, the book is peppered with rewardingly humorous passages that are one of the things for which I most enjoy Bernhard: “I can’t remember what I wanted to say, but I know it was something malicious. Often, of all the things you mean to say, that’s all that’s left, the sense that you had it in mind to say something malicious.”
“As soon as it could blow its own nose, a child was deadly to anything it came in touch with.”
“Most of them have never done anything else anyway but load and unload, standing in standing water in their gumboots and knocking in bridge piles.”
“It’s like having to make my way through millennia, just because a couple of moments are after me with big sticks.”
Themes that run throughout Bernhard’s writing are already making regular appearances in this, his first novel. A loathing of Austria, common Austrians and womankind is everywhere present. Characters fixate on suicide and feel beset and undermined by the destructive, crude and inadequate nature of neighbors and nations. Bernhard’s characters refuse to integrate and then punish themselves for it. The acid humor is the only relief that you will be afforded in your progress through his novels.If you have not read Bernhard before, do not start here. Consider starting with “Gargoyles,” his most episodic work that suffers least from repetition, or his memoir, “Gathering Evidence,” which is shattering, beautiful and cruel. As far as I’m concerned, most of his middle period works about creative people whose creativity is blocked, are a bit too painful for anyone who isn’t a literary masochist.
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Strauch, “one of those people . . . who tie tourniquets round the arteries of their thought, but to no effect; who pour themselves out in suicidal word-spate, who hate themselves in truth because the world of their feeling, apprehended as enforced incest, daily smashes them to smithereens.” Get the picture?Strauch’s disdain is breathless. Bernhard ensconces him in an environment, “where vulgarity carries its head as high as royalty. Brutality wanders along like the epitome of gentleness, celebrated, ethical, inimitable.” Strauch deplores the liquor-soaked, “cretins” who surround the rural inn to which he retreated after burning all of his paintings and breaking contact with anyone who might have been in the habit of tolerating him. His brother, a medical doctor, sends an aspiring medical student to observe Strauch’s behavior for thirty days. The book transpires in this implausibly short time period, narrated by the medical student, who quotes Strauch nearly as much as he articulates thoughts of his own. The reflections of the medical student are rapidly contaminated and overrun by the timbre of Strauch’s own inexhaustible venom and while peripheral characters register a few pages worth of speaking, they and the medical student all end up sounding like the painter, which is one of the book’s weak points.
If you had a friend like the painter, you would not often pay attention to what he said. When it resonated with your mood or your conclusions, you might perk up; but by and large you can tune out such a person with ease and discover twenty minutes (or pages) later, that they are oblivious to your level of alertness and disinterested in your reception. Worse, you can pretty much immediately get back into the flow of their discourse because it is predictable in its trajectory and stance. It can be difficult to get traction in this book. When I skim through the parts where I made fewest notes, I find passages that I don’t remember reading. At the same time, the book is peppered with rewardingly humorous passages that are one of the things for which I most enjoy Bernhard: “I can’t remember what I wanted to say, but I know it was something malicious. Often, of all the things you mean to say, that’s all that’s left, the sense that you had it in mind to say something malicious.”
“As soon as it could blow its own nose, a child was deadly to anything it came in touch with.”
“Most of them have never done anything else anyway but load and unload, standing in standing water in their gumboots and knocking in bridge piles.”
“It’s like having to make my way through millennia, just because a couple of moments are after me with big sticks.”
Themes that run throughout Bernhard’s writing are already making regular appearances in this, his first novel. A loathing of Austria, common Austrians and womankind is everywhere present. Characters fixate on suicide and feel beset and undermined by the destructive, crude and inadequate nature of neighbors and nations. Bernhard’s characters refuse to integrate and then punish themselves for it. The acid humor is the only relief that you will be afforded in your progress through his novels.If you have not read Bernhard before, do not start here. Consider starting with “Gargoyles,” his most episodic work that suffers least from repetition, or his memoir, “Gathering Evidence,” which is shattering, beautiful and cruel. As far as I’m concerned, most of his middle period works about creative people whose creativity is blocked, are a bit too painful for anyone who isn’t a literary masochist.
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LibraryThing member JimElkins
Frost, yet another excrescence of Bernhard's imagination. This time it's a student who follows a painter, or rather a man who used to be a painter, in order to see if he is sane. Of course he isn't: that is so immediately obvious that the question becomes--as of the first five pages of the
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book--what kind of imagination the painter possesses. The book offers no relief, no pleasure of slowly dawning insight (even if tha insight is going to reveal psychosis, or suicide, or unrelieved pessimism, or bottomless misanthropy). Reading the book is like lying in pig slurry, and raising yourself every few minutes to wipe yourself, and then lying back down, then rising again. It makes Beckett seem prissy and sterile, and it makes nearly every other author look cowardly, because every other author rushes off to a nice conclusion. Show Less
LibraryThing member thorold
This was Bernhard's first novel, following on from two collections of lyric verse and some musical collaborations with the composer Gerhard Lampersberg, and was really his breakthrough work as a prose writer, bringing him to the attention of the critics and winning him a couple of major prizes and
The narrator is a medical student, who has been given the rather unlikely assignment by his supervisor, the surgeon Strauch, of conducting an extensive undercover observation of Strauch's brother, a painter. The brother has burnt all his paintings, abandoned his life in Vienna, and gone into a Wittgenstein-like retreat in the obscure and impoverished mountain village of Weng, where he is staying in a run-down pub. The narrator tracks the painter down and soon finds himself recruited to go on long walks through the snow with him (Weng is clearly a place where it's always winter and never Christmas) and listen to his increasingly bleak and Bernhardish thoughts about his mental and physical state, the villagers, the landscape, Austria ("...the bordello of Europe..."), the arts, and death by disease, accident, murder and suicide.
It's a little bit looser and less intensively musical than mature Bernhard prose, and it uses unexpectedly conventional layout devices like paragraph breaks(!) and chapters, but you can see where it's headed. There's plenty of the usual scathing and very black humour, doctor-bashing, general misogyny, impatience with dullwittedness, and contempt for Austrian folksiness mingled with pleasure in the oddities of Austrian language. One of the main characters is the Wasenmeister, the person responsible for disposing of animal cadavers in the village (roughly equivalent to "knacker" in English). Not a word you will find in many modern dictionaries! Needless to say, he turns out to be in cahoots with the disreputable landlady of the pub.
Not a book that is likely to encourage many tourists to visit rural Austria, and probably best avoided if you are liable to depression, but otherwise well worth our time, like everything else I've read by Bernhard. And a fascinating glimpse at how he got to his mature style.
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quite a few important enemies (always a mark of success in Bernhard-land). The narrator is a medical student, who has been given the rather unlikely assignment by his supervisor, the surgeon Strauch, of conducting an extensive undercover observation of Strauch's brother, a painter. The brother has burnt all his paintings, abandoned his life in Vienna, and gone into a Wittgenstein-like retreat in the obscure and impoverished mountain village of Weng, where he is staying in a run-down pub. The narrator tracks the painter down and soon finds himself recruited to go on long walks through the snow with him (Weng is clearly a place where it's always winter and never Christmas) and listen to his increasingly bleak and Bernhardish thoughts about his mental and physical state, the villagers, the landscape, Austria ("...the bordello of Europe..."), the arts, and death by disease, accident, murder and suicide.
It's a little bit looser and less intensively musical than mature Bernhard prose, and it uses unexpectedly conventional layout devices like paragraph breaks(!) and chapters, but you can see where it's headed. There's plenty of the usual scathing and very black humour, doctor-bashing, general misogyny, impatience with dullwittedness, and contempt for Austrian folksiness mingled with pleasure in the oddities of Austrian language. One of the main characters is the Wasenmeister, the person responsible for disposing of animal cadavers in the village (roughly equivalent to "knacker" in English). Not a word you will find in many modern dictionaries! Needless to say, he turns out to be in cahoots with the disreputable landlady of the pub.
Not a book that is likely to encourage many tourists to visit rural Austria, and probably best avoided if you are liable to depression, but otherwise well worth our time, like everything else I've read by Bernhard. And a fascinating glimpse at how he got to his mature style.
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LibraryThing member stillatim
I'm not sure what I expected, but it wasn't this: I've read most of Bernhard's later work, and always put this one off. I think I'm glad--this was an amazing book, but I was expecting something easier than Bernhard's usual, not more difficult. The rant form is here in nuce, but broken up, like a
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later Bernhard book smashed into tesserae and scattered before the reader. Allow me to explain the clear with the obscure: it's much more Wittgenstein or Nietzsche, and less Adorno. And I prefer Adorno in every possible way. Show Less
Awards
San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year (Fiction — 2006)
Language
Original language
German
Original publication date
1963
Physical description
310 p.; 21 cm
ISBN
9045004461 / 9789045004464