Anyone else a Thomas Bernhard fan?

[gveranon]

paeng, I'd looked at www.thomasbernhard.org before, but not recently. Looking at it again, I see that it has a link to the same interview that was published in Harper's Magazine this month, but the links goes to http://www.signandsight.com/features/1090.html, where the interview was first published in English. This is a much longer version than the version in Harper's. Harper's cut it severely and even rearranged some of Bernhard's answers to make them go under different questions, without saying that they had done so. So forget about Harper's and click the link above if you want to read the interview.

I said that I pitied the poor, put-upon interviewer, but the full version of the interview leaves a different impression. Except for the initial business about continuing to read the newspaper (which was probably meant humorously), Bernhard is quite cooperative and is only rude to the interviewer when he asks stupid questions.

Thanks for sending me back to the Bernhard website. Otherwise I'd have missed the full version of the interview.

[Patrick Mullins]

i'll second what gveranon had to say regarding the harper's reprint. on the whole, thomas bernhard's interviews via thomas bernhard.org suggest a much more sensitive and humorous perspective than i expected to find. on the whole, the site provides a lot of perspective on the man. i am now excited(or as close as i can get to that state) to re read some of his works. much thanks to paeng for posting this link.

[gveranon]

Exterior views of Thomas Bernhard's house, with eerie music:

YouTube - Thomas Bernhard's House

An article from The Believer about Thomas Bernhard's house, the man himself, and his work:
http://www.believermag.com/issues/20...article_taylor

[Cyril Tourneur]

in some earlier post Bernhard's The Loser was mentioned, in which he declares his admiration for Glenn Gould; below is a link where you can download Gould's Goldberg Variations of 1981 (in my opinion the best recording of Bach)

http://harrysholodeck.blogspot.com/2007/05/glenn.html

http://youtube.com/watch?v=g7LWANJFHEs

[Bleak&Icy]

Has anybody read Bernhard's novella Yes? A lovely edition is available from University of Chicago Press. This book contains the most magnificently cruel and grotesque final passage I have encountered in a work of fiction . I would hate to spoil the ending by quoting it to you, but...

"Two days later, when I walked over to the totally abandoned, not yet half-finished and already dilapidated, house in the water-logged meadow, it occurred to me that on one of our walks in the larch-wood I had said to the Persian woman that so many young people nowadays killed themselves, and that the society in which those young people were compelled to exist was unable to understand why, and that, quite out of the blue and in fact in my tactless way, I asked the Persian woman if she would kill herself one day. Upon which she only laughed and said Yes."

Genius!

Incidentally, Bernhard perfected the technique of repetition. Compare the extended monologues of Bernhard's neurotic narrators to the following Ligotti tales: "The Bungalow House," "Teatro Grottesco," "Severini," "Gas Station Carnivals" and "The Clown Puppet." The repetition of certain key phrases, not dissimilar to the mnemonic repetition of phrases in Homer, creates an hypnotic effect, but unlike Homer, Bernhard and Ligotti employ the device to trap the reader inside the skull of a protagonist whose psyche is diseased.

[gveranon]

I read Yes about a year ago. The passage you quoted from the end of the novel is even more powerful in context. After reading pages and pages of Bernhard's relentless, driving prose, it is breathtaking to be suddenly brought up short with that final Yes. And of course that Yes is a negative affirmation: it drops the bottom out.

Thomas Ligotti is brilliant at weaving traces of Bernhard's prose style in with his own, while retaining his own distinctive voice. The first paragraph of "The Clown Puppet" is close to being simply a Bernhard pastiche, but in many passages of "The Shadow, the Darkness," "The Bungalow House," and "Gas Station Carnivals," the Ligottian style and the Bernhardian style are woven together so closely that it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins -- and the overall vision is completely Ligottian. For me, a big fan of both authors, this is very, very effective.

[paeng]

I just saw a copy of his first novel Frost available locally, but it's hardcover and sold at regular price. Is it one of his best?

[Cyril Tourneur]

Having read most of Bernhard's prose, I'd say that Frost is a typical early work;the clear line, the chirurgical precision is missing which is so typical for his latter books like Auslöschung or Holzfällen; sometimes you have the feeling that this is not Bernhard because his typical tone is just hinted at. Below are some favorites of mine : Holzfällen, Untergeher,Wittgenstein,Untergeher,Ja,Korrektur, Alte Meister

All in all I would recommend you to read some one of these first so you won't spoil your first encounter with him

[gveranon]

I haven’t read Frost yet, so I’ll have to defer to Cyril Tourneur on this. I did look at the brief description of Frost at Amazon.com and it sounds terrific, like something I ought to read immediately. It sounds very Bernhardian, almost like the essence of Bernhard right there, but as C. T. said, the style and form of his earlier work isn’t quite the style and form that he perfected later. I have read the novella “Amras,” which was published the year after Frost, and I found it to be powerful and harrowing and unlike anything else I’ve ever read except other Bernhard books, but it didn’t seem fully formed compared to his later works.

For what it’s worth, I’ll give my views of the ones I’ve read. I think my views may differ a little bit from C. T.’s! I’ll give the titles in English because unfortunately I can’t read German (which according to Bernhard means I can’t read him at all, so why the hell am I even bothering?)

Correction is considered by many to be his masterpiece, and it may be, but it isn’t my favorite. It is brilliant, dense, and intense, but in my opinion too long; the impact for me got dissipated in length and tedium.

Extinction is as long as Correction, but I loved it all the way through.

Concrete is much shorter; it was the first one I read and still one of my favorites; this is the book that started my Bernhard obsession.

Yes is also short and excellent (but you already know the ending, don’t you?).

Cutting Timber and Wittgenstein’s Nephew are very good, but not quite as good as some of the others, in my opinion.

The Loser and Old Masters are both excellent examples of the mature Bernhard, and both very philosophical, by which I mean that the ideas-to-fiction ratio is even more tilted toward “ideas” than in the other novels.

The Voice Imitator is a collection of brief sketches, almost in the style of news reports, dark and grotesque but too abbreviated, I think; it didn’t leave much of an impression on me.

Gathering Evidence, his memoir, is one of the best thing he ever wrote. His early life was very hard and eventful (dire poverty, erudite anarchist grandfather, Nazis, Allied bombings in WWII, working in a store in a slum, being in a horrifying hospital and then a sanatarium after being stricken by a nearly-fatal lung ailment, gradual discovery of artistic vocation, etc.) This memoir isn’t written in the full-on, rhythmic, repetitive style of his novels, which I love so much, but it is truly a great book. It gives some idea of how he turned out to be the hard-core, uncompromising man and writer that he was.

Sorry for rambling on at such length. I get overly enthusiastic on the subject of Bernhard.

[Dark Deceiver]

I'm a bit of a new-comer to Bernhard myself so in hindsight I should probably have consulted the views collected in this thread before going ahead and buying some of his work . However, having read the views expressed on Amazon, I kind of thought that 'The Lime Works' sounded suitably intriguing so I went ahead and bought that one as a starter. I just wanted to know what everyone else here thought about this particular book as an example of his work ( god I hope its positive - it arrived yesterday!)