I had rated this 3 stars up to one hour before finishing the novel and I had to suddenly change that to 4 stars. Similar to the third act turn that takes place in Woodcutters, the prose rattles on as a sort of rant which suddenly takes a very dramatic and surprising turn within just a few pages o...
I picked this up because I'd read Berhard's "The Loser" already and the same friend who had leant it to me suggested I check out another Berhard joint. Part of the reason he interests me is because he is so consistently praised and oohed and ahhed over by (at least what I see of) the current li...
For years I have lived in this state of self-condemnation, self-abnegation and self-mockery, in which ultimately I always have to take refuge in order to save myself.I find it a bit ironic that I’ve been having such a difficult time beginning this review, a review for a book narrated by an aging ...
For twenty years, Konrad has imprisoned himself and his crippled wife in an abandoned lime works where he's conducted odd auditory experiments and prepared to write his masterwork, 'The Sense of Hearing.' As the story begins, he's just blown the head off his wife with the Mannlicher carbine she k...
"Again and again we picture ourselves sitting together with the people we feel drawn to all our lives, precisely these so-called simple people, whom naturally we imagine much differently from the way they truly are, for if we actually sit down with them we see that they aren't the way we've pictu...
They say that the great artist is able to take the personal and - through the glamours of their craft - present it as the universal: certainly the torment called life that afflicts the Painter Strauch in Bernhard's first published novel, Frost, will resonate with certain readers at certain parts;...
Parents and Johannes killed in accident. Caecilia, Amalia, it read. Holding the telegram, I kept a clear head, walked calmly to my study window, and looked down on the Piazza Minerva, where there was not a soul in sight. I had given Gambetti five books that I thought would be useful and necessary...
The landlady called me a “kind gentleman,” and she twice brought me large glasses of slivovitz when she saw me leaning on my shovel, resting. She said: “I would never have thought you were so strong.” I said I was used to physical work. Circumstances had repeatedly led me to perform physical work...
He simply wasn’t the man to adapt himself, against his grain, against the dictates of his character, the word opportune was totally alien, totally inapplicable to anything he could ever think or do, but as for me and my outlook and my ideas and everything, I’d always been an opportunist, Roithame...
As he had his morning spot in the so-called Bordone Room, facing Tintoretto's WhiteBearded Man, on the velvet-covered settee on which yesterday, after an explanation of the so-called Tempest Sonata, he continued his lecture to me on the Art of the Fugue, from before Bach to after Schumann, as he ...
We learn of Rudolph’s sister, whose help he invites, then reviles as malevolent meddling; his “really marvelous” house, which he hates; the suspicious illness he carefully nurses; his ten-year-long attempt to write the perfect opening sentence; and, finally, his escape to the island of Majorca, w...
No one was more surprised than I was that I’d been awarded the Small State Prize, for I hadn’t submitted a single one of my works, I would never had done that, I had no idea that my brother, as he later admitted to me, had handed in Frost at the great entrance to the Ministry of Art and Culture o...