The German List
7 total works
art. With characteristically acerbic wit, Bernhard exposes the pretensions and aspirations of humanity in a novel at once pessimistic and strangely exhilarating.
"Bernhard's . . . most enjoyable novel."--Robert Craft, New York Review of Books.
"Bernhard is one of the masters of contemporary European fiction."--George Steiner
One night in the middle of winter, as deep snow covers the mountains and forests, a doctor is crossing the ridge in Austria from Traich to Föding to see a patient. He stumbles over a body in the darkness and fears it is a corpse. But it’s not a corpse at all. In fact, it’s wooden-legged Victor Halfwit, collapsed, but still very much alive. So begins this simultaneously absurd and tragic tale by celebrated Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet Thomas Bernhard. Combining the darkly comic voice and vision of Bernhard with the lush and beautiful collages of Indian designer Sunandini Banerjee, Victor Halfwit is a unique and collectible artist’s book. Illustrated in color throughout, this edition imaginatively presents Bernhard’s fable in a distinctive and unconventional style. It is the perfect gift book that will be cherished by fans of Bernhard’s other works and will inspire new interest among visual artists.
Bernhard’s work can seem off-putting on first acquaintance, as he suffers no fools and offers no hand to assist the unwary reader. But those who make the effort to engage with Bernhard on his own uncompromising terms will discover a writer with powerful comic gifts, penetrating insight into the failings and delusions of modern life, and an unstinting desire to tell the whole, unvarnished, unwelcome truth. Start here, readers; the rewards are great.
For all of these reasons, Bernhard's Collected Poems, translated into English for the first time by James Reidel, is a key to understanding Bernhard's irascible black comedy found in virtually all of his writings even down to his last will and testament. There is much to be found in these pages for Bernhard fans of every stripe.
Save Yourself if You Can is a collection of six plays that span the entirety of Thomas Bernhard’s career as a dramatist. The plays collected in this long-awaited addition to Bernhard’s oeuvre in English—The Ignoramus and the Madman, The Celebrities, Immanuel Kant, The Goal Attained, Simply Complicated, and Elizabeth II—traverse somber lyricism and misanthropy to biting satire and glorious slapstick. They explore themes that will be familiar to longtime readers of Bernhardt, but here they are presented in a subtly different register, attuned to the needs of the stage.
“The cold increases with the clarity,” said Thomas Bernhard while accepting a major literary prize in 1965. That clarity was the postwar realization that the West’s last remaining cultural reference points were being swept away by the ever-greater commodification of humankind. Collecting five stylistically transitional tales by Bernhard, all of which take place in sites of extreme cold, this volume extends that bleak vision of the master Austrian storyteller.
In “Ungenach,” the reluctant heir of an enormous estate chooses to give away his legacy to an assortment of oddballs as he discovers the past of his older brother, who was murdered during a career in futile colonialist philanthropy. In “The Weatherproof Cape,” a lawyer tries to maintain a sense of familial solidarity with a now-dead client with the help of an unremarkable piece of clothing. “Midland in Stilfs” casts a jaundiced eye on the laughable efforts of a cosmopolitan foreigner to attain local authenticity on a moribund Alpine farmstead. In “At the Ortler,” two middle-aged brothers—one a scientist, the other an acrobat—meditate on their unusual career paths while they climb a mountain to reclaim a long-abandoned family property. And in “At the Timberline,” the unexpected arrival of a young couple in a mountain village leads to the discovery of a scandalous crime that casts a shadow on the personal life of the policeman investigating it.