Phoenix Fiction S. Series

Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) has been hailed by Gabriel Josipovici as 'Austria's finest postwar writer' and by George Steiner as 'one of the masters of contemporary European fiction.' Faber Finds is proud to reissue a selection of four of Bernhard's finest novels.
The Loser centres on a fictional relationship between piano virtuoso Glenn Gould and two of his fellow students who feel compelled to renounce their musical ambitions in the face of Gould's incomparable genius. One commits suicide, while the other - the obsessive, witty, and self-mocking narrator - has retreated into obscurity. Written as a monologue in one remarkable unbroken paragraph, The Loser is a brilliant meditation on success, failure, genius, and fame.

Extinction

by Thomas Bernhard

Published 1 September 1995

Thomas Bernhard is one of the greatest twentieth-century writers in the German language. "Extinction, " his last novel, takes the form of the autobiographical testimony of Franz-Josef Murau. The intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family, Murau lives in Rome in self-exile. Obsessed and angry with his identity as an Austrian, he resolves never to return to the family estate of Wolfsegg. But when news comes of his parents' deaths, he finds himself master of Wolfsegg and must decide its fate.

Written in Bernhard's seamless style, "Extinction" is the ultimate proof of his extraordinary literary genius.

"Strangely gripping. The glue that holds his remarkable novel together is the unique virtuosity of his imaginative prose, a highly original kind of writing that resembles musical patterns of theme, variations and recapitulation." --Steve Dowden, "Washington Times"

"With a breathtaking sustained intensity . . . Bernhard assaults through the voice of Murau the modern world as exemplified by his birthplace, Austria." --Thomas McGonigle, "Chicago Tribune Books"

"Perfectly balanced and continually interesting. . . . The particular fineness of Extinction lies in its depiction of a consciousness in action." --Michael Dirda, "Washington Post Book World"

Yes

by Thomas Bernhard

Published 1 April 1991

The narrator, a scientist working on antibodies and suffering from emotional and mental illness, meets a Persian woman, the companion of a Swiss engineer, at an office in rural Austria. For the scientist, his endless talks with the strange Asian woman mean release from his condition, but for the Persian woman, as her own circumstances deteriorate, there is only one answer.

Thomas Bernhard was one of the few major writers of the second half of this century.--Gabriel Josipovici, Independent

With his death, European letters lost one of its most perceptive, uncompromising voices since the war.--Spectator

Widely acclaimed as a novelist, playwright, and poet, Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) won many of the most prestigious literary prizes of Europe, including the Austrian State Prize, the Bremen and Bruchner prizes, and Le Prix Seguier.

Concrete

by Thomas Bernhard

Published 1 January 1984

Instead of the book he's meant to write, Rudolph, a Viennese musicologist, produces this tale of procrastination, failure, and despair, a dark and grotesquely funny story of small woes writ large and profound horrors detailed and rehearsed to the point of distraction.
"Certain books few assert literary importance instantly, profoundly. This new novel by the internationally praised but not widely known Austrian writer is one of those a book of mysterious dark beauty . . . . [It] is overwhelming; one wants to read it again, immediately, to re-experience its intricate innovations, not to let go of this masterful work." John Rechy, "Los Angeles Times"
"Rudolph is not obstructed by some malfunctions in part of his being his being itself is a knot. And as Bernhard's narrative proceeds, we begin to register the dimensions of his crisis, its self-consuming circularity . . . . Where rage of this intensity is directed outward, we often find the sociopath; where inward, the suicide. Where it breaks out laterally, onto the page, we sometimes find a most unsettling artistic vision." Sven Birkerts, "The New Republic""

Gargoyles

by Thomas Bernhard

Published 15 June 1986

Early one morning a doctor sets out with his son on his daily rounds through the forbidding mountainous countryside. Their visits, a succession of grotesque portraits a diabetic industrialist living in incestuous isolation with his half-sister; three brothers, occupying a mill set in a deep gorge, who have just strangled a bevy of exotic birds; a crippled musical prodigy whose sister locks him in a cage lead them to a castle and a paranoid prince, whose "almost uninterrupted monologue for a hundred pages is a virtuoso verbal performance . . . [in] an extraordinary, somber first novel." A.C. Foote, "Book World"
"What he shares with the best of [writers such as Sartre, Camus, Mann, and Kafka] is the ability to extract more than utter gloom from his landscape of inconceivable devastation. While the external surface of life is unquestionably grim, he somehow suggests more the mystic element in experience that calls for symbolic interpretation; the inner significance of states that are akin to surrealistic dream-worlds; man's yearning for health, compassion, sanity." Robert Maurer, "The Saturday Review"
"The feeling grows that Thomas Bernhard is now the most original, concentrated novelist writing in German. His connections . . . with the great constellation of Kafka, Musil, and Broch become ever clearer." George Steiner, "Times Literary Supplement"
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The Lime Works

by Thomas Bernhard

Published 15 June 1986

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 kept strapped to her wheelchair. The murder and the bizarre life that led to it are the subject of a mass of hearsay related by an unnamed life-insurance salesman in a narrative as mazy, byzantine, and mysterious as the lime works, Konrad's sanctuary and tomb.
"A masterfully dense set of esthetic, social and political metaphors about contemporary life, about art, about obsessive commitment to anything....The book is a jungle of meaning, the opposite of simplistic allegory, and a major achievement." William Kennedy, "The New Republic""