The German List - (Seagull Titles CHUP)

5 total works

Old Masters

by Thomas Bernhard

Published 1 May 1989

In this exuberantly satirical novel, the tutor Atzbacher has been summoned by his friend Reger to meet him in a Viennese museum. While Reger gazes at a Tintoretto portrait, Atzbacher--who fears Reger's plans to kill himself--gives us a portrait of the musicologist: his wisdom, his devotion to his wife, and his love-hate relationship with
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

Victor Halfwit

by Thomas Bernhard

Published 27 May 2011

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.

Goethe Dies

by Thomas Bernhard

Published 29 April 2016

This collection of four stories by the writer George Steiner called “one of the masters of European fiction” is, as longtime fans of Thomas Bernhard would expect, bleakly comic and inspiringly rancorous. The subject of his stories vary: in one, Goethe summons Wittgenstein to discuss the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; “Montaigne: A Story (in 22 Installments)” tells of a young man sealing himself in a tower to read; “Reunion,” meanwhile, satirizes that very impulse to escape; and the final story rounds out the collection by making Bernhard himself a victim, persecuted by his greatest enemy—his very homeland of Austria. Underpinning all these variously comic, tragic, and bitingly satirical excursions is Bernhard’s abiding interest in, and deep knowledge of, the philosophy of doubt.

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.

Prose

by Thomas Bernhard

Published 10 August 2010

The Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is acknowledged as one of the major writers of our time. The seven stories in this collection capture Bernhard's distinct darkly comic voice and vision - often compared to Kafka and Musil - commenting on a corrupted world. First published in German in 1967, these stories were written at the same time as Bernhard's early novels "Frost", "Gargoyles", and "The Lime Works", and they display the same obsessions, restlessness, and disarming mastery of language. Martin Chalmers' outstanding translation, which renders the work in English for the first time, captures the essential personality of the writing. The narrators of these stories lack the strength to do anything but listen and then write, the reader in turn becoming a captive listener, deciphering the traps laid by memory - and the mere words, the never-ending words with which we try to pin it down. Words that are always close to driving the narrator crazy, yet, as Bernhard writes, 'not completely crazy'.

Collected Poems

by Thomas Bernhard

Published 24 October 2017

Beloved Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931 89) began his career in the early 1950s as a poet. Over the next decade, Bernhard wrote thousands of poems and published four volumes of intensely wrought and increasingly personal verse, with such titles as On Earth and in Hell, In Hora Mortis, and Under the Iron of the Moon. Bernhard's early poetry, bearing the influence of Georg Trakl, begins with a deep connection to his Austrian homeland. As his poems saw publication and recognition, Bernhard seemed always on the verge of joining the ranks of Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, and other young post-war poets writing in German. During this time, however, his poems became increasingly more obsessive, filled with an undulant self-pity, counterpointed by a defamatory, bardic voice utterly estranged from his country, all of which resulted in a magisterial work of anti-poetry one that represents Bernhard's own harrowing experience with his leitmotif of success and failure, which makes his fiction such a pleasure.
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.