More Bernhard Reviews and Quotes from The Loser

Thomas Bernhard, the gloomy Austrian, famous for his novels and plays actually started as a poet. He published his first volume of poetry when he was in his late twenties. The English translation of two of his poetry volumes has just come out. Here is one review. Also you can read parts of the poem at the publisher's page.

Link to pdf from the book. I don't know how good the poems are, I am not qualified enough to judge, but they do look characteristically bleak. (The title means "at the hour of the death.") Here is how it starts:

The flower of my anger grows wild
and everyone sees its thorn
piercing the sky
so that blood drips from my sun
growing the flower of my bitterness
from this grass
that washes my feet
my bread
o Lord
the vain flower
that is choked in the wheel of night
the flower of my wheat Lord
the flower of my soul
God despise me
I am sick from this flower
that blooms red in my brain
over my sorrow.

The complete review page contains more links.

I am in the middle of reading his novel The Loser and well, I don't think words like bleak, gloomy, pessimistic will do any justice to what is there in the book. I think one book by Bernhard is enough to counter an entire library of positive thinking, self-improvement, you-can-be-happy-if-you-want-to volumes!

Though I must say, this is really not a book for me to read these days, when I am struggling so hard to resist the perverse pull of masochism and anhedonia and not succeeding at all (will I end up in a madhouse, that is the question I sleep thinking about each night)... I am not going to pick up another one by Bernhard till I feel better :)

Okay, here is something to test your sense of humour, I know this is just out of context and may not make sense but you will get a feel of what is there in the book:

It took me three days after Wertheimer hanged himself to figure out that, like Glenn, he had just turned fifty-one. When we cross the threshold of fiftieth year we see ourselves as base and spineless, I thought, the question is how long we can stand this condition. Lots of people kill themselves in their fifty-first year, I thought. Lots in their fifty-second, but more in their fifty-first. It doesn't matter whether they kill themselves in their fifty-first year or whether they die, as people say, a natural death, it doesn't matter whether they die like Glenn or whether they die like Wertheimer. The reason is that they are often ashamed of having reached the limit that a fifty-year-old crosses when he puts his fiftieth year behind him. For fifty years are absolutely enough, I thought. We become contemptible when go past fifty and are still living, continue our existence. We're border crossing weaklings, I thought, who have made ourselves twice as pitiful by putting fifty years behind us. Now I'm the shameless one, I thought. I envied the dead. For a moment I hated them for their superiority.

Or this:

No one ever cast a more damaging light on his relatives than Wertheimer, descibed them into the dirt. Hated his father, mother, sister, reproached them all with his unhappiness. That he had to continue existing, constantly reminding them that they had thrown him up into that awful existence machine so that he would be spewed out below, a mangled pulp. His mother threw her child into this existence machine, all his life his father kept this existence machine running, which accurately hacked his son to pieces. Parents know very well that they perpetuate their own unhappiness in their children, they go about cruelly having children and throwing them into the existence machine, he said, I thought, contemplating the restaurant.

I haven't selected specific passages, just two almost at random. It is one continuous rant like this. A great example of what Susan Sontag called, "literature of mental restlessness." It is actually an extreme example, though I am enjoying it so far.

Anyway, here is one more review of Bernhard's first novel Frost in LA Times which has just been translated into English. I had linked to the NYT review earlier.