natbaldino's review against another edition
4.0
darkly witty and a breeze to read, although sometimes the repetitive style became sluggish, especially in Reunion.
jonathangolding_books's review
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
4.0
piccoline's review against another edition
5.0
I was a little worried, in the middle of the first of these four stories, that the reason these works had taken so long to be translated to English was that they were *so* Austrian/German that they would be incomprehensible to anyone but a Germanics specialist. But then I just relaxed a bit, said to myself, okay, let's just accept the conceit that Goethe and Wittgenstein not only were both alive at the same time, but that they were in their final days of life at the same time. I don't know if it's that the story turned a corner, or my attitude just got in the right place, but the story worked for me, then.
That said, I think the other three stories in the collection are even better. Really funny and bitter, as you'd want from Thomas. (Can I call him by his first name yet? Would it make him angry? Wouldn't he probably prefer to be angry?) "Reunion" is a real knockout, and the closing piece too.
Not really holding my breath that this'll vault up the bestseller lists, but it's well worth a look. I'll have to reflect a bit more, but it's possible that the last three stories actually make up a pretty good accessible-yet-still-somehow-representative introduction to Bernhard's work. (I guess I can only bring myself to call him by his first name once in this review.)
[a:Thomas Bernhard|7745|Thomas Bernhard|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1326833554p2/7745.jpg]'s work is sublime.
That said, I think the other three stories in the collection are even better. Really funny and bitter, as you'd want from Thomas. (Can I call him by his first name yet? Would it make him angry? Wouldn't he probably prefer to be angry?) "Reunion" is a real knockout, and the closing piece too.
Not really holding my breath that this'll vault up the bestseller lists, but it's well worth a look. I'll have to reflect a bit more, but it's possible that the last three stories actually make up a pretty good accessible-yet-still-somehow-representative introduction to Bernhard's work. (I guess I can only bring myself to call him by his first name once in this review.)
[a:Thomas Bernhard|7745|Thomas Bernhard|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1326833554p2/7745.jpg]'s work is sublime.
arirang's review
4.0
The four pieces in this collection were first released in German as a collection in 2010, although published separately previously.
Other short story/novella collections I have read, e.g. Prose and Three Novellas,. have been earlier, and less developed works, but this is Bernhard at his peak (all written in the early 1980s), and the book would serve as a wonderful introduction to the author, Bernhard in miniature, as well as a wonderful treat for the Bernhard completist (among which I number myself).
The translator is James Reidel, another to add to my growing list for Thomas Bernhard which now reads, of books I've read: James Reidel (Goethe Dies), Martin Chalmers (Prose and also Victor Halfwit), Peter Jansen (Three Novellas - Amras), Kenneth Northcott (Voice Imitators & Three Novellas - Playing Watten & Walking), Michael Hoffman (Frost), Richard and Clara Winston (Gargoyle), Sophie Wilkins (Lime Works & Correction), Ewald Osers (Yes & Old Masters, also the hard-to-obtain Cheap Eaters and an earlier translation of Woodcutters), David McLintock (Concrete, Wittgenstein's Nephew, Extinction & Woodcutters), Jack Dawson (Loser), Carol Brown Janeway (My Prizes), Meredith Oakes and Andrea Tierney (Heldenplatz), Russell Stockman (On the Mountain). And in addition I'm aware of translations by Gita Honneger (author also of a biography of Bernhard), Michael Mitchell, David Horrocks, Peter Eyre & Tom Cairns (various stories, plays and poems).
The title story, Goethe Dies was originally published in Die Zeit in 1982, towards the end of Thomas Bernhard's life, to mark the 150th anniversary of Goethe's death.
The story has Goethe on his death bed, deciding to summon Wittgenstein, who he has not met but sees as his philosophical successor, from England to see him. [Wittgenstein in reality, was not born until more than 50 years after Goethe's death, but in the novel's world is a contemporary].
Except in true Bernhard fashion, the story is told in indirect, often bitter, second- and third- hand accounts, indeed the unnamed narrator has not been present at all in the conversations that take place between the dying Goethe, his secretaries [Friedrich] Kräuter and [Johann] Eckermann and the literary historian [Friedrich Wilhelm] Riemer, the latter being the narrator's main direct source.
"He, Riemer, had spoken with Goethe several times over the last three days, twice in the presence of Kräuter, whom Goethe is said to have requested continuously, and up to the last minute, to remain at his side, but alone at one point as well, for Kräuter suddenly felt stick to his stomach, due apparently to Riemer’s presence in Goethe’s bedroom, and hurriedly took his leave, whereupon Goethe promptly began discussing with Riemer, just as in days past, The Doubting and the Doubting Nothing, just as in those first days of March, during which Goethe, thus said Riemer, kept coming back to this subject time and time again and with the utmost vigilance time and time again to the virtual exclusion of anything else since the end of February, for he had, thus said Riemer, on his daily morning constitutional with Riemer, as it were, hence without Kräuter and hence, from Riemer again, without that evil familiar regarded as the Lier-in-Wait of this Gothean death, been preoccupied with the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and even referred to the body of Wittgenstein thought as that which stood at once alongside his first, as well as that which superceded his, specifically at the point where the decision came between that which Goethe had been compelled to observe and record as Here and that which he had for as There for a lifetime would have to be eclipsed ultimately, if not completely eclipsed, by Wittgensteinian thought."
[....]
The idea of inviting Wittgenstein to Weimar occurred to Goethe at the end of February, thus said Riemer presently, and not at the beginning of March, as Kräuter maintained, and it was Kräuter who learned from Eckermann that Eckermann would prevent Wittgenstein from travelling to Weimar to see Goethe at all costs.
[...]
Goethe allegedly said to Eckermann that his services, which he, Eckermann, had always thus far performed for him, for Goethe, in those days and in his saddest of hours in the history of German philosophy, were null and void, for he, Eckermann, has perfidiously maligned Wittgenstein in front of Goethe’s eyes, had made himself unforgivably guilty and had to leave the room at once, The room, Goethe allegedly said, which was quite out of character for him since he always called his bedroom, The bedchamber, and then suddenly he, thus said Riemer, flung the word room at Eckermann’s head, and Eckermann stood there for a moment completely speechless, not getting a word out, thus said Riemer, and left Goethe."
James Reidel is better known for translating Bernhard's poems, and his translation of the title story wasn't entirely successful for me. Bernhard's sentences, with their nested clauses of indirect speech, are notoriously difficult, but I felt other translations I have read have parsed them a little better. It was also impossible to incorporate into the translation two key features of the German original mentioned in his own Notes. The novel's title "Goethe Schtirbt" is a corruption of the correct German word, but the English title Goethe Dies is in standard English. And the story's conclusion, claiming Goethe's famous last words were misreported, in German has "Mehr nicht" being turned into "Mehr Licht". Reidel's English rendition as "No more" turned into "More Light" is literally correct but loses the pun.
The story is also available on the web in an alternative, unauthorised, translation by Douglas Robertson (http://shirtysleeves.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/translation-of-goethe-schtirbt-by.html
). He translated the title as "Goethe Dighs" and makes the real last words at the end "More night", which preserves the pun but misses the echo of Goethe's earlier words, "No more", when banishing Eckermann. Ultimately the difficulty of the pun lies in the inability to change the translation of "Mehr Licht" as the "More Light" rendition is already so canonical in English culture as Goethe's last words.
The story Goethe Dies however is a wonderful introduction to Bernhard, very short, which makes his dense prose easier to digest, and packed with subtlety, as Reidel's end notes very helpfully explain.
This is also a truly excellent review:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1850810278
The second story, Montaigne, was also first published in Die Zeit in 1982.
This is an example of the Bernhardian monologue from a narrator, directed at his family.
"They reproached me because I was their misfortune; that I had made it against them and their relationships, against their affairs and there ideas, which were my own as well.
That I made it my habit to undermine their thinking, to mock it, destroy and exterminate it. That I enlisted everything at my command to undermine it and destroy it and exterminate it. [...]
From birth I was against them, holding my very existence against them as this wicked, never-speaking child just perpetually staring at them, their perfidious monstrosity".
The set-up is simple, the narrator, in his 40s but still living in the family estate, retires to an abandoned tower to escape his tormentors (i.e. his relatives), a book of philosophy in hand, snatched from the library. The book turns out to be by Montaigne, the irony of course being that he was known for his progressive views on children's education (and also had a library attached to a tower).
His monologue is directed both at his family's treatment of him, and their business dealings. A wonderful Bernhard sentence: "They spooned their soup and came to the defence of a dog which had bitten a passerby and in this canine can't they nevertheless were still talking about their business"
Reunion, originally published in 1982, is the longest story in the collection, although still only 30 pages. Two friends , aged in their 50s, on a train station and what we read is the comments made by one:
"While I always expressed myself too loudly, and especially the word misery always too loudly, I said it was invariably typical of him to invariably say everything too softly, something that made it difficult throughout our time together, especially when we so often went walking in the forest every day, as it had been our custom towards the end of winter, speaking not a word to each other in self-evident consent, as I said emphatically, without hesitation."
Then follows a lengthy diatribe about their parents, and in particular their regular, Alpine holidays, in an frustrated search for piece and quiet ("people loke our parents never find piece and quiet, I said, because they themselves are the absence of peace and quiet," holidays the two of them were forced to join, largely, in the narrator's view, to serve as a scapegoat for whatever ills befell the trip:
"So, the suspicion cannot be rejected out of hand, I said, of whether our parents made us for no other reason than to personify their guilt."
No responses from the interlocutor are recorded and the piece concludes: "Don't you remember, I asked. No, he said, and then with a very quiet and weak voice:I remember nothing whatsover.
The last story, Going Up in Flames: A Travelogue to an Erstwhile Friend, was originally published in 1983-4.
It takes the form of a a letter by the narrator to an architect, a long estranged friend ("my dear architect, my dear building artist, my dear surface area charlatan", sent from Norway ("the people there are unintellectual and perfectly uninteresting", their out of tune pianos having enabled them, in their ignorance, to accidentally discover modern music), telling of a dream he had, en route, in Rotterdam, "the city that is nearest and dearest to me", but set in Vienna and Salzburg:
"What have the Austrian people made of his European jewel in just forty or fifty years, I thought, sitting on this block of conglomerate stone? A single architectural abomination in which the Salzburgers, Catholic and National Socialist haters of Jews and immigrants, race back and forth in there gruesome Lederhosen and Loden cape by the tens of thousands."
A dream that ends with his deepest wish, as the whole of Austria burns:
"And as I saw the Austrian government, which, as you know, has always been the stupidest government on earth, and the remains of the Austrian Catholic clergy, which has always been the most cunning on earth, as well as the barely recognisable remains on Christian-Socialism and Catholicism and National Socialism in that stinking grey-black desert of fire, I breathed a sigh of relief, albeit coughing."
Highly recommended - start here and then read everything Bernhard has written.
Other short story/novella collections I have read, e.g. Prose and Three Novellas,. have been earlier, and less developed works, but this is Bernhard at his peak (all written in the early 1980s), and the book would serve as a wonderful introduction to the author, Bernhard in miniature, as well as a wonderful treat for the Bernhard completist (among which I number myself).
The translator is James Reidel, another to add to my growing list for Thomas Bernhard which now reads, of books I've read: James Reidel (Goethe Dies), Martin Chalmers (Prose and also Victor Halfwit), Peter Jansen (Three Novellas - Amras), Kenneth Northcott (Voice Imitators & Three Novellas - Playing Watten & Walking), Michael Hoffman (Frost), Richard and Clara Winston (Gargoyle), Sophie Wilkins (Lime Works & Correction), Ewald Osers (Yes & Old Masters, also the hard-to-obtain Cheap Eaters and an earlier translation of Woodcutters), David McLintock (Concrete, Wittgenstein's Nephew, Extinction & Woodcutters), Jack Dawson (Loser), Carol Brown Janeway (My Prizes), Meredith Oakes and Andrea Tierney (Heldenplatz), Russell Stockman (On the Mountain). And in addition I'm aware of translations by Gita Honneger (author also of a biography of Bernhard), Michael Mitchell, David Horrocks, Peter Eyre & Tom Cairns (various stories, plays and poems).
The title story, Goethe Dies was originally published in Die Zeit in 1982, towards the end of Thomas Bernhard's life, to mark the 150th anniversary of Goethe's death.
The story has Goethe on his death bed, deciding to summon Wittgenstein, who he has not met but sees as his philosophical successor, from England to see him. [Wittgenstein in reality, was not born until more than 50 years after Goethe's death, but in the novel's world is a contemporary].
Except in true Bernhard fashion, the story is told in indirect, often bitter, second- and third- hand accounts, indeed the unnamed narrator has not been present at all in the conversations that take place between the dying Goethe, his secretaries [Friedrich] Kräuter and [Johann] Eckermann and the literary historian [Friedrich Wilhelm] Riemer, the latter being the narrator's main direct source.
"He, Riemer, had spoken with Goethe several times over the last three days, twice in the presence of Kräuter, whom Goethe is said to have requested continuously, and up to the last minute, to remain at his side, but alone at one point as well, for Kräuter suddenly felt stick to his stomach, due apparently to Riemer’s presence in Goethe’s bedroom, and hurriedly took his leave, whereupon Goethe promptly began discussing with Riemer, just as in days past, The Doubting and the Doubting Nothing, just as in those first days of March, during which Goethe, thus said Riemer, kept coming back to this subject time and time again and with the utmost vigilance time and time again to the virtual exclusion of anything else since the end of February, for he had, thus said Riemer, on his daily morning constitutional with Riemer, as it were, hence without Kräuter and hence, from Riemer again, without that evil familiar regarded as the Lier-in-Wait of this Gothean death, been preoccupied with the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and even referred to the body of Wittgenstein thought as that which stood at once alongside his first, as well as that which superceded his, specifically at the point where the decision came between that which Goethe had been compelled to observe and record as Here and that which he had for as There for a lifetime would have to be eclipsed ultimately, if not completely eclipsed, by Wittgensteinian thought."
[....]
The idea of inviting Wittgenstein to Weimar occurred to Goethe at the end of February, thus said Riemer presently, and not at the beginning of March, as Kräuter maintained, and it was Kräuter who learned from Eckermann that Eckermann would prevent Wittgenstein from travelling to Weimar to see Goethe at all costs.
[...]
Goethe allegedly said to Eckermann that his services, which he, Eckermann, had always thus far performed for him, for Goethe, in those days and in his saddest of hours in the history of German philosophy, were null and void, for he, Eckermann, has perfidiously maligned Wittgenstein in front of Goethe’s eyes, had made himself unforgivably guilty and had to leave the room at once, The room, Goethe allegedly said, which was quite out of character for him since he always called his bedroom, The bedchamber, and then suddenly he, thus said Riemer, flung the word room at Eckermann’s head, and Eckermann stood there for a moment completely speechless, not getting a word out, thus said Riemer, and left Goethe."
James Reidel is better known for translating Bernhard's poems, and his translation of the title story wasn't entirely successful for me. Bernhard's sentences, with their nested clauses of indirect speech, are notoriously difficult, but I felt other translations I have read have parsed them a little better. It was also impossible to incorporate into the translation two key features of the German original mentioned in his own Notes. The novel's title "Goethe Schtirbt" is a corruption of the correct German word, but the English title Goethe Dies is in standard English. And the story's conclusion, claiming Goethe's famous last words were misreported, in German has "Mehr nicht" being turned into "Mehr Licht". Reidel's English rendition as "No more" turned into "More Light" is literally correct but loses the pun.
The story is also available on the web in an alternative, unauthorised, translation by Douglas Robertson (http://shirtysleeves.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/translation-of-goethe-schtirbt-by.html
). He translated the title as "Goethe Dighs" and makes the real last words at the end "More night", which preserves the pun but misses the echo of Goethe's earlier words, "No more", when banishing Eckermann. Ultimately the difficulty of the pun lies in the inability to change the translation of "Mehr Licht" as the "More Light" rendition is already so canonical in English culture as Goethe's last words.
The story Goethe Dies however is a wonderful introduction to Bernhard, very short, which makes his dense prose easier to digest, and packed with subtlety, as Reidel's end notes very helpfully explain.
This is also a truly excellent review:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1850810278
The second story, Montaigne, was also first published in Die Zeit in 1982.
This is an example of the Bernhardian monologue from a narrator, directed at his family.
"They reproached me because I was their misfortune; that I had made it against them and their relationships, against their affairs and there ideas, which were my own as well.
That I made it my habit to undermine their thinking, to mock it, destroy and exterminate it. That I enlisted everything at my command to undermine it and destroy it and exterminate it. [...]
From birth I was against them, holding my very existence against them as this wicked, never-speaking child just perpetually staring at them, their perfidious monstrosity".
The set-up is simple, the narrator, in his 40s but still living in the family estate, retires to an abandoned tower to escape his tormentors (i.e. his relatives), a book of philosophy in hand, snatched from the library. The book turns out to be by Montaigne, the irony of course being that he was known for his progressive views on children's education (and also had a library attached to a tower).
His monologue is directed both at his family's treatment of him, and their business dealings. A wonderful Bernhard sentence: "They spooned their soup and came to the defence of a dog which had bitten a passerby and in this canine can't they nevertheless were still talking about their business"
Reunion, originally published in 1982, is the longest story in the collection, although still only 30 pages. Two friends , aged in their 50s, on a train station and what we read is the comments made by one:
"While I always expressed myself too loudly, and especially the word misery always too loudly, I said it was invariably typical of him to invariably say everything too softly, something that made it difficult throughout our time together, especially when we so often went walking in the forest every day, as it had been our custom towards the end of winter, speaking not a word to each other in self-evident consent, as I said emphatically, without hesitation."
Then follows a lengthy diatribe about their parents, and in particular their regular, Alpine holidays, in an frustrated search for piece and quiet ("people loke our parents never find piece and quiet, I said, because they themselves are the absence of peace and quiet," holidays the two of them were forced to join, largely, in the narrator's view, to serve as a scapegoat for whatever ills befell the trip:
"So, the suspicion cannot be rejected out of hand, I said, of whether our parents made us for no other reason than to personify their guilt."
No responses from the interlocutor are recorded and the piece concludes: "Don't you remember, I asked. No, he said, and then with a very quiet and weak voice:I remember nothing whatsover.
The last story, Going Up in Flames: A Travelogue to an Erstwhile Friend, was originally published in 1983-4.
It takes the form of a a letter by the narrator to an architect, a long estranged friend ("my dear architect, my dear building artist, my dear surface area charlatan", sent from Norway ("the people there are unintellectual and perfectly uninteresting", their out of tune pianos having enabled them, in their ignorance, to accidentally discover modern music), telling of a dream he had, en route, in Rotterdam, "the city that is nearest and dearest to me", but set in Vienna and Salzburg:
"What have the Austrian people made of his European jewel in just forty or fifty years, I thought, sitting on this block of conglomerate stone? A single architectural abomination in which the Salzburgers, Catholic and National Socialist haters of Jews and immigrants, race back and forth in there gruesome Lederhosen and Loden cape by the tens of thousands."
A dream that ends with his deepest wish, as the whole of Austria burns:
"And as I saw the Austrian government, which, as you know, has always been the stupidest government on earth, and the remains of the Austrian Catholic clergy, which has always been the most cunning on earth, as well as the barely recognisable remains on Christian-Socialism and Catholicism and National Socialism in that stinking grey-black desert of fire, I breathed a sigh of relief, albeit coughing."
Highly recommended - start here and then read everything Bernhard has written.
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