msaari's review against another edition
3.0
Quite the heavy read. Not my favourite Bernhard (that would be [b:Old Masters: A Comedy|112801|Old Masters A Comedy|Thomas Bernhard|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328874372s/112801.jpg|108609]), but I found Watten and Gehen certainly worth reading. As usual, the Finnish translator Tarja Roinila has written excellent commentary on the novels to go with them.
arirang's review
4.0
"We were, as you know all too well, sworn enemies of prose, we were sickened by that loquacious literature, by that stupid narrative vein, by the regurgitation of dates, historical coincidences..." (from Amras)
Three Novellas collects some early Bernhard, Amras published in 1964 - shortly after Frost (1963), Watten (1969), and Gehen (1971) (around the time of Gargoyles and Lime Works but before Bernhard's peak), and comes with a helpful foreword from Brian Evenson, placing the works in the context of his overall output.
The latter two stories have been translated (as Playing Watten and Walking) by Kenneth Northcott (also Voice Imitator) but the first was by Peter Jansen, yet another voice to add to the long-list of Bernhard's interpreters into English. Of books I've read I count, in addition, Michael Hoffman (Frost), Richard and Clara Winston (Gargoyles), 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). In addition I'm aware of Martin Chalmers (Prose & also Victor Halfwit which I haven't read), Russell Stockman (On the Mountain), as well as Gita Honneger (author also of a biography of Bernhard), Michael Mitchell, David Horrocks, Peter Eyre & Tom Cairns and James Reidel (various stories, plays and poems). It is testament to the power and distinctiveness of Bernhard's narrative voice that it shines through consistently in English.
Amras, the first novella, is notably less developed than his later works, fragmentary and feverish, and at times melancholy rather than the characteristic bitterness and bile.
It is narrated by one of two brothers, one a science and one a musical student, orphaned after a family suicide attempt which they, to their regret, survived, and hiding from the authorities ("in contravention to the crude Tyrolean health regulation concerning persons apprehended in the act of suicide, condemned to excruciating survival and thereby disfigured, we were spared consignment to the insane asylum") and family debtors, in an ancient tower. Looking back on the family's life of diminishing economic wealth (albeit from a high base) and illness (both the brother and mother suffered from epilepsy):
"a sad degeneration of everything in which we were allowed timidly to thrive cast its shadow over the last ten years our family spent together"
Although when discussing the Tyrol region ("our parents themselves had been the products of those dreadful Tyrolean oxidations") or the Austrian university system, the characteristic Bernhard voice surfaces:
"...the very awakening in our parent's house had been sheer torment to us, for in truth it was already a wakening in the high-ceilinged and gray and answerless courtrooms of dull curricula, world views, of dusty theories and philosphies, an awakening in the stinking laboratories and auditoriums of our gloomy provincial capital...In those months we had soon exhausted ourselves in the memorisation of the depressing conventions of pseudointellectualism, in the nauseating subdeliria of academia...We could find the wellsprings of our music and our natural science not in the soil of the state system but only in ourselves...After all, so called education as well as so called higher education had always been hateful to us, had also been hateful to our father...With the day-to-day ingestion, imposed on us by the state, of the viscious poisons of erudition that contaminates the whole world, destroying all subtler traits in our young brains so utterly unsuited to coarseness, we had soon overtaxed our natural talents...Our time at the university was probably our worst time, hardly a time of life"
Rather than Bernhard's trademark stream of prose, the narration is more disjointed, with the narrator's thoughts interposed with letters and jottings from his brother's journal, and the cumulative effect is much less powerful as a result. It's as if Bernhard hadn't yet developed the courage for the more extreme narrative style he would develop in his later novels, commencing with Gargoyles.
Overall Amras is really only for people - like myself - who have read most of his major works and are hunting out the more obscure and formative works - 2 stars on a standalone basis.
Watten is a Tyrolean card game - hence the need for the explanatory "playing" in the English title, played in two pairs, similar to Bridge except that more explicit communication is allowed - the subtlety is to try and inform your partner of your hand and not the opposing pair (http://www.wattn.com/English/start_en.htm). Not that the nature of the card game - other than it's highly social nature and role in local customs - seems important to the novel, but the very frequent, rythmic repetition of the word can't help but lead the reader to want to know more.
Stylistically, the novel takes us to another stage in Bernhard's development of form - the monologue as a single multi-page unbroken repetitive paragraph, full of twice-reported speech ("the traveller said to the landlord, said the truck driver", "To have to hear, the truck driver thinks, I think to myself, the way the doctor always calls the so called library, the so called library, and apparently he takes the greatest pleasure in the name") leading to The Lime Works.
In this case, Bernhard seems to feel obliged to explain the form, so has the narrator be prompted by a request to "write a report on your perceptions, over a period of several hours, of the day before the day you received this letter"
In Playing Watten too, the narrator, a struck-off doctor, has withdrawn from social society, abandoning the family castle for a hut. Indeed his refusal to rejoin the game of Watten following the foehn (another Bernhardian fixation) induced suicide of one of the regular players is sign of his social withdrawal. The novella consists largely of a recalled dialogue with the "truck-driver" (actually owner of a successful haulage business), another Watten regular, trying to lure the Doctor back, but an seemingly unwelcome guest:
"When we invite people in and after they've sat down in our armchairs they thrust us down into the abyss. They lure us back into earlier times, impose our childhood, youth, age, and so forth upon us, and thrust us into what for ages we believed we had escaped...People come into our house, just as they come into my hut, in order to destroy us, to destroy me. In every case, to make us ridiculous, just as the truck driver, after all, only comes into my hut to make me ridiculous. They knock on the door and clap their curiosity, like a deathly piece of mastiness, onto our head. People come in as harmlessness itself and suddenly oppress us with their frightful corporeality, I think to myself. People ask something irrelevant in order to drive us into irrelevance and at the same time they tear down the curtain our own filth is hidden behind"
Overall 3.5 stars - certainly worth reading.
Walking is fully formed Bernhard, both stylistically ith multi-layered reported speech ("Suddenly Rustenschacher says, I tell Scherrer, says Oehler, that Karrer can try to tear a button off the trousers that are lying on the counter"), and in content. Indeed one could argue it all his later works are reworkings of the same themes, neatly encapsulated in the following passage which sets out the contradicition at the heart of Bernhard's work:
"If we hear something, says Oehler on Wednesday, we check what we have heard and we check what we have heard until we have to say that what we have heard is not true, what we have heard is a lie. If we see something, we check what we see until we are forced to say that what we are looking at is horrible...if we do something, we think about what we are doing until we are forced to say that it is something nasty, something low, something outrageous, what we are doing is something terribly hopeless and that what we are doing is in the nature of things obviously false. Thus every day becomes hell for us whether we like it or not, and what we think will, if we think about it, if we have the requisite coolness of intellect and acuity of intellect, always become something nasty, something low and superfluous, which will depress us in the most shattering manner for the whole of our lives...What must thoroughly depress is the fact that through this outrageous thinking into a nature that is, in the nature of things, fully immunised against this thinking, we enter into an even greater depression than that in which we already are...we have not made unbearable circumstances bearable or even less unbearable but only still more unbearable, says Oehler... There is no doubt that the art lies in bearing what is unbearable and in not feeling that what is horrible is something horrible. Of course we have to label this art the most difficult of all. The art of existing against the facts, says Oehler, is the most difficult, the art that is the most difficult. To exist against the facts means existing against what is unbearable and horrible, says Oehler...It is always a question of intellectual indifference and intellectual acuity and of the ruthlessness of intellectual indifference and intellectual acuity, says Oehler."
Except of course, that in this way of thinking lies either suicide or, here, madness ("I again recognised to what degree madness is something that happens only among the higher orders of humanity...because they are ignorant of their life's theme [other] people finally become mentally ill, but never mad"). The focus of Walking is the narrator's walking companion's Oehler's friend Karrer, who has gone mad from following these thoughts too far:
"If you go as far as Karrer, says Oehler, then you are suddenly decisively and absolutely mad, and have, at one stroke, become useless. Go on thinking more and more and more and more with ever greater intensity and with an ever grerater ruthlessness and with an ever greater fanticism for finding out, says Oehler, but never for one moment think too far."
The logical conclusion of Karrer, and Oehler's, thinking is that Oehler:
"to speak radically, stood for the gradual, total demise of the human race, if had his way, no more children not a single one and thus no more human beings...The state should have the responsibility, says Oehler now, for punishing people who make children, but now it subsidises the crime...Karrer was of the same opinion, says Oehler....My whole life long, I have refused to make a child, said Karrer, Oehler says."
Indeed, Bernhard's trademark multi-layering of reported speech here serves to shield the narrator from the ultimate effect of his thoughts - he instead reports Karrer's thoughts, as reported by Oehler, to him. Karrer is very much held up as an ideal model, as well as a warning - the following is, in Bernhardian terms, an ultimate tribute:
"Just as Karrer in general, says Oehler, called everything "so called", there was nothing that he did not call only so-called, nothing that he would not have called so-called and by so doing his powers achieved an unbelievable force...things in themselves are only so-called or, to be completely accurate so-called so-called, to use Karrer's words, says Oehler."
Walking is actually one of Bernhard's strongest works - although I understand he himself was fond of Amras - 4.5 almost 5 stars on a stand-alone basis.
Overall, a fascinating collection showcasing Bernhard's development. Only Walking stands comparison with the stronger longer works (Correction, Loser, Extinction etc) but still 4 stars overall.
Three Novellas collects some early Bernhard, Amras published in 1964 - shortly after Frost (1963), Watten (1969), and Gehen (1971) (around the time of Gargoyles and Lime Works but before Bernhard's peak), and comes with a helpful foreword from Brian Evenson, placing the works in the context of his overall output.
The latter two stories have been translated (as Playing Watten and Walking) by Kenneth Northcott (also Voice Imitator) but the first was by Peter Jansen, yet another voice to add to the long-list of Bernhard's interpreters into English. Of books I've read I count, in addition, Michael Hoffman (Frost), Richard and Clara Winston (Gargoyles), 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). In addition I'm aware of Martin Chalmers (Prose & also Victor Halfwit which I haven't read), Russell Stockman (On the Mountain), as well as Gita Honneger (author also of a biography of Bernhard), Michael Mitchell, David Horrocks, Peter Eyre & Tom Cairns and James Reidel (various stories, plays and poems). It is testament to the power and distinctiveness of Bernhard's narrative voice that it shines through consistently in English.
Amras, the first novella, is notably less developed than his later works, fragmentary and feverish, and at times melancholy rather than the characteristic bitterness and bile.
It is narrated by one of two brothers, one a science and one a musical student, orphaned after a family suicide attempt which they, to their regret, survived, and hiding from the authorities ("in contravention to the crude Tyrolean health regulation concerning persons apprehended in the act of suicide, condemned to excruciating survival and thereby disfigured, we were spared consignment to the insane asylum") and family debtors, in an ancient tower. Looking back on the family's life of diminishing economic wealth (albeit from a high base) and illness (both the brother and mother suffered from epilepsy):
"a sad degeneration of everything in which we were allowed timidly to thrive cast its shadow over the last ten years our family spent together"
Although when discussing the Tyrol region ("our parents themselves had been the products of those dreadful Tyrolean oxidations") or the Austrian university system, the characteristic Bernhard voice surfaces:
"...the very awakening in our parent's house had been sheer torment to us, for in truth it was already a wakening in the high-ceilinged and gray and answerless courtrooms of dull curricula, world views, of dusty theories and philosphies, an awakening in the stinking laboratories and auditoriums of our gloomy provincial capital...In those months we had soon exhausted ourselves in the memorisation of the depressing conventions of pseudointellectualism, in the nauseating subdeliria of academia...We could find the wellsprings of our music and our natural science not in the soil of the state system but only in ourselves...After all, so called education as well as so called higher education had always been hateful to us, had also been hateful to our father...With the day-to-day ingestion, imposed on us by the state, of the viscious poisons of erudition that contaminates the whole world, destroying all subtler traits in our young brains so utterly unsuited to coarseness, we had soon overtaxed our natural talents...Our time at the university was probably our worst time, hardly a time of life"
Rather than Bernhard's trademark stream of prose, the narration is more disjointed, with the narrator's thoughts interposed with letters and jottings from his brother's journal, and the cumulative effect is much less powerful as a result. It's as if Bernhard hadn't yet developed the courage for the more extreme narrative style he would develop in his later novels, commencing with Gargoyles.
Overall Amras is really only for people - like myself - who have read most of his major works and are hunting out the more obscure and formative works - 2 stars on a standalone basis.
Watten is a Tyrolean card game - hence the need for the explanatory "playing" in the English title, played in two pairs, similar to Bridge except that more explicit communication is allowed - the subtlety is to try and inform your partner of your hand and not the opposing pair (http://www.wattn.com/English/start_en.htm). Not that the nature of the card game - other than it's highly social nature and role in local customs - seems important to the novel, but the very frequent, rythmic repetition of the word can't help but lead the reader to want to know more.
Stylistically, the novel takes us to another stage in Bernhard's development of form - the monologue as a single multi-page unbroken repetitive paragraph, full of twice-reported speech ("the traveller said to the landlord, said the truck driver", "To have to hear, the truck driver thinks, I think to myself, the way the doctor always calls the so called library, the so called library, and apparently he takes the greatest pleasure in the name") leading to The Lime Works.
In this case, Bernhard seems to feel obliged to explain the form, so has the narrator be prompted by a request to "write a report on your perceptions, over a period of several hours, of the day before the day you received this letter"
In Playing Watten too, the narrator, a struck-off doctor, has withdrawn from social society, abandoning the family castle for a hut. Indeed his refusal to rejoin the game of Watten following the foehn (another Bernhardian fixation) induced suicide of one of the regular players is sign of his social withdrawal. The novella consists largely of a recalled dialogue with the "truck-driver" (actually owner of a successful haulage business), another Watten regular, trying to lure the Doctor back, but an seemingly unwelcome guest:
"When we invite people in and after they've sat down in our armchairs they thrust us down into the abyss. They lure us back into earlier times, impose our childhood, youth, age, and so forth upon us, and thrust us into what for ages we believed we had escaped...People come into our house, just as they come into my hut, in order to destroy us, to destroy me. In every case, to make us ridiculous, just as the truck driver, after all, only comes into my hut to make me ridiculous. They knock on the door and clap their curiosity, like a deathly piece of mastiness, onto our head. People come in as harmlessness itself and suddenly oppress us with their frightful corporeality, I think to myself. People ask something irrelevant in order to drive us into irrelevance and at the same time they tear down the curtain our own filth is hidden behind"
Overall 3.5 stars - certainly worth reading.
Walking is fully formed Bernhard, both stylistically ith multi-layered reported speech ("Suddenly Rustenschacher says, I tell Scherrer, says Oehler, that Karrer can try to tear a button off the trousers that are lying on the counter"), and in content. Indeed one could argue it all his later works are reworkings of the same themes, neatly encapsulated in the following passage which sets out the contradicition at the heart of Bernhard's work:
"If we hear something, says Oehler on Wednesday, we check what we have heard and we check what we have heard until we have to say that what we have heard is not true, what we have heard is a lie. If we see something, we check what we see until we are forced to say that what we are looking at is horrible...if we do something, we think about what we are doing until we are forced to say that it is something nasty, something low, something outrageous, what we are doing is something terribly hopeless and that what we are doing is in the nature of things obviously false. Thus every day becomes hell for us whether we like it or not, and what we think will, if we think about it, if we have the requisite coolness of intellect and acuity of intellect, always become something nasty, something low and superfluous, which will depress us in the most shattering manner for the whole of our lives...What must thoroughly depress is the fact that through this outrageous thinking into a nature that is, in the nature of things, fully immunised against this thinking, we enter into an even greater depression than that in which we already are...we have not made unbearable circumstances bearable or even less unbearable but only still more unbearable, says Oehler... There is no doubt that the art lies in bearing what is unbearable and in not feeling that what is horrible is something horrible. Of course we have to label this art the most difficult of all. The art of existing against the facts, says Oehler, is the most difficult, the art that is the most difficult. To exist against the facts means existing against what is unbearable and horrible, says Oehler...It is always a question of intellectual indifference and intellectual acuity and of the ruthlessness of intellectual indifference and intellectual acuity, says Oehler."
Except of course, that in this way of thinking lies either suicide or, here, madness ("I again recognised to what degree madness is something that happens only among the higher orders of humanity...because they are ignorant of their life's theme [other] people finally become mentally ill, but never mad"). The focus of Walking is the narrator's walking companion's Oehler's friend Karrer, who has gone mad from following these thoughts too far:
"If you go as far as Karrer, says Oehler, then you are suddenly decisively and absolutely mad, and have, at one stroke, become useless. Go on thinking more and more and more and more with ever greater intensity and with an ever grerater ruthlessness and with an ever greater fanticism for finding out, says Oehler, but never for one moment think too far."
The logical conclusion of Karrer, and Oehler's, thinking is that Oehler:
"to speak radically, stood for the gradual, total demise of the human race, if had his way, no more children not a single one and thus no more human beings...The state should have the responsibility, says Oehler now, for punishing people who make children, but now it subsidises the crime...Karrer was of the same opinion, says Oehler....My whole life long, I have refused to make a child, said Karrer, Oehler says."
Indeed, Bernhard's trademark multi-layering of reported speech here serves to shield the narrator from the ultimate effect of his thoughts - he instead reports Karrer's thoughts, as reported by Oehler, to him. Karrer is very much held up as an ideal model, as well as a warning - the following is, in Bernhardian terms, an ultimate tribute:
"Just as Karrer in general, says Oehler, called everything "so called", there was nothing that he did not call only so-called, nothing that he would not have called so-called and by so doing his powers achieved an unbelievable force...things in themselves are only so-called or, to be completely accurate so-called so-called, to use Karrer's words, says Oehler."
Walking is actually one of Bernhard's strongest works - although I understand he himself was fond of Amras - 4.5 almost 5 stars on a stand-alone basis.
Overall, a fascinating collection showcasing Bernhard's development. Only Walking stands comparison with the stronger longer works (Correction, Loser, Extinction etc) but still 4 stars overall.
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