A review by trve_zach
The Lime Works by Thomas Bernhard
With his characteristic lists, lack of paragraph breaks, and maddening repetition Bernhard is very much his comfortable self here. In The Lime Works, he invites you into the misanthropic and obsessive mind of the protagonist, Konrad, and does so in a way that’s both fun/funny and terrible. This funny/terrible balance is something that he is able to nail and one that is common amongst my favorite writers.
Want to read about Konrad’s hate for consumer culture and the way it dumbs down people, or about how he is a prophet and superlative artist for studying hearing, or about how he’s definitely not insane and definitely not using the outside world as an excuse for his own failings? It’s all there (and much, much more), and it’s all to be read and understood with the knowledge that this is a man who has blown his wife’s head off with a bolt-action riffle.
Time and again Konrad contradicts himself, often in the same sentence, and especially about anything having to do with the absolute or certainty or, you know, Truth. His desperate need to control his environment and the people around him (his wife) further drives how he tries to control the story of his life and its worth. This is smartly-yet-heavy-handedly contrasted by the structure of the narrative, being a series of secondhand accounts by Konrad’s various acquaintances, and this lets us play with broader ideas about how subject and object are constructed whether it be by a societal body at large or within one’s mind (this of course also leads into the raging debates of the day of what it means to separate the creator from the creation and what that means holistically, particularly when it’s so obviously someone in an unstable mental state deciding how the lines are drawn).
It’s an engaging dynamic, and it’s nice to ruminate on ideas framed in such a context. After all, framing ideas in new ways and allowing us the freedom to think about them again to possibly come to new conclusions/realizations is what good art is all about, and Bernard consistently delivers.
Want to read about Konrad’s hate for consumer culture and the way it dumbs down people, or about how he is a prophet and superlative artist for studying hearing, or about how he’s definitely not insane and definitely not using the outside world as an excuse for his own failings? It’s all there (and much, much more), and it’s all to be read and understood with the knowledge that this is a man who has blown his wife’s head off with a bolt-action riffle.
Time and again Konrad contradicts himself, often in the same sentence, and especially about anything having to do with the absolute or certainty or, you know, Truth. His desperate need to control his environment and the people around him (his wife) further drives how he tries to control the story of his life and its worth. This is smartly-yet-heavy-handedly contrasted by the structure of the narrative, being a series of secondhand accounts by Konrad’s various acquaintances, and this lets us play with broader ideas about how subject and object are constructed whether it be by a societal body at large or within one’s mind (this of course also leads into the raging debates of the day of what it means to separate the creator from the creation and what that means holistically, particularly when it’s so obviously someone in an unstable mental state deciding how the lines are drawn).
It’s an engaging dynamic, and it’s nice to ruminate on ideas framed in such a context. After all, framing ideas in new ways and allowing us the freedom to think about them again to possibly come to new conclusions/realizations is what good art is all about, and Bernard consistently delivers.