Prose
Published on 10. August 2010
Book
Hardback
180 pages
978-1-906497-56-9 (ISBN)
Description
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'.
Reviews / Votes
"His manner of speaking, like that of all the subordinated, excluded, was awkward, like a body full of wounds, into which at any time anyone can strew salt, yet so insistent, that it is painful to listen to him." - from "The Carpenter" "Bernhard's glorious talent for bleak existential monologues is second only to Beckett's, and seems to have sprung up fully mature in his mesmerizing debut." - Publishers Weekly, on Frost. "The feeling grows that Thomas Bernhard is the most original, concentrated novelist writing in German. His connections... with the great constellation of Kafka, Musil, and Broch become ever clearer." - George Steiner, "Times Literary Supplement", on "Gargoyles". "What is extraordinary about Bernhard is that his relentless pessimism never seems open to ridicule; his world is so powerfully imagined that it can seem to surround you like little else in literature." - "New Yorker"More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Greenford
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 22 mm
Width: 16 mm
Thickness: 2 mm
Weight
340 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-906497-56-9 (9781906497569)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Thomas Bernhard grew up in Salzburg and Vienna, where he studied music. In 1957 he began a second career as a playwright, poet, and novelist. He went on to win many of the most prestigious literary awards of Europe. Martin Chalmers is a translator and editor whose translations include works by Hubert Fichte, Ernst Weiss, Herta Mueller, Alexander Kluge, Emine Sevgi Oezdamar, and Erich Hackl.