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A review of The Loser

by Thomas Bernhard (translated by Jack Dawson)

A radical, obsessed novel, ostensibly about Glenn Gould but really about life’s inevitable constant dead ends.

Reviewed by: Nancy Chapple
About Nancy Chapple

The Loser You’ve probably read lots of books that are separated into chapters, into paragraphs. OK, probably most books you’ve read have some sort of visible structure. Not Thomas Bernhard’s novels. Do you know any other author who repeats himself constantly, who takes words and phrases, sets them in italics, and has them crop up again and again? He takes a phrase, for instance "piano radicalism", and hammers it into you until you can only repeat it after him like a mantra. He starts out in a high gear of vituperative stream-of-consciousness and never lets up. Bernhard’s novels are just as much about wound-up, repetitive language itself as about the dead-ended frustration a thinking person can feel dealing with life’s conundrums.

It’s possible that The Loser, billed as a Glenn Gould novel, is displayed at your local bookstore next to lavish photo albums and CD packages devoted to the great pianist, whose death 20 years ago has become the occasion for a huge amount of (Sony-controlled) publicity. But this book doesn’t fit into the cult. It’s actually about obsession and about Austrian intellectuals’ favorite Hassobjekt: Austrian fustiness, provinciality, Philistinism.

In the several Bernhard novels I’ve read, a narrative framework is provided by creating a friend who is going through something difficult. Rather than describing what the narrator himself feels or thinks, Bernhard describes what the friend, one step away, thinks. In The Loser, it’s a double construct: the narrator, Wertheimer and Glenn Gould ostensibly all studied piano with Horowitz in the Austrian alps in the summer of 1953. "He said, I thought": this twice removed indirect discourse appears again and again. It shows us that an omniscient narrator is just a convenient fiction for storytellers, and that if they were honest, they’d have to constantly write in indirect speech, as Bernhard does.

"[Glenn] was killed by the impasse he had played himself into for almost forty years, I thought. He never gave up the piano, I thought, of course not, whereas Wertheimer and I gave up the piano because we never attained the inhuman state that Glenn attained, who by the way never escaped this inhuman state, who didn’t even want to escape this inhuman state."

"I understood that early on, I had hardly begun to think when I understood that: we talk just nonsense, everything we say is nonsense, but everything people say to us is also nonsense, as is everything that is said at all; only nonsense has been said in this world until now and, he said, in actual fact and as a matter of course only nonsense has been written; what we have in writing is just nonsense, since it can only be nonsense, as history proves, he said, I thought."

Every now and then you ask yourself – is it really all that bad? Why is Bernhard such a misanthrope? And then you find something that fits and you say, yeah, I’m afraid he’s right. In my case, having worked for years as a piano teacher before giving it up as a lost cause, it was, "Ninety eight percent of all conservatory students enter our musical academies with the highest demands and after finishing conservatory spend decades of their lives as so-called music teachers in a most ridiculous manner, I thought."

And why do I love this guy’s novels? First, I admire his stubborn determination to write consistently over decades in a manner that seems to make no concessions to us readers, and yet draws us in and mesmerises us. And then – and these are un-American thoughts – life is indeed ‘nasty, brutish and short’ and many people are dumb and stuck in their ways. Bernhard saw through the whole immense pretense.

Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: The Loser

Copyright © by Nancy Chapple, 2003

Reviewed by Nancy Chapple:
--Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited - by Vladimir Nabokov
--Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood - by Alexandra Fuller
--Jarhead - by Anthony Swofford
--Mao II - by Don DeLillo
--The Last Samurai - by Helen DeWitt
--A Perfect Spy - by John le Carré
--The Duke of Deception - by Geoffrey Wolff
--The Loser - by Thomas Bernhard
--A Room of One’s Own - by Virginia Woolf
--Ragtime - by E.L. Doctorow
--This Boy’s Life - by Tobias Wolff
-- From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler - by E. L. Konigsburg
--Into Thin Air - by Jon Krakauer
--Heart of Darkness - by Joseph Conrad
--Winter’s Tale - by Mark Helprin
--Harriet the Spy - by Louise Fitzhugh
--Dispatches - by Michael Herr
--Minor Characters - by Joyce Johnson
--Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs - by Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard
--The Complete Chronicles of Narnia - by C. S. Lewis
-- Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction - by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer
--Angela’s Ashes - by Frank McCourt
--Old Glory - by Jonathan Raban
-- Postmodern Pooh - by Frederick Crews









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