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Please try again later. The longest diatribe in the book belongs to Wertheimer reported by the narrator , an attack on modern philosophy as nothing but bad aphorisms reduced from the books of the great philosophers of the past. It runs for six pages and, naturally, begins and ends with an aphorism. Man is unhappiness, he said over and over, I thought, These are distinct from diatribes which are a special instance of digression. Digression is a form of delay dramatized through suspension. In the following example, the innkeeper asks the narrator for a report on Wertheimer's funeral upon which the narrator launches into a two-page discussion of real estate in Vienna and the Austrian economy—note that the narrator identifies the passage as a digression for the reader.
Through the digression, the answer to the innkeeper's request for details of Wertheimer's funeral is held in suspense, and, naturally, as soon as the narrator returns to the subject of the funeral he lapses into another digression. Naturally I could only give her a fragmentary report, I started by saying I'd been to Vienna, occupied with the sale of my apartment, a large apartment I said But I didn't sell the apartment As I say, hyperbole underlies all Bernhard's structural dispositions; it is the super-trope governing stressed form. But sometimes Bernhard is just exuberantly hyperbolic for the fun of it or these could be described as mini-diatribes, miniature lapses into intemperate invective.
When it rains here for six or seven weeks without stopping and the local inhabitants go crazy in this unstoppable rain, I thought, one has to have tremendous discipline not to kill oneself. But half the people here kill themselves sooner or later What lousy teachers we had to put up with, teachers who screwed up our heads. Art destroyers all of them, art liquidators, culture assassins, murderers of students. The authorial lung disease shared by four characters in the novel is a good example of the way Bernhard is always interacting playfully with the real world through the text.
It is his personal and factual lung disease growing microbial on the page. But Bernhard also uses allegorical set-pieces to connect The Loser with to create a dramatic implied conversation with—this is its aesthetic function, to create textual interest by multiplying dramatic exchanges a larger historical context, especially Austria's history with Nazis and the Holocaust. Ironic Mis-appropriation of Fact: Bernhard's fictional dramatic confrontation with reality goes beyond the comic use of his own lung disease and allegorical reference to the use of an actual person Glenn Gould in his text, which is actually a misuse for he gets Glenn Gould glaringly and hilariously wrong on purpose.
Glenn Gould was a real life Canadian piano virtuoso who earned instant fame for his early recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations. And he did stop performing publicly at the height of his celebrity after a brief career. Beyond that he bears no resemblance to Glenn Gould in Bernhard's novel. Gould never studied with Horowitz Horowitz never taught , never studied in Salzburg, didn't speak German fluently, never had a country place outside of New York he lived most of his life in Toronto , his parents weren't wealthy, and he died of a stroke at 50, not 51, in his sleep, not at the piano playing the Goldberg Variations.
The real Glenn Gould was a prolific author of essays and scripts unlike the fictional Glenn Gould who, the narrator claims, didn't write at all. These are deliberate distortions of fact in order to create a Glenn Gould who conforms to the needs of the novel's structure and also to juice the novel's dramatic encounter with reality, the real world beyond the text. Bernhard's bold-faced, flat-out lies about Glenn Gould are immensely comic in part because it is so obvious that he is playing that game: What is true here?
And what is a half-truth based upon a truth?
In the novel Gould is portrayed as the ideal of the romantic artist, a genius, eccentric, self-conscious, obsessive, concentrated, and immune to the doubt that plagues his friends. But he is also arrogant, cruel and inhuman. Glenn Gould said the word loser out loud in a crucial moment , I thought. We say a word and destroy a person. We get inside music completely or not at all, Glenn often said He also gets drunk and pops champagne corks at the Nazi statues.
Glenn Gould thus is another paradox in a novel built on contradictions: None of this is real or meant to be real. Except for the first page, as I say, the entire novel consists of one paragraph of character thought, a single, unstoppable column of prose weaving in and out of content topics, plot and figure and trope, without a discrete stop along the way Bernhard will even shift from one content stream to another on a comma in the middle of a sentence, with no logical or grammatical transition , so that it is all a trope, an image, oddly fragmented but with the fragments glued back together such that it resembles the thought-ravings of a madman who cannot control the logorrheic flow, not even minimally by breaking it into conventional logical segments called paragraphs.
Over and over, the reader senses that the narrator is thinking fast to prevent himself from thinking, his thoughts always implying an excess they dare not express although the narrator does let slip many very clear pointers. The entire text is framed within an implied conflict—the narrator's resistance to a truth he cannot face—and this conflict propels the text forward with a mysterious urgency.
The desperate, compulsive, and transparently self-serving if not delusional nature of the narrator's thoughts in turn motivates the stressed form characteristic of the prose. The mechanical elaborations of grammatical yoking are desperate attempts on the part of the narrator to appear logical and analytical even as he is constantly dropping into spiraling word repetitions, fugue stops, digressions, and self-revealing tirades.
But the disorder is only a semblance of disorder. Hyperbole and absurdity subvert every aspect of Bernhard's novel; hyperbole is the constant marker for irony, the double sign that destroys the fictional facade of plausibility and univocal meaning and points to a second meaning that is absent in the text. This is the ultimate moment of ambiguity and difficulty, the text announcing that it doesn't mean what it says it means. There are reasons for this difficulty, this incomprehensibility.
One reason perhaps the least interesting is political, the collapse of trust in the German language shared by almost all thinking writers of German after the Second World War. This is perhaps true in spades for Austrian writers, coming from a country whose unforced complicity in that Nazi horror show is still denied. How do you write the truth in a language of lies when the Nazi statues are so huge they can't be moved out of the cultural house? The answer is that you draw attention to the corruption of the German language by writing in corrupt, unbeautiful, incorrect, unclear German.
You use language to attack itself. If language cannot express the truth, the secret horror at the back of history, then you write in a way that draws attention to the paradox of writing in a language that cannot write the truth—in so doing, you somehow draw attention to, implicate, limn, the truth. A second reason for incomprehensibility is philosophical. Kant drew a line between the real world and the world of existence where we live: But paradoxically even the conscious subject, the person who thinks, cannot appear to itself as an object; the heart cannot know its reasons.
The great Viennese wealthy, Jewish, neurasthenic, suicidal philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein drew the noose even tighter by defining language as a limiting concept; ultimately language cannot speak the truth but can only talk about itself, play with itself pun intended.
Modern philosophy after Kant is famously difficult stylistically, mainly because philosophers have had to work around the central problem that, by definition , they cannot talk about what they are talking about. Difficulty and incomprehensibility become aesthetic virtues after Kant perhaps not what he intended ; clarity and formal neatness are marks of fantasy or prevarication.
Hence the tradition of German Romanticism, a paradoxical aesthetic based on the impossibility of creating beauty. What goes for beauty in novels, paintings, symphonies are only failed attempts to create beauty, which is otherworldly, unconditioned, absolute, sublime in the Kantian sense and beyond language. German Romanticism is a hyper-realist aesthetic in the sense that it values works of art that represent their own inevitable failure. In contrast to the ideal of classical unity, it values fragments, digressions, interruptions, mixed forms, incompleteness, difficulty, and, above all, irony.
Friedrich Schlegel famously defended difficulty in his essay "On Incomprehensibility," which is really an essay about the role of irony in a post-Kantian literature. Irony in its original form comes in two basic varieties: Irony is that moment in a text when the author glances up at the reader and says, You realize, of course, that this isn't real, that what I put on the page is not what I mean. Always the literalist, Plato condemned Ironists at the same time as Sophists and Poets.
To German Romantics, the novel is the great modern example of ironic form, and the novel tradition out of which they write begins with Cervantes' Don Quixote a book about an insane person, about 50, in a quest for the absolute and descends through Laurence Sterne and Denis Diderot, the masters of digression, delay and self-parody. The Loser is very much a novel-as-performance , both image and allegory, more image than discursive thought yet very much a novel of ideas with the ideas implicit in the structure, action, and style.
The Loser fictionalizes the European version of nostalgia for Being the American version is a retreat to fundamentalist Christianity and a sense of living in a fallen existential world. It presents three men whose goal is to become transcendent artists; one succeeds, the other two fail, and their psychomachia is rather a soul-unmaking or disintegration leading to paralysis and the one authentic act left, suicide. While I had empathy for all the three as they possessed no massive blemishes on their hearts, I could not warm upto them for they bordered on the sunshine but never bothered to usher it in, even through the doors of unhappiness and dry humor.
They basked in unhappiness way too much and I felt rashes on my skin, unexpectedly. The Loser is a tag Glenn gives Wertheimer on the first day of their meeting. But I could not help but wonder why Wertheimer was a loser in his suicide and Glenn was not, in his exile? Or for that matter, our narrator, in his directionless transit?
It was like a fabulous soprano, which reached its crescendo during the first half and all I did afterwards, was search its mellifluous vibrations in the rest of the piece. I have never admired anything but have marvelled at many things during my life and I, can say, have marvelled the most in my life. I did marvel at Bernhard though. Repetitive yet fresh, discoloured yet brilliant, his style was the strong ribs of his unusual plot. Bernhard once said on his writing: View all 36 comments.
View all 47 comments. Mar 22, May 20, Lee rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: Funnier and nastier and less full of shit than anything I've ever read.
Glenn Gould, the one true piano genius. One paragraph for pages! Few sentences extended over the course of the book in fugue state. Sort of like lame-ass literary fiction if you removed every standard literary convention plot, dialogue, setting, scenes and just freakin' mainlined the narrator's consciousness: I Funnier and nastier and less full of shit than anything I've ever read.
I remember Marilynne Robinson a Bach lover, same as Wertheimer, same as Glenn Gould saying no writers really represent human as opposed to alien? Plus, again, you'll laugh out loud LOL like 12 times, which isn't a bad number for a book about encountering a true piano genius Glenn Gould and either quitting piano the narrator or killing yourself Wertheimer. Highly recommended to all people who are looking for something a little bit different formally and maybe also totally awesome thematically.
Nov 26, David rated it it was amazing Shelves: Recommended soundtrack for this review. Of course Thomas Bernhard's The Loser covers some of the usual Bernhardian terrain -- misanthropy, madness, death, all the fun stuff really -- but failure is the real star of this show. The 'Loser' of the title, named Wertheimer, was unfortunate enough both to have been a gifted piano player and to have studied contemporaneously with piano legend Glenn Gould, whose life and genius -- albeit in a somewhat fictionalized form -- haunt Wertheimer until he is at Recommended soundtrack for this review.
The 'Loser' of the title, named Wertheimer, was unfortunate enough both to have been a gifted piano player and to have studied contemporaneously with piano legend Glenn Gould, whose life and genius -- albeit in a somewhat fictionalized form -- haunt Wertheimer until he is at long last able to 'assert himself' [as the narrator puts it] for the first time -- by committing suicide just outside his sister's Swiss home.
It's this final act of defiance against a world he cannot master that is his one success. The unnamed narrator of the novel, another failure who has languished in Gould's long shadow, also turns his back on piano playing resolutely, and yet with some measure of seeming equanimity. Even though music is all he's really cut out to do, the piano has been irrevocably ruined for him by Gould's brilliance, his native ability, his setting of a standard neither to be met or outstripped.
It was ruined the first time he heard Gould play The Goldberg Variations while still studying in Salzburg under Horowitz. Gould was still a student then, an apprentice -- but even his performance of Bach as a relative novice destroyed the promising careers of the narrator and Wertheimer. It was impossible to carry on after hearing Gould. Everything else was -- must be superfluous. But while the narrator attempts to shut out the past, to avoid it altogether, drifting vaguely through life, Wertheimer becomes a willing, ecstatic victim of the past.
He becomes the Loser, as Gould anoints him, not without blunt humor or insight.
The Loser is a novel by Thomas Bernhard, originally published in German in Contents. 1 Plot introduction; 2 Plot summary; 3 Allusions to actual events. The Losers is a American action film based on the adaptation of the Vertigo comic book series of the same name by Andy Diggle and Jock. Directed by.
As Gould intuits, Wertheimer is doomed to perish, body and soul, in his adjacency to the genius and accomplishment of others. There is no contentment, no grace or dignity, for the also-ran, who acknowledges his insignificance, his insufficiency in the field of his 'calling' or his ordained vocation.
When the foundation has been proven rotten, decayed, inadequate, the entire structure in its turn gives way. And so Wertheimer one day travels to his sister's house in Switzerland -- the sister he dominated until she escaped -- and kills himself. He even failed at dominating his weak sister, at terrorizing her into abjection, so he elects to fail comprehensively. To yield to failure, to succeed at failing. The themes of The Loser will immediately be recognizable to anyone who has made any tentative venture into a field particularly an artistic field only to be stymied by the mastery of others.
If Shakespeare and Dostoevsky have done their part, for instance, what can my writings add to the collective pool to make it worth the effort? In the shadow of the Canon, the ridiculous things I jot down, more like notes and scribbles than literature, can only be signposts of my vulgarity and inferiority rather than assertions of something original and meaningful.
I can assert my failure, like Wertheimer, or I can flee from it as best as I can, like the narrator. Neither is an attractive option, of course, but the neurosis of the artist evokes this dilemma, even if logically he realizes that the question is entirely disingenuous. There is an interesting and informative afterword to the Vintage International edition of The Loser , written by Mark M. Anderson, which discusses how the events of the book relate to Bernhard's life and how Bernhard selectively altered the details of Glenn Gould's life to suit his narrative purposes.
Also, the essay begins with an example of Bernhard's bitter humor with respect to his country of residence Austria, for which he harbored an intense ambivalence throughout his life: During his lifetime Thomas Bernhard's texts provoked more than an ordinary share of scandals. But perhaps the most enduring scandal will turn out to be his very last text, his will: This parting slap in the face of his native country thus came not only as a surprise; it came from the hand of a dead man, whose laughter rang out from the grave.
View all 10 comments. Or well, a long internal monologue that rambles on and on without any pauses. He always read books that were obsessed with suicide, with disease and death, I thought while standing in the inn, books that described human misery, the hopeless, meaningless, senseless world in which everything is always devastating and deadly. That's why he especially loved Dostoevsky and all his disciples, Russian literature in general, because it actually is a deadly literature, but also the depressing French philosophers.
I read somewhere that the three characters can be analyzed as an Ego narrator , Id Wertheimer and Superego Glenn , which is such an interesting approach, that I will have on mind when I come back to this novel and I would like to analyze them in detail, there is so much material to be contemplated upon in this pages long novel and I might write a longer review in the future. It is not even that I intellectually agree with everything Bernhard writes nihilistic, pessimistic and fatalistic fellow readers definitely would enjoy his thinking on the highest level but it somehow resonates with me and shakes my soul, like a true piece of art that challenges you to see the world differently and wake up from your usual delusions.
We should observe and treat people not from our point of view but from all angles, I thought, associate with them in such a way that we can say we associate with them so to speak in a completely unbiased way, which however isn't possible, since we actually are always biased against everybody. Highly recommend to everyone. View all 14 comments. Jan 04, Mariel rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: The hopeless catch in the throat part of the heart that swallows down all when it's not easy.
The have to be a Loser, Philosopher or Genius. Those mistakes over and over again.
The starry velvet mental goldmine has had some horrific accident and you should have known not to step there already. My goodreads friends say that The Loser is laugh out loud funny. I shook my head in a recognition kind of way. It started to feel like reliving an embarrassing moment and pretending you can laugh about it now because you feel like you should be able to laugh about it by now. I don't know if it was quite humor to me. It's not sad and it's not funny because it's not making something more out of what already is, like art.
It's more like if you could cut the hole out of the heart and compared it to the black hole they would fit together like left and right. I guess it's funny like how irony is funny because I never really know why I'm moved to some laughter-like impulse I don't understand irony or anything else. Have I ever laughed like Glenn Gould? Not if anyone else was around, I know that. I wouldn't have waited for Glenn Gould to assign me The Loser. Do you sit down at the table and not expect to get punished? Or not sit at all. Maybe stand in the doorway of the inn, thinking?
I don't care about the what is the use when there's Glenn Gould I can imagine being Glenn Gould and starting to wonder behind that barricade about not composing like Bach, if you stepped outside of the music when you really shouldn't do that. The other day I read Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet great and he had some advice about how you shouldn't write if it wasn't something you would die over if you couldn't do it. I'm more walking the tight rope lines of David Foster Wallace's fiction is what it is to be a fucking human being something like that. They both put it better than I could.
I only live it now, as they did in theirs. I wouldn't want to do anything if I couldn't feel a story in everything. It's all the not expecting to get punished thing. The Loser isn't about not being the best in music or anything else. It's not ever being able to get over the feelings to avoid and you're always barricaded and always lost. What would they have done if they had never met Glenn Gould?
My suspicion is that they would have been all for Genius if they had felt they belonged with it. It's a lonely feeling to not go that high. If you're one of those people who talk all of the time and never listen. I know shit about philosophy. I wouldn't have known about allusions to Wittgenstein without other goodreads reviews I have seen the movie with Tilda Swinton in it.
My version of their never-gonna-rock-me-Amadeus is feeling stupid in the face of what appears to me to be clear-eyed clarity compared to my cataract confusion. What I know is that I can relate way too much to feeling bad. My heart broke for our narrator that he could never get himself to tell that story about Gould or Wertheimer it goes without saying that the only person I truly felt sorry for was Wertheimer's sister.
Please, don't ever let me be a sister in a Thomas Bernhard novel. It's like being the piano and eliminating Gould to just play some Bach. I know all about that. If you want to talk about genius in strumming those inner violin chords of self pity and acoustics of loneliness and that shit It is what it is and how it can be that way and not what it could be, with a leap.
And the art is in the listening. I wonder what would have happened if they could keep it up every day, all of the time, of feeling good enough. Or seen somewhere they wanted to belong. The trio probably wouldn't have need fortresses I "discovered" this Austrian musician while in Germany last year.
Um, no one ever, uh, played him any Glenn Gould recordings? Why wasn't he stopped? No wonder Bernhard hates Austrians! And I want to read this Glenn Gould biography. Otto Friedrich can fricking tell a story. His City of Nets was pretty damned perfect. Talk about not being able to catch a break! My first wife, Mary Quattro, played the spoons in the Intergalactic Pipe Cleaners , a polka and celtic disco band who kept audiences enthralled with their wild interpretations of traditionals in the style of Ottawan and other disco groovers. She was forever in the shadow of Niles Vee, a percussionist of rare merit, who was at home on maracas and spoons.
This outrageous two-instrument skill was impossible for poor Mary to beat, so she spent her life in a permanent rage against this otherwise harmless bearded man who liked smoothies and taking things at a sluggish pace. I had to divorce Mary when she brought her fiftieth Niles Vee voodoo mannequin into the flat. Sometimes there are limits to love. Have you ever sat in an airport and tried to match the face to the destination? This is a fun distraction.
Who are we to assume plump red-faced men in suits are heading for Amsterdam, or that tanning-bed turkeys are destined for Ibiza? Mary was always chiding me for these attitudes, despite my guesses usually being right, and humans being as predictable as their behaviour repeatedly proves them to be. Sono sicuro che in molti sconsiglierebbero la lettura consecutiva di due romanzi di Bernhard, ma io me ne infischio. Ah, cari soccombenti, siamo in tanti, forse la maggioranza. Bernhard non ha nulla del tormento che attanaglia i giovani umani: Eh no, lo stile conta, altrimenti il contenuto va a farsi benedire.
Dec 12, rahul rated it it was amazing. This book should be hidden inside the dust jackets of all the self help books out there. You don't need help once you realize that helplessness is the basic condition that surrounds us. Helplessness of a genius to be that way and of the Loser to struggle against this helplessness. And I think my suicide gets delayed, until I have finished reading all what he has written.
Lets understand suicide before committing to it. Mar 29, Bern rated it it was amazing. If you are fond of classical music, you will probably like this novel. The world of musicians, their hopes and ambitions are skillfully depicted. I also liked the idea that the story is fictionalised about the great pianist Glen Gould's real story. Un cammino impervio, soprattutto per i due protagonisti che si devono confrontare con il genio assoluto del piano, ovvero Glenn Gould. Di fronte alla bravura di un talento di questo calibro, si rischia di crollare, di soccombere e la tua vita si rivela un fallimento.
Wertheimer, the loner, had a piano delivered from Vienna and invited a crowd of "artists" to come and stay; then he proceeded to drive them out of the house with his incessant, incompetent piano-playing; they destroyed his furniture, drank his booze, and then he finally paid for taxis to take them back to Vienna. Bernhard may be a complete original, I'm not sure, but take heed. Above all he is ironic, and the reader can never be sure whether Bernhard means what he says or is larking around with us. Legend of the Sword The Dark Tower I take my hat of to him, he makes me laugh and wince at the same time!.
Originalmente scritte per clavicembalo, sono state trasposte per pianoforte negli anni cinquanta del secolo scorso, specialmente grazie al geniale pianista canadese Glenn Gould. Bernhard, prendendo spunto proprio da Gould e le Goldberg, scrive un romanzo "circolare"'. Gli stessi temi sono incessantemente ripetuti, in modo continuo e ossessivo. Tre gli attori principali, tutti pianisti: Che quando comprende di non essere un genio e di non poterlo diventare, abbandona il pianoforte senza particolari traumi.
Un grande libro, che mi ha totalmente rappacificato con la scrittura di Bernhard, che ho trovato questa volta meravigliosa. If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review. Sep 08, Drew rated it really liked it.
Ever wondered if you were a genius? Or desperately wanted to be one? Plenty of novels have been written about genius from its own perspective; Ratner's Star and Infinite Jest are a couple of examples, though by no means the best ones.