A black comedy of manners in which Bernhard portrays Viennese bourgeois society, the theatre world, and civilization itself. The narrator has spent the last 30 years in London. On a brief trip to Vienna he meets a couple he knew in his youth, who tell him of the suicide of another mutual friend.

Cutting timber: An irritation

BERNHARD, THOMAS

Vintage

An autobiography which traces Bernhard's life and interests in music, theatre, poetry and writing.

Gathering Evidence a Memoir

TRAFALGAR SQUARE +

Old Masters (1985) is Thomas Bernhard's devilishly funny story about the friendship between two old men. For over thirty years Reger, a music critic, has sat on the same bench in front of a Tintoretto painting in a Viennese museum, thinking and railing against contemporary society, his fellow men, artists, the weather, even the state of public lavatories. His friend Atzbacher has been summoned to meet him, and through his eyes we learn more about Reger - the tragic death of his wife, his thoughts of suicide and, eventually, the true purpose of their appointment. At once pessimistic and exuberant, rancorous and hilarious, Old Masters is a richly satirical portrait of culture, genius, nationhood, class, the value of art and the pretensions of humanity.

Old Masters (Penguin Modern Classics)

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Penguin Classics

Thomas Bernhard is one of the greatest twentieth-century writers in the German language. Extinction, his last novel, takes the form of the autobiographical testimony of Franz-Josef Murau. The intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family, Murau lives in Rome in self-exile. Obsessed and angry with his identity as an Austrian, he resolves never to return to the family estate of Wolfsegg. But when news comes of his parents' deaths, he finds himself master of Wolfsegg and must decide its fate.Written in Bernhard's seamless style, Extinction is the ultimate proof of his extraordinary literary genius."Strangely gripping. The glue that holds his remarkable novel together is the unique virtuosity of his imaginative prose, a highly original kind of writing that resembles musical patterns of theme, variations and recapitulation."—Steve Dowden, Washington Times"With a breathtaking sustained intensity . . . Bernhard assaults through the voice of Murau the modern world as exemplified by his birthplace, Austria."—Thomas McGonigle, Chicago Tribune Books"Perfectly balanced and continually interesting. . . . The particular fineness of Extinction lies in its depiction of a consciousness in action."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World"Bernhard's distinctive style . . . is caught with quite remarkable fidelity in David McLintock's excellent translation . . . . The work of a master."—W.E. Yates, New York Times Book Review"When Thomas Bernhard died, Austria lost one of its bravest authors . . . . David McLintock's translation . . . is exquisite. It presents an English far richer than most English language books . . . . Fresh, disturbed and punchy."—Benjamin Weissman, Los Angeles Times

Extinction: A Novel (Phoenix Fiction)

University of Chicago Press

The Loser is a brilliant fictional account of an imaginary relationship among three men—the late piano virtuoso Glenn Gould, the unnamed narrator, and a fictional pianist, Wertheimer—who meet in 1953 to study with Vladimir Horowitz. In the face of Gould's incomparable genius, Wertheimer and the narrator renounce their musical ambition, but in very different ways. While the latter sets out to write a book about Gould, Wertheimer sinks deep into despair and self-destruction. "Like Swift, Bernhard writes like a sacred monster. . . . A remarkable literary performer: [he] goes to extremes in ways that vivify our sense of human possibilities, however destructive."—Richard Locke, Wall Street Journal "The excellence of Bernhard—and it is a kind virtuosity, ably maintained in this American translation—is to make his monotonous loathing not only sting but also, like Gould at the piano, sing."—Paul Griffiths, Times Literary Supplement "[He is] one of the century's most gifted writers."—David Plott, Philadelphia Inquirer "America has been sadly immune to the charm and challenge of Bernhard's work and the American public has deprived itself of the deep and serious pleasure of reading one of the great writers of this century. . . . One of the great works of world literature. Its arrival on these shores is a significant literary event."—Thomas McGonigle, New York Newsday

The Loser: A Novel (Phoenix Fiction)

The narrator, a scientist working on antibodies and suffering from emotional and mental illness, meets a Persian woman, the companion of a Swiss engineer, at an office in rural Austria. For the scientist, his endless talks with the strange Asian woman mean release from his condition, but for the Persian woman, as her own circumstances deteriorate, there is only one answer. "Thomas Bernhard was one of the few major writers of the second half of this century."—Gabriel Josipovici, Independent "With his death, European letters lost one of its most perceptive, uncompromising voices since the war."—Spectator Widely acclaimed as a novelist, playwright, and poet, Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) won many of the most prestigious literary prizes of Europe, including the Austrian State Prize, the Bremen and Brüchner prizes, and Le Prix Séguier.

Yes (Phoenix Fiction)

Contemporary

In this exuberantly satirical novel, the tutor Atzbacher has been summoned by his friend Reger to meet him in a Viennese museum. While Reger gazes at a Tintoretto portrait, Atzbacher—who fears Reger's plans to kill himself—gives us a portrait of the musicologist: his wisdom, his devotion to his wife, and his love-hate relationship with art. With characteristically acerbic wit, Bernhard exposes the pretensions and aspirations of humanity in a novel at once pessimistic and strangely exhilarating. "Bernhard's . . . most enjoyable novel."—Robert Craft, New York Review of Books. "Bernhard is one of the masters of contemporary European fiction."—George Steiner

Old Masters: A Comedy (Phoenix Fiction)

Humor & Satire

It is 1967, in a Viennese hospital. In separate wards: the narrator named Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of Ludwig Wittgenstein, is suffering fom one of his periodic bouts of madness. Bernhard traces the growth of an intense friendship between two eccentric, obsessive men who share a passion for music, a strange sense of humor, brutal honesty, and a disgust for bourgeois Vienna. "[Wittgenstein's Nephew is] a meditative fugue for mad, brilliant voices on the themes of death, death-in-life and the artist's and thinker's role in society . . . oddly moving and funny at the same time."—Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune "Mr. Bernhard's memoir about Paul Wittgenstein is a 'confession and a guilty homage to their friendship; it takes the place of the graveside speech he never delivered. In its obsessive, elegant rhythms and narrative eloquence, it resembles a tragic aria by Richard Strauss. . . . This is a memento mori that approaches genius.'"—Richard Locke, Wall Street Journal

Wittgenstein's Nephew: A Friendship (Phoenix Fiction)

"Bernhard's prose is lapidary and translucent in its vocabulary, but sinuous and formidably dense in its phrasing. This prose enacts the essential motif of the novel: the notion that every 'correction' is also a negation . . . . The remarkable point is the extent to which the ascetic compactness of Bernhard's style turns these abstractions into a sensory presence . . . . [Bernhard's] connections, at once developmental and contrastive, with the great 'Austrian' constellation of Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Musil and Broch become ever clearer."—George Steiner, Times Literary Supplement "Correction is something exceedingly rare among novels of recent years: a paradigm of consciousness and not simply a product . . . . Bernhard has said that 'the art we need is the art of bearing the unbearable,' and his novel joins that small group of literary works which nobly help us to do that."—Richard Gilman, The Nation "It is high time that we keep Bernhard firmly in our mind, as European readers have been doing for many years now."—Peter Demetz, Christian Science Monitor

Correction (Phoenix Fiction)

Histrionics: Three Plays

Although he is best known in the United States as a novelist, Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard has been hailed in Europe as one of the most significant and controversial of contemporary playwrights. George Steiner has predicted that the current era in German-language literature will be recognized as the "Bernhard period"; John Updike compares Bernhard with Kafka, Grass, Handke, and Weiss. His dark, absurdist plays can be likened to those of Beckett and Pinter, but their cultural and political concerns are distinctly Bernhard's. While Austria's recent political history lends particular credibility to Bernhard's satire, his criticisms are directed at the modern world generally; his plays grapple with questions of totalitarianism and the subjection of the individual and with notions of reality and appearance.

Dramas & Plays

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