Thomas Bernhard for life

January 17, 2007 5:54 PM

"I'm not my characters. I'd have to have killed myself hundreds of times and be perversity incarnate from five in the morning until ten at night." A 1986 interview with the late, great Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, published in German for the first time last year, now in English translation at signandsight.com.
posted by otio (18 comments total)

i've never heard of him--he sounds really interesting, but i can only read him in translation, which he says isn't him at all. thanks! : >
posted by amberglow at 6:38 PM on January 17, 2007 [1 favorite]

this i really loved: ...There are always traditions, conscious and unconscious. From reading and being alive since childhood, all that comes of its own accord. And because you're constantly throwing out what you don't like or what's bad from the beginning, you're left with what you want. Whether it's stupid or not is another question. Whether or not it's the right path, no one knows, every individual has their own path, and for that person every path is the right one. And now there are four and a half billion people, I think, and four and a half billion right paths. The misfortune of human beings is that they don't want to take the path, their own, they always want to take a different one. Striving and struggling towards something other than what they themselves are. Everyone is a great personality, whether they paint or sweep streets or write or... people always want something different. That's the misfortune of the world. ...
posted by amberglow at 6:41 PM on January 17, 2007

yeah, i really like him : >

But it all helps you get ahead, gives you something to live from, and life involves doing a load of nonsense. Life consists of one long succession of nonsense, a little bit of sense, but mostly nonsense. No matter who.
posted by amberglow at 6:43 PM on January 17, 2007

Bernhard sounded insufferable to me, pronouncing rather than conversing, and declaiming that conversation as such couldn't happen because of the stupidity of people, although talking to "simple people" was a pleasure, perhaps because stupid people rarely troubled to take him seriously in conversation. I'll grant that he seemed not to take conversation or intellectual effort or arts or anything really seriously either, so it probably was a pleasure to talk with people who didn't want to bother about all that kind of thing, but the sense that he's a disingenuous windbag doesn't dissipate because I share some of his misanthropy.

On the plus side, his talent as an artist has next to nothing to do with his quality as a human being, and I thank you for this post, otio. People who loathe their species and can speak plainly about it intrigue me, and Thomas Bernhard seems to be such a person.
posted by cgc373 at 6:55 PM on January 17, 2007

Isn't it tho that many European authors are expected to play the game tho---being public intellectuals and stuff? I've watched many Euro tv shows and things where it was an author on a panel with politicians and diplomats or just one-on-one about the world and all sorts of topics, and they were right at home (much more than ours, who are mostly ignored outside of their work)
posted by amberglow at 7:02 PM on January 17, 2007

If you want to read one of Bernhard's books, I suggest Correction.
posted by mekanic at 7:28 PM on January 17, 2007

Thanks for posting this.
posted by anticlock at 7:37 PM on January 17, 2007

Anyone who has a favorite bench is fine by me.

I was charmed by this image: "If someone is a great pianist then you can clear out the room where he's sitting with the piano, fill it with dust, and then start throwing buckets of water at him, but he'll stay put and keep on playing. Even if the house falls down around him, he'll carry on playing."

Thank you, otio, I had known Bernhard only as a name.
posted by Kattullus at 7:39 PM on January 17, 2007

Great writer. Misanthrope, certainly. Melancholic visionary? That too.

Another product of the land of Mozart, Freud and Hitler. You can get quite a powerful brew happening if you mash these three up.
posted by Wolof at 10:37 PM on January 17, 2007

Amusing title on that site, too. V Hegelian.
posted by Wolof at 10:43 PM on January 17, 2007

Bernhard's great and so is this -- thanks, otio!
posted by scody at 10:57 PM on January 17, 2007

I've never heard of him before this and am SO glad that I have now. Thank you.
posted by bunglin jones at 11:20 PM on January 17, 2007

By coincidence (?), there's an article on Bernhard in the current New York Review of Books. Subscribers only, unfortunately.
posted by russilwvong at 11:50 PM on January 17, 2007

There's an NYC event on February 18. Writers will read from Bernhard's work and talk about how he's influenced them. You can find out more at http://www.thomasbernhard.org.
posted by gwyon at 2:35 AM on January 18, 2007

Thanks for this. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I just read The Loser a couple of weeks ago, and as usual, I loved everything Bernhard had to say. I was thinking just this morning about the narrative technique in that book, the lightly touched on present and past framing, and wondering at how he could have gotten it so right.
posted by OmieWise at 7:02 AM on January 18, 2007

Yeah, OmieWise, his books are incredibly intricate, well-made things, but I couldn't see that at first. Nor could I see he's more than just a misanthrope, a fact this surprisingly hopeful interview ("life is pleasant and fun" is a phrase you wouldn't expect from Bernhard) makes clear. The first time I read The Loser I hated it. I read it through - it's pretty short - but it struck me then as a sort of caricature of teutonic gloominess and that relentless repetition seemed like either the tic of a sick mind or the gimmick of a savvy one. A few miserable years later, however, I picked it up again and laughed until it hurt. That drone I heard before became like the most beautiful music. I was hooked and that was that.

Thanks for the tips russilwvong and gwyon for the tips! I'll definitely be shelling out for the NYRB this month and maybe making it down to NY come February.
posted by otio at 7:50 AM on January 18, 2007

"I've got simple people at home at the moment. That's most agreeable, even if they do make a mess.".

Hey, that sounds exactly like my wife & kids.
posted by Siberian Mist at 7:53 AM on January 18, 2007

Yeah, I've always thought of him as above all a comic writer. Every one of his books that I've read, maybe four or five, has been really very, if blackly, funny.
posted by OmieWise at 8:12 AM on January 18, 2007