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4.15 AVERAGE
4.15 AVERAGE
challenging
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
dark
funny
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
emotional
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
It isn't comfortable being in the head of the narrator of Thomas Bernhard's The Woodcutters, but once you jump in there, it is hard to pull yourself back out -- this book is difficult to put down, and not only because it is all written as a single paragraph. It is the 1980s and our narrator finds himself back in Vienna after over twenty years of living abroad. He runs into some former friends that he used to idolize in the 1950s, but who he now hates. He confuses even himself by accepting an invitation to their artistic dinner honoring a Viennese actor and then surprises himself again by showing up. The narrative is the uninterrupted mental monologue of the narrator as he sits in his wing chair and watched the action of the party as it goes late into the night. We go back and forth in time, get snippets of a friend's funeral from earlier in the day, and hear in great detail about the narrator's feelings for his former friends, their art, and Viennese society in general. So amazingly good.
50th book of 2022.
4/4.5. Maybe better than Concrete, actually I think it is, but not as good as Wittgenstein's Nephew which is going to be hard to top. Woodcutters is centred around a dinner party, an 'artistic dinner', in which are very Bernhardian narrator (indeed, as ever, perhaps simply Bernhard himself) is sitting in a winged chair for most of the duration and pouring scorn on the guests about him. It's a giant tirade against/about intellectualism, the bourgeoisie, hypocrisy, art and suicide. This novel was originally banned in Austria and though it's relatively hard to see why, when really there's nothing overtly shocking about it other than his spiky remarks, it's more interesting to think that this was actually banned, that those it was directed at were clearly alarmed by its honesty. This novel is like a caustic (the one word everyone uses (rightfully) to describe Bernhard) Proust, a bit like Vol. 3 of In Search of Lost Time where Proust uses a wild amount of satire and humour to rip apart the Parisian upper classes. Bernhard's humour is very different but they are both tolling the same bell. Like all of Bernhard's novels this is one continuous paragraph from start to finish with no indentation or paragraphing. You have to read Bernhard in long concentrated chunks otherwise he's near-on impossible. I think Bernhard is up there with the great prose writers just because his sentences have such fantastic cadence and rhythm, which sadly goes unnoticed until you start reading it in 50 page blocks. The most striking philosophy from this novel though is the narrator attacking his own hypocrisy (as all of Bernhard's narrator attack themselves as well as their targets), the idea that we have friends we 'hate', that we 'hate' our homelands, etc., but we also don't, we can't live without them. Many times over the last few years especially I've thought cruelly about people I love, the place I live, in some strange attempt/desire to breakaway and live a completely different and somehow better life. These are on the most part delusions, and Bernhard identifies this in his horrific way. How so many of us love and hate at once, because perhaps we are always so unsure of ourselves.
4/4.5. Maybe better than Concrete, actually I think it is, but not as good as Wittgenstein's Nephew which is going to be hard to top. Woodcutters is centred around a dinner party, an 'artistic dinner', in which are very Bernhardian narrator (indeed, as ever, perhaps simply Bernhard himself) is sitting in a winged chair for most of the duration and pouring scorn on the guests about him. It's a giant tirade against/about intellectualism, the bourgeoisie, hypocrisy, art and suicide. This novel was originally banned in Austria and though it's relatively hard to see why, when really there's nothing overtly shocking about it other than his spiky remarks, it's more interesting to think that this was actually banned, that those it was directed at were clearly alarmed by its honesty. This novel is like a caustic (the one word everyone uses (rightfully) to describe Bernhard) Proust, a bit like Vol. 3 of In Search of Lost Time where Proust uses a wild amount of satire and humour to rip apart the Parisian upper classes. Bernhard's humour is very different but they are both tolling the same bell. Like all of Bernhard's novels this is one continuous paragraph from start to finish with no indentation or paragraphing. You have to read Bernhard in long concentrated chunks otherwise he's near-on impossible. I think Bernhard is up there with the great prose writers just because his sentences have such fantastic cadence and rhythm, which sadly goes unnoticed until you start reading it in 50 page blocks. The most striking philosophy from this novel though is the narrator attacking his own hypocrisy (as all of Bernhard's narrator attack themselves as well as their targets), the idea that we have friends we 'hate', that we 'hate' our homelands, etc., but we also don't, we can't live without them. Many times over the last few years especially I've thought cruelly about people I love, the place I live, in some strange attempt/desire to breakaway and live a completely different and somehow better life. These are on the most part delusions, and Bernhard identifies this in his horrific way. How so many of us love and hate at once, because perhaps we are always so unsure of ourselves.
funny
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Ich gebe zu, dass mich die ersten 40 Seiten schockiert haben. Praktisch das ganze Buch ist ein reiner Bewusstseinsstrom, bei dem es Gott sei Dank wenigstens eine Interpunktion gibt. Nachdem ich den Schock überwunden hatte, auch dank einer Wikipedia-Recherche, die mir nicht nur einen Kontext, sondern auch einige weitere Erklärungen lieferte, muss ich zugeben, dass mir diese bissige Darstellung der Wiener Gesellschaft, die zum Beispiel sehr gut auf ein Berliner Büro zutreffen könnte, eine gewisse Befriedigung verschaffte.
Ammetto che le prime 40 pagine mi hanno scioccato. Praticamente tutto il libro non é che un flusso di coscienza, dove grazie a Dio, c'é almeno la punteggiatura. Superato lo schock, anche grazie ad una ricerca su wikipedia che mi ha fornito non solo un contesto ma anche qualche ulteriore spiegazione, devo ammettere che questo rendiconto al vetriolo della societá viennese, che potrebbe per esempio, applicarsi benissimo ad un ufficio berlinese, mi ha dato una certa soddisfazione.
Ammetto che le prime 40 pagine mi hanno scioccato. Praticamente tutto il libro non é che un flusso di coscienza, dove grazie a Dio, c'é almeno la punteggiatura. Superato lo schock, anche grazie ad una ricerca su wikipedia che mi ha fornito non solo un contesto ma anche qualche ulteriore spiegazione, devo ammettere che questo rendiconto al vetriolo della societá viennese, che potrebbe per esempio, applicarsi benissimo ad un ufficio berlinese, mi ha dato una certa soddisfazione.
Having managed to avoid the garish theatrical milieu of Vienna for over a quarter of a century, the death of a mutual friend inadvertently plunges the narrator back into the artistic coterie he despised for its artificiality. An 'artistic dinner' is being given in honour of a Burgtheatre actor. He's beyond late. During an endless wait, from his wing chair in the grand dining room of the Auersbergers, the narrator sees how such a society comports itself and gives vent to a city that demolishes genius and to the guests who have nothing to offer but mediocrity. Best line ever: ‘to serve potato soup at a quarter to one in the morning and announce that a boiled pike is to follow is a perversion of which only the Auersbergers are capable.’ It's brilliant, compelling and hilarious and as far as I'm aware, due to the auto-fictional nature, was the subject of a legal battle as the real-life Auersberger - Austrian composer Lampersberg could be identified.
He's not so purblind as to let his own mendacity go unchecked, however, but Bernhard could be describing the kind of cultural dilettantism that exists in every city in the world: 'They’ve betrayed literature and art for the sake of a few ludicrous prizes and a guaranteed pension, kowtowing to the state and its cultural riffraff, churning out their derivative kitsch for the vilest of motives and spending their time going up and down the back stairs of the ministries that dole out subventions.' The repetitive prose creates a kind of anxiety or uncanny disquiet that put me in mind of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, written a decade later, about a pianist lost in a frustrating psychological drama.
He's not so purblind as to let his own mendacity go unchecked, however, but Bernhard could be describing the kind of cultural dilettantism that exists in every city in the world: 'They’ve betrayed literature and art for the sake of a few ludicrous prizes and a guaranteed pension, kowtowing to the state and its cultural riffraff, churning out their derivative kitsch for the vilest of motives and spending their time going up and down the back stairs of the ministries that dole out subventions.' The repetitive prose creates a kind of anxiety or uncanny disquiet that put me in mind of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, written a decade later, about a pianist lost in a frustrating psychological drama.
I don't generally like, or even read, books that an author uses to publicly shame a circle of real life friends or ex-partners etc. But after loving The Loser I wanted to read this highly praised one and it turned out to be worth of all those positive reviews. This book is a description of a dinner party held after the funeral of a memeber of a circle of friends who are part of the art scene in Vienna. Bernhard's style of not using paragraphs (which bothered me a bit in The Loser) makes perfect sense in Woodcutters; it makes the inner monologue of the story teller more manic and frantic. The writing is brilliant and psychologically observant. Bernhard uses a lot of repetition which makes the thought patterns appear more authentic; the thoughts go in circles and come back to things the character is most obsessed about. Highly recommend to all those readers who love a good study in human behaviour and the mind!
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes