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buddhafish 's review for:
Woodcutters
by Sezer Duru, Thomas Bernhard
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.