The Loser

This was the first book I read by Bernhard. I'm having trouble rating it, since it's not his best work but still worth 5 stars. The Loser definitively got me hooked on Bernhard and if you are reading this, thinking about reading him for the first time, there's nothing I can truthfully say to discourage you.

Read about Thomas Bernhard from an article on Susan Sontag. She was effusive about his work. The Loser is a meditation on the plight of the genius and his pursuit of artistic perfection. It's a dense novel--be prepared to trudge through a non-linear narrative and condensed prose. Indeed, as the translator points out, Bernhard doesn't use the language in a conventional way. His sentences are extended, complex, and the verb tenses are rarely in agreement. His narrator reminisces incidents from the past based on fragments of thoughts, freely skipping from one event to another, and often recounting an event numerous times. The Loser in the novel refers to Wertheimer. Both the narrator and Wertheimer were promising classical pianists before they met Elliot Gould in a seminar with Horowitz. Gould's sublime rendition of Bach's Goldberg Variations ended any illusion about their musical talent--not that they're without talent, but they fall short of the defining quality of a genius. For them, they're either the best or they're nothing. The narrator survives the trauma by building a wall of indifference around him. He gives away his Steinway piano to a girl student without talent and writes thesis and books that have no literary nor scholarly worth. Wertheimer can't deal with living under the shadow of Gould and takes a more drastic way out. Much of the most illuminating thoughts of the novel are couched in aphorisms. This is a reflection of Wertheimer's ultimate talent--he's a genius of aphorisms and not sustained argument. Wertheimer is supposedly based on Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose best works are extended aphorisms. Be patient with the novel and one or more of these aphorisms would strike you with a truth that holds you breathless.

apparently other people think like me! this novel is a witty stream of counciousness writing that happily mimicks the things that run through my head, only in someone else's life. taken without the political context, it is an amusing way to spend a couple of hours, if you are interested enough to spend a moment getting the actual context of the book, it is a steller and intelligent snub. i was pleasantly entertained.

Open to the first page, take a deep breath, and begin reading--if you do it just right, it'll be hard to stop until you reach the end of this extraordinary 170-page diatribe of envy, spite, self-loathing, and misanthropy that plumbs the depth of the narrator's all-inclusive contempt for life and practically everyone living it, including himself. We're talking a novel that is one uninterrupted paragraph from beginning to end, spoken by one character, who's not very reliable, and quite possibly entirely demented. It's as if one of the more troubled heroes of a Dostoyevsky novel escaped to deliver a monologue written by Samuel Beckett. That'll give you an approximate idea of the style of *The Loser,* which is definitely not for everyone, the novel being more about the labyrinthine workings of an obsessed mind than it is about the ostensible events of the so-called "plot." This plot--the intertwined fate of three young musicians, one of whom happens to be the famed piano artist Glenn Gould, and another who commits suicide--becomes the touchstone Bernhard uses to explore his themes of artistic ambition and the destructive power of genius, as well as the double-sided nature of friendship. Bernhard, like Beckett, was a playwright, and it shows in the intricate, serpentine "speech" the narrator delivers in *The Loser*--in fact, it might even be more rewarding if one were to read the text out loud to better "hear" the full intent of Bernhard's lush and cadenced "madman's" prose. For the novel is indeed a soliloquy: contradictory, ironic, by turns concealing and revealing, a confession that confesses the very impossibility of telling the absolute truth. *The Loser* is ultimately a novel for those who find language more intriguing than story, the mind's interior struggle for meaning more dramatic than physical incident. As such, it's a work of the first order. I cant recommend it highly enough.

This book is not about music, really, even though all 3 main characters are musicians, best piano performers in the world. The book belongs to this very specific genre I'd call "On Human Condition". The main work in this genre would be "Waiting for Godot", I guess, and "The Loser" is definitely in the same domain. It is not at the same level of abstraction as "Waiting for Godot", which does not make it any worse, though, because it considers human endeavour from somewhat different angle, comparing 3 types of personality - how they cope with failure and success, life. The "existence machine" concept, which "the loser" uses to describe his position in life, could be considered all-encompassing methapor, but Bernhard shows that it is not universal, that other people experience reality differently. Bernhard also very clearly shows that success can be experienced as failure, that everything is relative to the personal "settings" in one's mind. The book is full of subtle absurd ironies, it is tragic and funny, very European, idiosyncratic.