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Old Masters (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

There is so little plot in this short novel that the reader may not realize how much the book contains till it is set aside. The narrator, Atzbacher, stands in a museum watching Reger, an bitter old musicologist, who is seated in front of Tintoretto’s WHITE-BEARDED MAN (reproduced on the front cover). The museum guard Irrsigler comes and goes, a tour group passes through, and Atzbacher sits down next to Reger, who finally asks him to go to the theater. This minimum action serves as a frame for Atzbacher’s reflections and Reger’s diatribes on his past and the many evils of Austrian society and culture. We learn about personal tragedies, but the book is predominantly a meditation on art — and its abuse.

Reger attacks every aspect of the anti-intellectual meanness of his Austrian compatriots, but he professes no love for art either (while returning regularly to the museum). The old masters, the famous artists whose paintings hang around him, were corrupted by the state to serve its purposes instead of faithfully depicting the central fact of man’s existence, namely death. The reality of death is denied by both kitsch, trashy art pandering to cheap sentimentality, and the old masters, who lied in the service of state and church bent on total social control. Honest people like Reger can only protest bitterly and then fall back on simple human friendship.

Though dealing with serious themes, the novel, far from somber in tone, is one of Bernhard’s most accessible. Some of his techniques may appear daunting at first, such as the lack of paragraph breaks and his heavy reliance on rigid framing devices, but the subtitle is accurate; this is a comedy. At the deepest level, the comedy derives from human idiocy in the face of death, but everything Reger says about the bleakness of existence and the faults of his compatriots is taken to the satirical extreme. The more Reger rants, the more darkly humorous his exaggerations become.

The novel’s low-key resolution, with its reaffirmation of human companionship, is simple but surprisingly hopeful after the much-deserved fulminations that precede it.

Sources for Further Study

Library Journal. CXVII, November 1, 1992, p. 115.

The New York Review of Books. XXXVII, September 27, 1990, p. 40.

The Observer. July 16, 1989, p. 43.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXIX, October 19, 1992, p. 72.

The Times Literary Supplement. February 15, 1991, p. 20.