their project will not live up to their own lofty expectations of perfection, even if they did complete it, but completion is impossible since it cannot be complete unless it is perfect. This desperate paradox leads some of the protagonists to suicide; others, facing the same dilemma they observe and describe in their friends, finally come to the realization that such perfection is not possible, but that human existence is made meaningful by persevering in the attempt to attain perfection, even though it is inevitably doomed.

In addition to this fundamental existential anguish that pervades Bernhard’s novels, there is the more obvious and sometimes shrill dissatisfaction with the cultural and political state of affairs in the author’s native country, Austria. The author never missed an occasion—even when the Austrian government awarded him prestigious and lucrative prizes and stipends—to revile his countrymen for their unwillingness to face their fascist past, their political opportunism, their adherence to outmoded social and artistic models, and their disdain and lack of support for contemporary art that questions their petite bourgeois tastes. Bernhard’s dyspeptic narrators become virtual mouthpieces for his criticism of Austria and its political and cultural institutions. In some cases, his characters’ diatribes against leading politicians and fellow artists were so transparent that legal action was taken against him and attempts were made to prevent the performance of one of his plays.

Bernhard was quickly recognized as one of the leading prose writers of the twentieth century by fellow writers and critics; despite their complexity, his novels found a wide readership in Europe. Readers in England and the United States were somewhat more reluctant to accept him, but the increasing praise of his prose by British and American critics has increased the readership in these countries, and excellent translations of almost all his prose works are now readily available. His compatriot, Elfriede Jelinek, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004, compellingly argues that all future German and Austrian novelists will have to measure themselves against the high standards set by Thomas Bernhard.

Concrete

First published: Beton, 1982 (English translation, 1984)

Type of work: Novel

An ailing would-be musicologist once more fails to start his study of the composer Felix Mendelssohn and relives a troubling experience from his past on the island of Mallorca.

Like all of Thomas Bernhard’s mature novels, Concrete is written as one long paragraph representing a continuous interior monologue. In this novel, the monologue is in the form of a manuscript perused by an anonymous narrator, possibly after the death of the manuscript’s author, Rudolph. The unnamed narrator is noticeable only by brief editorial references, such as “writes Rudolph,” or “so Rudolph,” which appear mainly at the beginning and the very end of the novel.

At the outset, Rudolph, who fancies himself a musicologist, once again attempts to start his magnum opus, a study of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, as he has done several times for the past ten years without ever writing a line. Convinced that he has only a few more years to live because he suffers from sarcoidosis, a usually nonfatal lung disease, he is determined to start writing. He attributes his inability to begin to the constant interruptions of his sister, whom he depicts as an anti-intellectual but apparently very successful business woman. Further excuses for his procrastination are the adverse cultural conditions in Austria, his health, and the climate, but the reader senses that the very completion of his project would deprive him of any reason to continue living—the completion of his life’s work would also be the end of his life.

After a long rant about these obstacles that takes up two-thirds of the novel, Rudolph decides to follow his sister’s advice to go to Mallorca for a change of scenery. However, shortly after arriving there, he remembers a young German woman, Anna Härdtl, whom he had met by chance in the same place two years before. At that time, Anna told him that her husband had just fallen from their hotel balcony, either by accident or by committing suicide due to the failure of their business, for which he had no talent. Rudolph had helped Anna find her husband’s grave, which turned out to be in a huge concrete bunker he shared with a woman who was a total stranger. The self-absorbed Rudolph had left Mallorca and the young woman behind and returned to Austria. Now, two years later, Rudolph is seized by curiosity and possibly feelings of guilt. He revisits the grave site and discovers that Anna is now buried in the same concrete grave bunker as her husband. He finds out that Anna has committed suicide, news that leaves him in a state of extreme anxiety at the end of the novel.

Concrete—the title is obviously taken from the concrete grave that becomes Anna Härdtl’s final resting place—is Bernhard’s most accessible novel. The protagonist, a self-absorbed intellectual wracked with doubt and self-loathing, incapable of decisive action, is the prototypical Bernhard “hero.” His long monologue, written to explain and to justify himself, is full of contempt for practical people who are capable of acting, if only in a sphere the narrator finds vulgar, but at the same time he envies people like his sister and Anna who actively take charge of their lives, even when that means committing suicide. The reader is left to ponder whether Rudolph’s most recent epiphany will lead him to also act decisively, but it is more likely that his extreme state of anxiety will lead only to further excuses and procrastination.

Correction

First published: Korrektur, 1975 (English translation, 1979)

Type of work: Novel

An anonymous narrator sorts through the posthumous papers and manuscripts his friend Roithamer left after killing himself and tries to find an explanation for the suicide.

Most critics consider Correction to be Thomas Bernhard’s masterpiece. On the surface, the novel is very similar to Concrete and The Loser; indeed, one could call the three novels a trilogy on the dangers of striving for perfection. Whereas the other two are long interior monologues presented as one single paragraph, Correction is divided into two sections with individual headings. The first section is entitled “Hoeller’s Garret,” while the second part is called “Sifting and Sorting” and is noticeably different from the first part in style and content.

In the first section, the narrator—an intellectual afflicted with a lung disease—moves into the garret of a friend’s house (the name Hoeller strongly evokes the German word Hölle, meaning “hell”) to take charge of the papers of his longtime friend Roithamer, who has recently committed suicide. A note found on his body requested the narrator to become the executor and editor of his papers, especially of three versions of an essay that tries to explain the reasons for Roithamer’s failed utopian plan to construct a cone-shaped building in the middle of a forest, intended as the perfect abode for his beloved sister. In some unexplained way, however, the building led to the death of his sister shortly after he installed her there, and Roithamer then hanged himself in a nearby forest clearing.

The title of the novel is taken from the corrections Roithamer has made to the essay, with each correction an attempt at condensation and reduction in order to clarify his concept of the conical building. The essay was written in the same garret where the narrator reads it, and this location leads the narrator to recall a stream of memories of his and Roithhaimer’s common past, during which the reader discovers that the two men’s backgrounds are remarkably similar.

In the second section, which deals with the narrator’s sifting and sorting through Roithamer’s papers, the original narrative voice increasingly disappears and the section is an apparently random perusal of the large number of Roithamer’s papers the narrator has spilled out in the garret. For the most part, the dead man is allowed to speak from his papers without any attempt at editing or interpreting, although it is clear from the last phrases quoted from the papers that Roithamer had realized that he had pursued an impossible goal: trying to achieve perfection. By this single-minded quest he has killed his sister and set himself up for disappointment and despair, leading him inexorably to the clearing where he hanged himself.

Critics have commented extensively on the similarities between Roithamer and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, including a strong attachment to their sisters, the construction of eccentric houses, suicidal tendencies, and a growing despair in the power of language to adequately express complex ideas. The narrator begins to see how much he and Roithamer are alike and grows increasingly fearful that an interpretive understanding of Roithamer’s papers might push him to the same fate. Therefore, he allows Roithamer to speak for himself through his papers, which he scans without any editorial plan. This seemingly unscholarly lack of method is the narrator’s salvation. He has grasped that the process of sifting and sorting itself is healthy and productive, and the futile attempt at perfect understanding and expression is impossible, even with an infinite number of “corrections,” and inevitably leads to “the clearing.”

The Loser

First published: Der Untergeher, 1983 (English translation, 1991)

Type of work: Novel

A concert pianist turned philosopher and writer has come to sift through the papers of his friend Wertheimer, who has recently committed suicide, and he reflects on the impact their former friend, piano virtuoso Glenn Gould, has had on their lives.

Written almost twenty years after Correction, The Loser strikingly resembles the earlier novel in both form and content. Whereas Correction deals with a character representing the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and his pessimistic language philosophy, The Loser focuses on a highly mythologized Glenn Gould—some of his biographical data are intentionally wrong—and his quest for the perfect piano performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

Like most of Bernhard’s novels, The Loser is a one-paragraph interior monologue. In this novel’s monologue, the narrator is moved to reflect back thirty years, when he, Wertheimer, and Gould were studying to become concert pianists in Salzburg. As in Bernhard’s previous novels, all three main characters are afflicted by a lung disease and prone to self-absorption and self-doubt. Wertheimer has recently killed himself, and the narrator, who has been making little progress on his presumed magnum opus, a study entitled About Glenn Gould, has come to take charge of Wertheimer’s papers, which would presumably shed light on the reasons for his suicide. Almost the entire stream-of-consciousness monologue is delivered during the brief time the narrator waits in a country inn near Wertheimer’s house for the innkeeper to show him to his room.

The narrator conjectures that Wertheimer’s suicide is tied in some way to the recent death of Gould. Both the narrator and Wertheimer had given up piano playing when they were confronted with the fact that they would always be second-rate compared to Gould. However, Wertheimer sought to become and to be Gould, thus “losing” his own identity. The German title of the novel cleverly hints at this misguided ideal; an Untergeher is a person who sinks or submerges himself, and the word also connotes “decline.” Wertheimer’s “loss” is that he cannot stand being himself but tries in vain to lose or submerge himself in Gould, who very perceptively gave him his nickname, The Loser, thirty years ago.

Wertheimer has not been able to overcome his disappointment for thirty years, in contrast to the narrator, who has turned his energies away from trying to become Gould and now merely tries to describe Gould’s genius, an almost equally impossible task which nevertheless keeps him from despairing like Wertheimer.

In The Loser, Bernhard’s diseased intellectual protagonist has been split into three variations of the same type. There is Gould, who realizes the impossibility of the perfect concert piano performance and turns to the recording studio and its technological possibilities to achieve the impossible; the narrator, who realizes his limitations early and turns his energies to the equally impossible quest of describing Gould’s genius; and Wertheimer, who destroys himself by stubbornly refusing to live within his limitations, and in his attempt to achieve his ideal of becoming someone else, loses, or annihilates, himself. It is inevitable, therefore, that the narrator discovers that Wertheimer has burned all his papers after one last grotesque attempt at becoming Gould before killing himself. The narrator is left speechless, listening to Gould’s famous recording of the Goldberg Variations.