Frost [Hardcover]

Thomas Bernhard (Author), Michael Hofmann (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 17, 2006

Visceral, raw, singular, and distinctive, Frost is the story of a friendship between a young man at the beginning of his medical career and a painter who is entering his final days.

A writer of world stature, Thomas Bernhard combined a searing wit and an unwavering gaze into the human condition. Frost follows an unnamed young Austrian who accepts an unusual assignment. Rather than continue with his medical studies, he travels to a bleak mining town in the back of beyond, in order to clinically observe the aged painter, Strauch, who happens to be the brother of this young man’s surgical mentor. The catch is this: Strauch must not know the young man’s true occupation or the reason for his arrival. Posing as a promising law student with a love of Henry James, the young man befriends the mad artist and is caught up among an equally extraordinary cast of local characters, from his resentful landlady to the town’s mining engineers.

This debut novel by Thomas Bernhard, which came out in German in 1963 and is now being published in English for the first time, marks the beginning of what was one of the twentieth century’s most powerful, provocative literary careers.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A student's increasingly erratic dispatches over 27 days comprise this obsessive first novel by Bernhard (1931–1989), published to European acclaim in 1963. An unnamed medical student is sent from Vienna by his supervisor, an eminent surgeon named Strauch, to undertake "precise observation" of the surgeon's brother, a famous painter who has suddenly left the city for the "dismal" village of Weng. After "systematically inveigling" himself into the company of the painter under the pretense of being a vacationing law student, the student slowly feels his own mood and mental attitudes being subsumed by the painter's paranoid outbursts and disjointed monologues. Weng itself, located in a grim valley still bearing the grisly traces of WWII, is a hotbed of murky scandal: the landlady sleeps with the village knacker (handyman), while her husband, against whom she testified in a murder trial, sits in jail; a traveling show appears in the village displaying "deformed women and deformed animals"; a barn is torched. All are dutifully reported by the disintegrating student. Bernhard's glorious talent for bleak existential monologues is second only to Beckett's, and seems to have sprung up fully mature in his mesmerizing debut. (Oct. 19)
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From Booklist

Austrian Bernhard's first novel, which appeared in German in 1963, is being published in English for the first time in a translation that finely captures Bernhard's bitter, acerbic prose. The story follows an unnamed young medical student who is sent by a colleague to watch over an elderly painter named Strauch. What follows is roughly 300 pages of a dying, demented man spewing relentless bile and invectives against, well, everything. The modern world is a rotting chaos, the natural world a threatening lunacy, and memory and imagination nothing more than symptoms of the malignant disease of life. The younger man's mind, predictably, soon becomes infected by the elder man's corrosive diatribes. Bernhard, who died in 1989, would go on to achieve distinction as a playwright, poet, and novelist, but his first book is more an extended, free-association tirade than a novel, mapping out Bernhard's assured examinations into the language of isolation, paranoia, and futility. For readers who find Beckett too glib and Kafka a mere fusspot. Ian Chipman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; Tra edition (October 17, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400040663
• ISBN-13: 978-1400040667
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,183,579 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars interesting look at a person falling apart, October 21, 2006

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Frost (Hardcover)

Following WW II in Vienna distinguished Dr. Strauch sends his underling to a remote village Weng that the renowned surgeon assumes is a dump filled with peasants. He tells his employee to look into the mental state of his brother, a famous painter who abruptly left civilization in Vienna to rusticate.

Pretending to be a law student, the young man befriends the painter and begins sending to his employer correspondence involving the mental health of the artist. However, the newcomer becomes somewhat frightened by the painter's paranoid temper fits and schizoid discussions as if he is talking to himself. He also reports the village is filled with scandal as he realizes his landlady sleeps with the village knacker while her spouse resides in jail on a murder conviction in which his wife testified against him. As the writings of the "spy" turn unreasonable bordering on the insane, a traveling troupe arrives with a show of deformity that he sends in graphic detail to the surgeon. After spending four weeks in Weng, the outsider seems on the verge of a breakdown; that is if he has not already gone over the edge.

Mindful of Camus' The Stranger, this translation by Michael Hofmann of a 1963 classic is a terrific look at a person falling apart over the course of four weeks. Readers will observe the mental collapse of the unnamed outsider from his increasingly irrational writings that he dutifully sends to his employer. Fans who want something different will want to read the late Thomas Bernhard's compelling and profound existential look at a man seemingly falling apart as he fails to adapt to this alien environs.

Harriet Klausner

8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars For the Bernhard "Completist" Only?, September 27, 2007

By 

W. Wilson (Boxborough, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Frost (Hardcover)

_Frost_ is not a place to begin for those unfamiliar with Thomas Bernhard. The various university presses and publishers were smart to leave this as one of the last, if not the last, of Bernhard's works to be published in English.

_Frost_ is not Bernhard's best novel, no, not by a longshot; so to give it 4 or 5 stars is overly generous. (Should other, better-crafted novels [such as _Correction_ or _Concrete_ or _Woodcutters_] get 7 or 8 stars?)

However, to be fair, it is his first novel, and in many respects is remarkably good and portends greatness. Themes that would be explored more fully in later writings -- the seeming meaninglessness of existence; ambivalence if not contempt for post-World War II Austria and Catholicism; Bernhard's fascination with newspapers; Pascal's _Pensees_--are dealt with here too, but what's lacking in _Frost_ is any humor, even dark humor, which makes for a grim, unrelenting slog through 300+ pages.

At times I felt the novel should have been titled _Heavy Wet Snow._

What's lacking in _Frost_ is that all-important first sentence that grabs the reader in the same way the first few notes of a composition grab the listener.

What's lacking in _Frost_ is a well-thought-out, believable plotline. At the end of the book there are loose ends aplenty, leaving one wondering (SPOILER WARNING)

- what happened when the landlady's husband finally got out of jail?
- how did Strauch (the painter's) brother, the surgeon, react to the dispatches sent by the unnamed narrator?
- did Strauch the painter kill himself, or was he done in by the patrons of the inn?

Another reviewer noted that the philosophical observations by Strauch the painter are "truths, if you will." I don't think that's quite accurate. They are "things to think about" (like Pascal's _Pensees_) rather than statements that can either be verified or not verified by objective analysis. Objective analysis is the surgeon's realm; the fuzzy, messy world of speculation is Strauch the painter's, and Bernhard's realm.

_Frost_ is too long. Sections could have been omitted without affecting the work as a whole.

Finally, when I got to the end of _Frost,_ I came to realize that Bernhard was so nihilistic when he wrote this novel that it seems all of what I'd just read was pointless. (SPOILER ALERT) The surgeon-in-training went back to Vienna to begin his practice; Strauch the painter died, as had been foreshadowed early on; and none of the people at the Inn changed. Had Bernhard duped me into reading _The Pensees_ or something like it by disguising the text as a novel?!

_Frost_ is not without great prose. And manufacturer R.R. Donnelly should be commended for the paper, the typeface, and printing of the book, including the ragged-edged pages...are all marks of a quality . It's unfortunate, however, that this treatment was given to one of Bernhard's lesser novels.

1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars FROST by Thomas Bernhard, March 21, 2007

By 

Junis R (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Frost (Hardcover)

Although not pretty, this is an important book, one very well worth the effort to read. Strauch, the painter, the primary character, is undeniably insane. Nonetheless, he is a font of philosophical observations - truths if you will - often exposing the dark side of the human condition. The relationship developed between Strauch and the anonymous young medical student who leaves his work to observe Strauch is engaging and psychologically astute. While extremely "raw", FROST is unforgettable.