Customer Reviews

The Loser: A Novel (Phoenix Fiction)

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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.

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.

A masterful creation about artistic genius, jealousy, betrayal, and failure. Thomas Bernhard has constructed an immensely readable novel about the competitive relationship between three piano virtuosos, and how Glenn Gould drives the other two into self-abdication. The Loser puts Bernhard's own inimitable voice into the central character as he attempts to piece together the protracted process of descent his friend and colleague falls prey to. This text has astonishingly accomplished portraits of the nature of artistic genius and its strangely bewitching tendencies. In the final analysis, Bernhard asks us-as well as himself-whether or not we can truly face our own insurmountable limitations and appreciate divine genius when we finally encounter it. Unfortunately for his protagonists, and perhaps for himself, the answer to that question is a resounding "No."

Men of letters have a long tradition of firing off a parting salvo in their last will and testament. Shakespeare, who bequeathed to his estranged wife, Anne Hathaway, his "second best bed," is the most famous practitioner of this art. While the Bard's bequest was steeped in a subtle, bitter brew, other writers, such as the Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard, have used their final publication to fling straight vitriol in the faces of the living. Long known in Austria as a "Nestbeschmutzer" (one who soils his own nest), Bernhard nevertheless managed to shock his homeland after his death in 1989 when this clause of his will was read: "Whatever I have written, whether published by me during my lifetime or as part of my literary papers still existing after my death, shall not be performed, printed or even recited for the duration of legal copyright within the borders of Austria, however this state identifies itself." This last phrase is no doubt an allusion to Austria's 1938 Anschluss with Nazi Germany, a shameful episode in his country's history that Bernhard "commemorated" fifty years later in the play, "Heldenplatz" (Heroes' Square). I say "commemorated" in an ironical sense because Bernhard, being the provocateur that he was, surely delighted in rubbing Austria's nose in its gravest mistake.

If "anti-Austrian" is one hyphenated word that describes Bernhard and his narratives, then "death-obsessed" is another. Upon receiving the Austrian State Prize for Literature in 1967, he told his audience that "everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death." The unnamed narrator of "The Loser" has come to a similar conclusion, having lost his conservatory pals Glenn Gould ("the most important piano virtuoso of the [twentieth] century") and Wertheimer ("The Loser's" title character, "Der Untergeher," which, rendered literally, means "the one who goes under."), the only "two people in [his] life who gave it any meaning." Gould died of a stroke while playing the "Goldberg Variations" (This is one of many fictionalizations that Bernhard performs on the historical figure of Gould; in fact, the stroke struck while the pianist was in his sleep.), while Wertheimer hanged himself in a spiteful and embarrassing plea for his sister's attention. It was Gould himself who, in his "ruthless and open, yet healthy American-Canadian manner" dubbed Wertheimer "The Loser." This epithet works in concert with Gould's staggering virtuosity to wreck Wertheimer's confidence, sending him to seek succor first in "the human sciences" and later in suicide. The narrator asserts that the die was cast the moment they heard Glenn's divine rendition of Bach's "Goldberg Variations."

Variations, as a formal technique, rely on thematic repetitions, and "The Loser" is their prose equivalent. Like a baroque fugue, the novel is polyphonic and maddeningly circuitous; the narrator's compulsive mind returns again and again to Glenn Gould, Wertheimer, Austria, death and, of course, the piano: "My ideal would be, I would be the Steinway, I wouldn't need Glenn Gould, he [Gould] said, I could, by being the Steinway, make Glenn Gould totally superfluous. . . . To wake up one day and be Steinway and Glenn in one, he said, I thought, Glenn Steinway, Steinway Glenn, all for Bach." Jack Dawson, the author's assiduous translator, faithfully preserves the novel's almost complete lack of paragraph indentation. With dozens of run-on sentences, the novel convincingly captures the stream of thought in a consciousness beleaguered by madness. It is this uncanny verisimilitude to the unhinged mind that makes "The Loser" a strangely rewarding - and possibly exasperating - read.

[...]

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.

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.

I read through the first 90-100 pages of Thomas Bernhard's "The Loser" in one sitting. I enjoyed it that much. However, the second half of the novel was much harder for me to get through. "The Loser" is written as an unbroken, 170 page paragraph in monologue style told by a fictional student of piano virtuoso Glenn Gould about how Gould's greatness drove him and his friend, Wertheimer, to abandon their pursuit of the piano since they believed that they would never attain the greatness of their teacher and friend. The prose is dark, dismal, pessimistic and depressing. But the prose is also quite humorous. The first half of the novel is absolutely wonderful, but somehow, I could not easily navigate my way through the second half. The style of the novel changed from engaging to trying. Just getting through the prose seemed like an impossible task. The style of this novel is innovative and very interesting, but somehow, I could not stay engaged through the whole thing. Bernhard's rambling would have been far more easily tolerable in a shorter novel. The book is an interesting exploration of genius, obsession and greatness, but if you're like me, you may think that after 90 pages you've gotten the point and had enough.

Length:: 2:09 Mins

A few words on one of the great writers of our time.

The novel is an obsessive (I think), or at least an autistic droning of repetitions and paranoid preoccupations with a tight set of recurring themes, most of them apparently autobiographical. The central tenet is an acknowledgement from the narrator that he would never be as `good' a pianist as Gould, and subsequent renouncement of the piano, and, subsequent inability to crystallise anything productive in his life as a result of `analysis paralyses'. The narrator, a nameless character, devotes the span of fifty odd years of his life, consumed, governed, informed by this one meme. He never publishes any of the work he keeps writing about Glenn Gould. The alternative would be a controlled descent into madness, which is exactly what happens to the narrator, arrested in a 2D plane of existence which never changes

People love to read books about heroes and immerse themselves in what it's like to succeed, but few contemplate what it's like to be on the other side; what it's like to give up.

The Loser is a snapshot of such a man who is, ironically, destroyed by his own genius and perfectionism in the face of another genius. Unlike his competition, The Loser (who lacks self direction and confidence), and Glenn Gould (who is brilliant but only capable of achieving, not of seeing his faults), the narrator is capable of seeing his flaws and misfortunes alongside his ability, a deadly combination which leads to his demise and despair. He seems to recognize, but not actually admit to himself, that he gave up his one chance at happiness, but by being so concerned with his past blunders he neglects his fortunes, most notably that he is the only one of the three central characters in the book who is still alive.

I admit that this is the only book by Bernhard I have read (though I now plan to read more), and I only read it because, ironically, I had become obsessed with Glenn Gould during a research project. Needless to say, I was taken by surprise. This isn't a book about Glenn Gould, it's about genius and its effects on the psyche of the men who existed alongside it; the ones you never hear about because they didn't achieve what they had in mind. But it's not just about failure, it's about the even more frightening realization that one did not succeed not because he has yet to, but because he cannot.