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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
For lovers of long mad monologues only...,
By
This review is from: The Loser: A Novel (Paperback)
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.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Meditation On Genius,
By Lao Chuang (Australia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Loser: A Novel (Paperback)
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.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent,
By
This review is from: The Loser: A Novel (Paperback)
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."
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