Customer Reviews

Woodcutters

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Thomas Bernhard is a writer of semi-autobiographical fiction and satire who possesses an acerbic wit. Born out of wedlock in Holland in 1931, he was raised for several years in Vienna by his maternal grandfather, himself a writer. His grandfather introduced him to the many literati of his generation and also to Schopenhauer, who remained a strong influence on Bernhard's life and writing. Bernhard considered Vienna his home though he maintained a love/hate relationship with it. The Boston Review cites that "In his final will and testament, Thomas Bernhard - Austria's most infamous novelist and playwright for the past half-century, and the most outspoken critic the state has endured since Karl Kraus - performed an unlikely post-mortem disappearing act. With characteristic bravado, he banned any further production and publication of his works within his home country for the duration of their copyright." Bernhard suffered from chronic tuberculosis to which he succumbed in 1989 at the age of 58. He speaks at great length about his illness in his novel, Wittgenstein's Nephew: A Novel (Vintage International).

Woodcutters, originally written as part of a trilogy, is Bernhard's diatribe about his disgust, revulsion, loathing, hatred and vilification of the hypocrites and losers that make up the art circle in Vienna from the 1950's through the 1980's. In his unique style, with not one paragraph in nearly 200 pages, this novel is told primarily in stream of consciousness from the viewpoint of a writer, one not unlike Bernhard himself. The novel is in three identifiable parts - the writer sitting in a wing chair observing a dinner party, the writer discussing his relationship with a recently deceased friend, and the conversations of an actor during dinner.

The first segment of the book has almost every sentence beginning with, containing, or ending with the phrase " ...from my wing chair". As the writer looks on at those attending the party, from his wingchair, he remembers all the reasons that he has been estranged from these very same people for the last twenty or thirty years. He remembers all the slights he received, the lies that were told about him and the hypocrisies he's witnessed. He tries to figure out why he accepted this invitation and ruminates about it over and over, finally coming to a semi-belief that it was because his friend had committed suicide yesterday and he was feeling more vulnerable when he was invited. He recollects his history with all of the attendees, each relationship ending poorly, with the writer getting the bad end of the stick. He can think of nothing positive to say about anyone nor can he imagine why he even remains at such a despicable gathering.

The middle part of the book takes place at Joana's funeral. Joana was the writer's friend and she committed suicide yesterday. Her funeral was this afternoon. As the writer recalls Joana's time as the reigning queen of Vienna's art scene, he describes her lovely costumes, her graciousness, and her mentoring of others. She marries a weaver, a man who creates great tapestries that are sold throughout the world. It was Joana who made him famous and created the mystique that surrounded him. When he was in his prime, her husband left her for a Mexican woman and Joana, in her grief, succumbed to uncontrolled alcoholism despite several treatments. It was not without surprise that the writer learned that Joana had taken her life.

The third part of the book is the arrival, two hours late, of the actor in whose honor this dinner party is being held. (The story goes back and forth in time as gaps are filled in about different characters and the writer's relationships with them). We are privy to the conversations at the table and the rudeness, drunkenness, and shameful behaviors of the guests. The actor has just finished up an Ibsen play and is tired, as are the guests, as the dinner did not start until close to midnight. The writer is a listener and observer, discussing in his own mind the implications and audacities of all that he hears. He is especially disgusted at the rudeness of an egomaniacal woman writer who keeps alluding to the actor's old age. The actor finally snaps and gives this woman a piece of his mind, an action that the writer finds stunning. While he originally had thought poorly of the actor, the actor starts speaking about how he'd like to live in the woods and be a woodcutter. For some reason, the writer finds this a lovely idea and he ends up liking the actor.

As the dinner party ends, the writer wants to be sure to leave alone. As a misanthrope, having company is one of the worst things he can imagine. He says polite and hypocritical goodbyes to his hosts creating his own self-loathing as he sees he is no better than those he criticizes for their false charms and graciousness. What he'd like to say to his hosts is that he hates them, that he has no idea why he came to this awful party, and that he hopes he doesn't see them for another twenty or thirty years. However, he does not do this. He plays his role as polite guest and leaves in an almost manic mood. He walks and runs around the streets of Vienna alternately embracing and hating this city that is his, despite all its foibles.

For those of us who can embrace Bernhard's unique style, he is a breath of fresh air. His writing has a post-modern feel to it as he examines everything as part of something else, yet everything having a separate and distinct context in its own right. Everything is connected and nothing touches anything else. We can wonder till the planets' ends and still come up with more and more reasons for why any particular event, action, or thought exists. The last thing Bernhard would call himself is a philosopher, but despite his self-description, there is a lot of philosophizing going on in his book.

Woodcutters is definitely my favourite novel by Thomas Bernhard. It is Thomas Bernhard at his best. He got sued by former friends of his when he published the book so as in many of his books the narrator is very close to or maybe even identical with Thomas Bernhard himself.

Basically, the book consists of two parts. In the first part, the narrator sits in a chair and watches his hosts plus their other guests waiting for an actor to have dinner. The narrator had bumped into his hosts whom he hadn't seen for many years and they had invited him to join their dinner. A mutual friend of them had just committed suicide so he had felt obliged to join them - much to his regret. The second part describes the actual dinner. However, most of the book consists of what the narrator is thinking about his former friends, about friendships in general and about relationships between people. This nearly endless rant evolves around every possible aspect and like a surgeon Bernhard cuts deep into what everybody takes for granted and lays open treachery, lies, and hypocrisy (If you believe in family values and in a good world, this book might disturb you quite a bit!). As I mentioned before, old friends of Bernhard's sued him when the book was published because it was too obvious he was actually referring to them - and he was showing them in a way nobody would possibly want to be shown. This is not to say that Bernhard is necessarily a misanthrop. Quite surprisingly, when the narrator leaves the dinner table abruptly, he runs back home "through Vienna the city I loved like no other city" - quite a surprise after his Vienna-bashing. To me, Thomas Bernhard always was a deeply disturbed person who hated the world because it wasn't as nice as he wanted to believe it was.

I first read about Thomas Bernhard in a tribute to and general review of his works in believe it or not Details magazine, back in the days when it was slightly more intellectual, and less hairspray and BS. I was very intrigued by what the reviewer said about his writing style, which used little punctuation and basically no paragraph indentations. I was also turned on by the fact that he was originally trained as a musician (as I am), and apparently constructed his writing in a parallel fashion to the structures of music. The review below is excellent, but it refers to Bernhard's novel Gargoyles (and maybe should have one of those italicized Amazon messages saying this refers to a different book by the author), which in my opinion was a little harder to get into, but is still a fascinating book, as the reviewer relates very well. The plot of Woodcutters revolves around a musician who has experienced the suicide of a very close friend. The entire book takes place from the corner of a room where the musician sits at a party, and we are allowed into his mind as he relates the unfolding of what turns out to be a fairly disastrous evening among people he has learned to despise over the time since the death of his friend. The people at the party are all artists and musicians as well, and for those of you who have spent some time in the arts community you will relate to some of the observations the narrator makes about these folks (you will enjoy it even if you aren't an artist, though). The book is dark, cynical, and funny. I can't imagine there would be anyone who couldn't relate to a few things in this novel in this day and age. Highly recommended.

Woodcutters is a brutal critique of the post war Vienna art society. It is entertaining, vivid, fast-paced, melodic and manic.

An unnanmed writer talking in the first person describes how he decides to move back to Vienna in the 80's having moved to London in the 1950's. He is a sneering, cynical and seemingly introverted middle aged man who seems to reject society and spend an inordinate effort to avoid running into old acquaintances and yet he obsesses on his views of people and the whims and ways of everyone he knows or has known. Observing and critiquing is his oxygen.

The story is almost entirely about a dinner party that he's regretfully decided to attend. On his hosts he writes, "the Aursbergers aren't the worst people in the world, at least not the very worst." On and on he races us through the slights and insults that he's had to endure along with cut to the bone deep rips on the character or appearance or career of each of the diners at this "artistic dinner" and some others the same circle of friends.

Of one woman writer he writes "'this woman, who was now fat and gross and ugly, fancied herself the Viennese Virginia Wolf, though everything she wrote was the most dreadful kitcsh,.." And this was someone he once had an affair with! He is even more direct about others.

The hook that keeps one reading is how Bernhard keeps so many balls up in the air; there's the old friend Joana who's committed suicide the previous day. There is his ongoing consideration of the Aursbergers and how they "tricked" him into coming. He is focused/jealous of the actor from the Burg Theater who is the star attraction of the dinner and 2 hours late. There are the other dinner guests of whom he has limited knowledge but still willing to tell you his opinion. On he goes both isolating a point or observation and then jumping back to the current predicament of being at a dinner party that he wants no part of.

The dinner does end. I felt well rewarded for ploughing through the middle of this book as the last section was brilliant. The pace gets even faster, perhaps as the drinks were getting stronger? if that's possible, and the characters are more and more revealed. I thought this built up very nicely.

This is a hard to book to comment on without also thinking about Bernhard himself. Because the book is so unique and worthwhile to read I spent more time reading about Bernhard. He was born in the Netherlands to a woman who bore him out of wedlock in 1931. The father ran away and later committed suicide. His stepfather refused to adopt him despite his mother remarrying when Bernhard 5 years old and having to step siblings from what appeared to be a successful marriage. Later in life he had only one know "girlfriend"; a woman 37 years his senior. He is otherwise described as asexual with no other evidence of meaningful relationships of any kind and unfortunately later in life he suffered from TB and died in his 50's. He had challenges with emotional attachments and perhaps it explains his love/hate relationship with Vienna and the ending which seems appropriately ambiguous.

Why 4 stars? I had a hard time getting through parts of the story. I did find myself losing attention from time to time but I do want to read more and I may even read this again and reconsider....

Bernhard brings you uncomfortably inside his body, as he squirms through an evening with "friends"
After the first page the book becomes repetitive, and after 20 pages you want to scream. But there is so much subversive intelligence and humor to the ravings of this self-loating old man, that you can't put this book down. Part of the success of the work undoubtedly is how closely it describes real people, the blowhards that were part of Bernhard's circle in contemporary Vienna. He is unsparing of them, and the narrative of the book is driven by Bernhard's petty and loving appreciation of the failures of artistic aspiration.

In "Woodcutters", Thomas Bernhard offered us one of his most searing indictments of the Austrian society he so capably described and dissected. Throughout the novel Bernhard, whose will specified his works not be published posthumously in Austria during the duration of the copyright, focused an unwavering gaze on the sycophantic circles of postwar Vienna theatre and arts. Was Bernhard's an accurate description? No matter. Through the eyes of the narrator -- a clear stand-in for the author himself -- Bernhard unleashes a vitriol that is disturbing, acute, and entertaining. Hang in there for the ending, where once the actor finally arrives, Bernhard allows him to level a passionate indictment of a woman whose silly question deserves nothing but contempt. The actors' retort is so stinging that it's almost humorous -- in a wonderfully dark manner that's reminiscent of Beckett's finest -- and is worth waiting for after we've followed the narrator's hours long thoughts as he sits in the wing chair. As we traverse his thoughts while he sits in the wing chair, waiting waiting waiting for the actor to arrive, we also revisit his relationship with a woman buried earlier the same day but whose suicide and funeral is strangely not discussed at all during the dinner party. Bernhard clearly finds this silence symptomatic of what cannot be faced in a society which suffers one of the highest suicide rates in Europe.

For Bernhard readers who haven't sampled this novel, it's a must. For those who have yet to delve into the deep, resolute prose of one of the German-speaking world's most insightful writers, this may not be the place to start, but is certainly a candidate. Try "Concrete" or "Correction", too.

"Woodcutters" is the personal narrative of an Austrian composer and member of educated Austrian society, disturbed by the artificiality of city life, yearning for the simplicity of the country, and envious of those who see beauty so effortlessly in the simple things in life (1984). The book is written in Thomas Bernhard's curmudgeonly signature style, a rambling chaotic monologue, one episode following the other in darting succession, building the story one parcel at a time, culminating in a climax less of action than philosophical insight (1931-1989, Austria).

The narrator (clearly a proxy for Bernhard) sits aloof and alone, in a comfortable chair at a cocktail party, held in honor of a famous actor performing on a local stage. The actor arrives after a lengthy delay, and the group sits down to a midnight dinner, where the actor engages the group in charming, if stilted, conversation. Through it all, the effusive narrator volunteers how much he hates being there, how much he hates his hosts (while complaining how much he once loved them), how much he hates Austrian bourgeois society, and so on, until the party ends, the actor leaves, and the narrator sums up his thoughts. Hardly naive, he realizes most people don't much like him either, but also apologetic, he doesn't much care.

The work is a meditation on artificiality, playing on the contrast between the artifice of city life and the authenticity of the rural, and questioning whether the actor is still play-acting, even in this "casual" setting. Like other Bernhard works, it is written without a single paragraph break in all of its 181 pages. While interesting and capable, this work's conclusion and final insight is not as powerful or effective as those of works such as "Yes," "Extinction," or "Wittgenstein's Nephew." Also, it might have made more sense to English-language readers if the title were "Lumberjacks," to suggest its central conflict more clearly.

Bernhard was one of the great writers of the past 50 years, and this book is a particularly good place to begin exploring his unique achievement in the novel. He writes often what may be called "stream of consciousness," but it is far more compelling (at least to me) than the Joycean variety. It persuades the reader that this really is the way that the mind of an extremely educated, pessimistic, hypercritical and hyper self-critical person would work. Beginning with a perceptive observation of an individual quirk, Bernhard can gradually build up a devasting case that indicts an entire society, if not humanity as a species. How he does this, the careful construction of the sentences, the use of hyperbole, all of these make for works that force one to laugh out loud with gallows humor. It's also a pleasure to find oneself engrossed in a book that is minimally concerned with plot. Woodcutters is simply one man's ruminations during a ghastly dinner party attended by failed artists and pseudo-artists. But through Bernhard's careful narrative, characters are evoked and dispatched in ways that elude most better known novelists.

of those who appreciate the French nouveau roman and Lacanian refoundings of Freud. Woodcutters might have been entitled "Buzzsaw" for the manner in which Bernhard cuts through the reader's expectations of traditional narrative technique. A son away from home at college visits his father, a country doctor who has come to question existence and the notion of subjectivity (a Lacanian concern) through the eyes of his patients. At the begin of this short novel, a murder has taken place and the killer is at large. Father and son spend the day traveling the countryside on the doctor's agenda of house calls. The last two thirds or the book detail their visit with a monomanical prince who engages in one of the author's longest and most fascinating monologues about the nature of an existence already deemed futile, a future that, even if it exists, lacks meaning by definition, and the imaginings of this second father about his own son's reactions to wealth, noblesse oblige and the daily routine of family, writing (always a Bernhardian leitmotif--see "The Limeworks"), and the nature of routine and the interruption of that routine with its implications for the very idea that any human meaning whatsoever could exist. With Thomas Bernhard don't expect answers, Dear Reader, only devastatingly harsh and heart-rending questions. --R. L. Mazzola, Denver, New York, Paris