Customer Reviews

On the mountain: Rescue attempt, nonsense

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This early work captures much of the mood, but not exactly the style that will be prevalent in Bernhard's later work. Written as what can best be described as one long prose poem, the storyline is drawn in fragments of conversation, emotion, images, etc. and can be hard to follow at times. However, what's distilled here is an atmosphere of clausterphobia and approaching madness that is definitely Bernhard's forte. I found it to be incredibly lyrical and poignant, and this piece has remained my favorite even after reading several of his more mature works. Maybe because of the dog (read the book!).

His earliest but already matured prose/A thin(143 pages)book made up of one towering sentence/Dis- turbing plot,problematic hero but gripping tale/ challenging but satisfying masterpiece...

FAB QUOTE #1: "There are no families anymore, only live-in arrangements, rail and postal workers credit unions, travel associations, limited philosophy partnerships, literature societies, smoked-meat societies, turnip cooperatives' societies, burlap bag associations, legal societies, weed-killing societies, societies for the praise and adoration of God: spare parts heaped on top of each other in some giant spare-part warehouse: a huge pile of sh-t for a world."

FAB QUOTE #2: "The country people have always hated the city folks, you know: the farmers had their religion, the city people their nothingness, nowadays all of that has changed: both have their nothingness: the countryside doesn't have any religion anymore: we have only a world without religion: an inevitable wasteland."

FAB QUOTE #3: "People keep looking for someone to tell them the truth, but as we know there's no such thing as truth, hence no one to tell it, not even the opposite of truth, they all transgress against God, against their concept of God, for even I have a concept of God, even though it's only a concept, says the teacher."

FAB QUOTE #4: "Summer arrives with a lot that's unbearable, I've already seen this unbearable stuff before: in the wintertime."

And here's something from Sophie Wilkins's afterword: "Kafka broke down forever the old Latin structure of the German sentence, the clauses within clauses with the verb at the end wondering what its subject was, back there (with which Mark Twain had his fun in his European travel books) and created a new sentence, sinuous as a snake chain moving on indefinitely, never needing to look back beyond the last comma."