Classics corner
Prose by Thomas Bernhard — review
Bernhard's neuroticism and his loathing of the everyday are palpable in these newly translated short stories
Mina Holland
Sunday 2 January 2011
T
he neuroticism and cruelty on display in these seven newly translated short stories leave you short of breath but entirely absorbed – or, more accurately, entrapped. The theme of imprisonment runs through the collection, and Thomas Bernhard forces us to confront his characters' sense of confinement with dizzying, claustrophobic whirls of syntax. We too feel the craze-inducing "sleeplessness" (the word hypnotically repeated throughout the narrative) of the new tutor in "Two Tutors", and grasp the pain of Georg's deformity in "The Crime of an Innsbruck Shopkeeper's Son": "Every morning he woke up in the firmly locked cell of a new age-old day." What translator Martin Chalmers describes as Bernhard's "verbal logjam" evokes madness and suffering to the extent that we experience them ourselves.
The stories are preoccupied with mental illness and a sense of disappointment at the world. Bernhard's loathing of the everyday is palpable. Vienna is viciously referred to as a "cemetery" with "silent megalomania". The city is busier but no less isolating than jail, physically imprisoning its inhabitants and mirroring their mental states. Rural Austria doesn't fare any better; the narrator in "Jauregg" spits blood about a small mining community: "general exhaustion prevails and a general will to nothing." And while one tale, "Is it a comedy? Is it a tragedy?", is specifically about the theatre, thespian imagery is used throughout the collection to convey the crudeness of modern life, "a repulsive operetta".
In theme and style, Prose, which was originally published in 1967, closely echoes Bernard novels such as Old Masters and Concrete. It provides an excellent introduction to his work, or a satisfying reading experience in itself for those who like angst in small doses.
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