Thomas Bernhard
Paperback | Pages: 188 pages Rating: 4.21 | 3438 Users | 311 Reviews
Identify Books Supposing Woodcutters
| Original Title: | Holzfällen: Eine Erregung |
| ISBN: | 0226043967 (ISBN13: 9780226043968) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Setting: | Vienna(Austria) |
Representaion As Books Woodcutters
This controversial portrayal of Viennese artistic circles begins as the writer-narrator arrives at an 'artistic dinner' given by a composer and his society wife—a couple that the writer once admired but has now come to loathe. The guest of honor, an actor from the Burgtheater, is late. As the other guests wait impatiently, they are seen through the critical eye of the narrator, who begins a silent but frenzied, sometimes maniacal, and often ambivalent tirade against these former friends, most of whom were brought together by the woman whom they had buried that day. Reflections on Joana's life and suicide are mixed with these denunciations until the famous actor arrives, bringing a culmination to the evening for which the narrator had not even thought to hope. "Mr. Bernhard's portrait of a society in dissolution has a Scandinavian darkness reminiscent of Ibsen and Strindberg, but it is filtered through with a minimalist prose. . . . Woodcutters offers an unusually strange, intense, engrossing literary experience."—Mark Anderson, New York Times Book Review "Musical, dramatic and set in Vienna, Woodcutters. . . .resembles a Strauss operetta with a libretto by Beckett."—Joseph Costes, Chicago Tribune "Thomas Bernhard, the great pessimist-rhapsodist of German literature . . . never compromises, never makes peace with life. . . . Only in the pure, fierce isolation of his art can he get justice."—Michael Feingold, Village Voice "In typical Bernhardian fashion the narrator is moved by hatred and affection for a society that he believes destroys the very artistic genius it purports to glorify. A superb translation."—Library JournalPoint Appertaining To Books Woodcutters
| Title | : | Woodcutters |
| Author | : | Thomas Bernhard |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 188 pages |
| Published | : | February 15th 1989 by University Of Chicago Press (first published 1984) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. European Literature. German Literature. Novels. Literature |
Rating Appertaining To Books Woodcutters
Ratings: 4.21 From 3438 Users | 311 ReviewsAppraise Appertaining To Books Woodcutters
Just re-read after 8+ years: not nearly as funny as I remembered, which isn't what I was expecting, since I re-read it to prep for an essay on Bernhard's humor: hmmm. Laughs at first may have come in part from initial exposure to his intoxicating/detoxifying technology in prose. It's not all bile at all -- the moments of tenderness for his friends and Vienna really stood out this time, as when he shifts into generalizing "we" mode. The style isn't totally refined yet either. I'd almost beWoodcutters is a story about the ruination of artistic hopes it is a complex, multilayered and caustic tale of life in the world of arts.People hated me and everything I wrote, and ganged up against me in the most vicious fashion whenever they saw me. But ever since my return from London I had been on my guard against them, against all the people I had known previously, but above all against these so-called artistic figures from the fifties, and especially those who had come to this artistic
Youve always lived a life of pretense, not a real life a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real. Bernhard's satire of Viennese petit bourgeois society is one long frantic, hateful, angry, and at times even nostalgic internal monologue. Its narrated as if its one deep exhale by an aging writer who has returned to Vienna after several decades away and has reunited with people he didnt like 30
As I sat in my chair after reading of a man sat in a chair, I thought, what an odd, darkly comic and nihilistically cold book this was. The only thing I am sure of is I haven't read anything quite like it before. I wouldn't have minded going for a drink with Mr Bernhard, but if this is his idea of a dinner party, I would decline the invitation and stay at home with a good book and some takeaway noodles. The novel takes place over only a couple of hours, but is told with large chunks of flashback
Brilliant, bilious, hilarious, unsettling, a breathlessly intense, sustained novelistic experience that leaves you smiling and strained on the outside, nicked and nourished beneath the skin. By this point in his literary output Thomas Bernhard was a master craftsman, and the narrative voice he conjures for the unnamedbut immensely Bernhardianwriter whose interiority serves as the driving force of this little human engine that couldn't ranks among his very best. Personally, and has always proven
3,5Είχα καιρό να βρεθώ σε φυσικό βιβλιοπωλείο. Ήθελα να ξεχάσω το χρόνο, περιμένοντας δυο φίλους να διαλέξουν δωράκια για μια παιδική γιορτή. Ξεχώρισα αρχικά το Μηδέν και το άπειρο και μετά συνέχισα να κοιτάω. Επέλεξα τελικά κάποιο του Ρεβέρτε, τον οποίο δεν έχω διαβάσει γενικά. Φεύγοντας έπεσε το μάτι μου στα πίσω ράφια της κλασικής και είδα ένα μικρό βιβλιαράκι που έκανε μπαμ από μακριά ότι είναι Έξαντας. Το είχα αναζητήσει παλιότερα και έτσι το πήρα στα χέρια μου. Αν και είχα διαβάσει
In a prominent, well-trafficked gallery of the Bad Dinner Guest Hall of Fame we should logically expect to find the (unnamed) narrator of Thomas Bernhard's excoriating masterpiece Woodcutters, who not only isolates himself from the other guests, preferring a lone wing chair in the entryway to their generally detestable company, but also spends the better part of the evening mentally dissecting, dismantling, and disparaging everyone who is unlucky enough to fall under his gaze. At the
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