Re: The Loser

[John A Lane <jal@iastate.edu>]

At 05:27 PM 4/1/1998 EST, ByTheSea6 wrote:
>Anyone care to share an opinion or review of Thomas Bernhard's "the Loser?"
>Apologies if this subject has been discussed and rehashed....
>
>yours,
>
>nate
>

NATE--

A 2-cent opinion about "The Loser": A great book if you can handle the
steep twists & turns of the prose. Bernhard's forte, in my opinion, was his
ability to have his characters peel back layer after layer of their
thoughts. Or to put it another way, the object of the character's thoughts
is like one of those
wooden Russian dolls (babushkas?) that when opened, you discover another
smaller doll, and you open that one, and find another smaller doll, and so
forth.
--John
p.s. Now here's a far greater assessment of the book below...

>From The New York Times:

Devastated by Genius 
Date: September 8, 1991, Sunday, Late Edition - Final 
Byline: By Ursula Hegi; 
Lead: 
THE LOSER By Thomas Bernhard. Translated by Jack Dawson. 190 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $19. 
Text: 

Considered anti-Austrian by many of his countrymen, Thomas Bernhard
(1931-89) nurtured a love-hate connection to his native land and took
pleasure in shocking and antagonizing its citizens with his work. His
practice of blurring the lines between fiction and fact even resulted in
lawsuits for libel. 

Bernhard's complex and unsettling novel "The Loser," which was originally
published in German in 1983, is woven around an imaginary friendship
between Bernhard and the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, an eccentric recluse
terrified of injury who sat on a 14-inch chair when he played the piano,
his eyes at the level of the keyboard, as though this link symbolized his
most intimate relationship. 

Rendered in a consistently joyless voice, this novel about genius and
obsession uses language that moves in loops around itself, mirroring the
thought processes of a compulsive mind. Drawn to the same cycle of events,
the same questions, the unnamed narrator -- who both is and is not Thomas
Bernhard -- dissects the past, assigns responsibility and, at times,
deceives himself. Except for the first page, the internal monologue runs in
one unbroken paragraph until the end of the book. 

Although it is possible that Bernhard attended one of Gould's performances
in Salzburg in 1958, it is unlikely that the two men ever met. Perhaps the
catalyst for this book was Bernhard's deep identification with the pianist,
who withdrew from concerts into a romanticized isolation that Bernhard also
pursued throughout his life. When the author died of a heart attack two
years ago, at the age of 58, he was alone in his Austrian farmhouse. 

Bernhard takes details from Gould's life and transforms them to fit his
narrator's experience. He even revises Gould's death, having him die at the
age of 51, not 50. In "The Loser," Gould, the narrator and a third young
pianist, Wertheimer (who bears certain similarities to the philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein), meet one "rain-drenched summer" in Leopoldskron,
where they study with the famous teacher Horowitz. They live music, breathe
music. They barely sleep or eat. "Horowitz," the narrator observes,
"rendered all our professors null and void." 

When Gould returns to Austria two years later to play Bach's "Goldberg
Variations," the other two young men are devastated by his genius and give
up the piano. The narrator resents Wertheimer for copying his gesture. "I
wanted to be the best or not at all, and so I gave it up." 

His greatest enemy is mediocrity. He is afraid of succumbing to
complacency, of being merely one of many competent musicians: "All our
lives we run away from amateurishness and it always catches up with us, I
thought." Bernhard's narrator sees the world in shades of black and white,
everything or nothing. And therefore nothing it has to be. He tries to tell
himself that he never wanted to be a piano virtuoso; yet that loss keeps
smoldering through nearly three decades: "We didn't reach the absolute
limit and go beyond this limit, I thought, because we gave up in the face
of a genius in our field." 

Wertheimer's cruel and odd attachment to his sister contributes to his
self-destruction, and his vindictive nature persists even in his choice of
death -- he travels to Switzerland and hangs himself "a hundred steps in
front of his sister's house." Flawed and needy, Wertheimer has courted
suicide since childhood. But as the narrator analyzes Wertheimer, he draws
a horrifying picture of himself, revealing far more than he realizes. In
the process, he becomes an unreliable narrator, a device Bernhard uses
convincingly throughout this bleak novel. 

Translated by Jack Dawson, the text faithfully adheres to the pattern of
Bernhard's monologue. The German title, "Der Untergeher" -- which suggests
"the one who goes under" and implies a struggle against circumstances,
destruction even -- is impossible to translate literally. And yet the
book's title had to focus on a single word because it is this word -- used
several dozen times throughout the novel -- that prods Wert heimer into
suicide many years after Gould labels him the "Untergeher." 

"Glenn mortally wounded Wertheimer with his loser," the narrator concludes,
"not because Wert heimer heard this concept for the first time but because
Wertheimer, without knowing this word loser, had long been familiar with
the concept of loser, but Glenn Gould said the word loser out loud in a
crucial moment. . . . We say a word and destroy a person, although the
person we've destroyed, at the moment we say out loud the word that
destroys him, doesn't take notice of this deadly fact, I thought." 

Since the word "loser" lies at the core of Bernhard's novel, the
translation becomes far more significant than a mere selection of title.
Quite likely, choosing "The Loser" was one of Mr. Dawson's better options;
and yet, in our society, that word is encumbered with notions of failure
and passivity -- whereas the German "Untergeher" is also bound up with the
idea of destiny, of grappling with overwhelming external forces. 

"We have the greatest trouble saving ourselves from these losers," the
narrator discovers. "Because of their weak constitution they have the
capacity to devastate the people around them, I thought. . . . They drag
you down with all their might, wherever they can, I said to myself, for
them any victim will do, even their own sister, I thought." 

Sadly, the narrator's friendships with Gould and Wertheimer are the most
significant bonds in his barren existence. Void of compassion for anyone,
including himself, he lives a half-life in isolation, arrogance and
madness. Sequestered in his study "without seeing anything but my own
unhappiness," he shuns present experience while he scrutinizes the past
through a believable yet constricting lens.