Frost (original 1963; edition 2006)

I think pretty highly of this longish gem. My review can be read in its entirety here:

http://mewlhouse.hubpages.com/hub/Frost-the-First-Novel-Wrtten-by-Thomas-Bernhard ( )

'Frost' yet another excrescence of Bernhard's imagination. This time it's a student who follows a painter, or rather a man who used to be a painter, in order to see if he is sane. Of course he isn't: that is so immediately obvious that the question becomes--as of the first five pages of the book--what kind of imagination the painter possesses. The book offers no relief, no pleasure of slowly dawning insight (even if that insight is might reveal psychosis, impending suicide, unrelieved pessimism, or bottomless misanthropy). Reading 'Frost' is like lying in pig slurry, and raising yourself every few minutes to wipe yourself, and then lying back down, then rising again. It makes Beckett seem prissy and sterile, and it makes nearly every other author look cowardly, because by comparison most authors rush off to nice conclusions. ( )

Here is Thomas Bernhard once again offering the “philosophy of the exacerbated bird’s-eye view of impure thought” as it goes “through the nitrogen of the primal condition of the devil,” “pitch[ing] wildness and quiet alternately at the disquiet of others.” His voicebox is the painter, Strauch, “one of those people . . . who tie tourniquets round the arteries of their thought, but to no effect; who pour themselves out in suicidal word-spate, who hate themselves in truth because the world of their feeling, apprehended as enforced incest, daily smashes them to smithereens.” Get the picture?

Strauch’s disdain is breathless. Bernhard ensconces him in an environment, “where vulgarity carries its head as high as royalty. Brutality wanders along like the epitome of gentleness, celebrated, ethical, inimitable.” Strauch deplores the liquor-soaked, “cretins” who surround the rural inn to which he retreated after burning all of his paintings and breaking contact with anyone who might have been in the habit of tolerating him. His brother, a medical doctor, sends an aspiring medical student to observe Strauch’s behavior for thirty days. The book transpires in this implausibly short time period, narrated by the medical student, who quotes Strauch nearly as much as he articulates thoughts of his own. The reflections of the medical student are rapidly contaminated and overrun by the timbre of Strauch’s own inexhaustible venom and while peripheral characters register a few pages worth of speaking, they and the medical student all end up sounding like the painter, which is one of the book’s weak points.

If you had a friend like the painter, you would not often pay attention to what he said. When it resonated with your mood or your conclusions, you might perk up; but by and large you can tune out such a person with ease and discover twenty minutes (or pages) later, that they are oblivious to your level of alertness and disinterested in your reception. Worse, you can pretty much immediately get back into the flow of their discourse because it is predictable in its trajectory and stance. It can be difficult to get traction in this book. When I skim through the parts where I made fewest notes, I find passages that I don’t remember reading. At the same time, the book is peppered with rewardingly humorous passages that are one of the things for which I most enjoy Bernhard: “I can’t remember what I wanted to say, but I know it was something malicious. Often, of all the things you mean to say, that’s all that’s left, the sense that you had it in mind to say something malicious.”

“As soon as it could blow its own nose, a child was deadly to anything it came in touch with.”

“Most of them have never done anything else anyway but load and unload, standing in standing water in their gumboots and knocking in bridge piles.”

“It’s like having to make my way through millennia, just because a couple of moments are after me with big sticks.”

Themes that run throughout Bernhard’s writing are already making regular appearances in this, his first novel. A loathing of Austria, common Austrians and womankind is everywhere present. Characters fixate on suicide and feel beset and undermined by the destructive, crude and inadequate nature of neighbors and nations. Bernhard’s characters refuse to integrate and then punish themselves for it. The acid humor is the only relief that you will be afforded in your progress through his novels.If you have not read Bernhard before, do not start here. Consider starting with “Gargoyles,” his most episodic work that suffers least from repetition, or his memoir, “Gathering Evidence,” which is shattering, beautiful and cruel. As far as I’m concerned, most of his middle period works about creative people whose creativity is blocked, are a bit too painful for anyone who isn’t a literary masochist. ( )

One of the book descriptions says this is a story of a friendship - I'm not sure I would use that word. Bernhard alternates between the semi-coherent ramblings of the old man under observation and stories about or descriptions of the village in which the action takes place. I don't know if I should have tried to understand what the painter was saying - I did try, but perhaps that isn't the point.

I wanted to put the book down a few times because I had no interest in either of the main characters, but the author was good enough and forced me to keep going. There are also a few passages that are worth remembering, and Bernhard is still good when he deals with the issue of mediocrity and provincialism.

If you are thinking about reading Bernhard, I would recommend The Loser instead.

real ( )