Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989)

Rollercoaster, vitriolic and superbly written diatribe about his home country and experience, applicable in many ways to how people are treated and behave today. Or, more forcefully, the book is a non-stop expectoration of bile and sputum, as in 'sputum' - 'to cough up sputum from their eroded lungs’. It is repetitive. It is a prose poem of hate. It is like a dystopian grand prix, round and round, fuelled by disgust at human nature, establishment and other people. It is absolutely brilliant.

This is an extinction in progress. This is the slow methodical annihilation of every comfortable reading habit you've ever had, every expectation about what a novel should do or be, all of it swept away by this Austrian voice that won't shut up, that can't shut up, that circles and circles around its own rage and intelligence until you realize the circling itself is the point. Bernhard has created not a story but a kind of magnificent textual suicide, and you'll either throw the book across show more the room or find yourself completely destroyed by it and transformed by it which amounts to the same thing in the end. show less

Kalkwerk differs from most of Bernhard's fiction in that the narrator is not the protagonist, but a neutral, transparent observer. He reports without comment what he has heard about Konrad (whom he apparently doesn't know) from Konrad's acquaintances Fro and Wieser, complemented by the various opinions of the people in several local pubs. It's easy to understand why Bernhard needs to set up this wall between the narrator and Konrad, because Konrad is the cynical, depressed, frustrated and show more alienated Bernhard-figure frighteningly taken to the extreme and somewhere beyond. At the outset of the book, we learn that Konrad has murdered his wheelchair-bound wife and has been found by the police hiding in a frozen cesspit. Bernhard uses his customary 200-page paragraph to analyse the process of intellectual self-destruction that brought Konrad to this point, at the root of which is the apparently seminal monograph On Hearing that Konrad has been working at for the last twenty years, without ever quite having the courage to realise it on paper.

As the title implies, the former lime-works where Konrad has chosen to live is a major character and source of symbolism throughout the book. He has supposedly picked it because of its remoteness and freedom from distractions, but in fact it turns out to be in the middle of all kinds of rural activity. As a functional industrial building it is meant to embody his disgust for prettiness and bourgeois country-house life, but we quickly realise that it also expresses his unproductive lifestyle, and his failure to break with his bourgeois roots (the works was part of his family's business empire). And it obviously has more than a hint of the tomb about it, and on a prosaic level it seems to reflect elements of the decrepit farmhouse Bernhard describes buying for himself in Meine Preise.

There is a wonderful Whatever happened to Baby Jane struggle going on between Konrad and his wife, as they spar about food, her clothes, Konrad's interminable hearing-tests according to the method of Urbantschitsch, and above all, about which book he should read to her from: she prefers Heinrich von Ofterdingen, but he is dedicated to Kropotkin's memoirs. Even when his wife isn't ringing her little bell, Konrad is disturbed by interminable visits from the locals, or the thought that there might be a visit from a local, or a passing huntsman or forester might be making a noise in the woods....

I don't want to repeat my comments about Bernhard's style for the umpteenth time: it is what it is, and it's splendid, but it's best to experience it at first hand. But one detail I haven't commented on before, which struck me especially in this book, is the extent to which Bernhard enjoys peppering us with Austrianisms, even whilst pouring contempt on every aspect of Austrian prettiness and quaintness. He clearly gets real (and no doubt perverse) pleasure from foregrounding words like Jänner, Fleischhauer, Rauchfangkehrer, Störschneider, Zuhaus - words which are just so much more fun that their standard German counterparts. And why not? show less

Cada vez son menos las obras de Thomas Bernhard que me quedan por leer, es por ello que me las voy racionando, porque después ya sé que no habrán nuevas obras de mi admirado Bernhard por leer, y sólo me quedará releer sus obras. Crítica severa de la sociedad artística y cultural de Viena, y crítica despiadada de la propia Viena, ‘Tala’ (1984) es un monólogo interior, desde su sillón de orejas, de un narrador y protagonista que ha sido invitado a una cena artística por los show more Auersberger, a los que llevaba muchos años sin ver, cena artística que también rememora a la fallecida Joanna, que se ha suicidado. Durante dicha velada, el protagonista repasará parte de su vida, haciendo hincapié en las relaciones con algunos de los invitados a esta cena artística. ‘Tala’, por tanto, es una crítica a la sociedad artística vienesa, a su falta de autenticidad, hipocresía y mediocridad, además de una reflexión sobre la estulticia humana. Bernhard despliega una excelente prosa que se encuentra en el culmen de su carrera. Un prosa circular, repetitiva, hipnótica, con palabras clave que se repiten durante la narración, exponiendo una idea repetidamente, volviendo sobre sus pasos para retomarla, exponiendo unos hechos para volver sobre ellos periódicamente, por los mismos hechos. En fin, es Bernhard. show less