You'd think this novel would be unreadable, consisting as it does of one, yes one, insanely long and largely redundant paragraph. But its combination of humor and desperation works. I was agreeably jaws-agape. Here is an author to explore; next stop, his inaugural novel, Frost. ( )

2.1

Overall more impressive in style than in substance, however, in retrospect I enjoyed this work quite a lot. imo critics who emphasize his needling of 'Austria' have already lost themselves in cheap allegory. Some impromptu thoughts:

Insane notion, the opposite of composition. The author has concluded the scene (about disposal of the Steinway) and then immediately repeated it with less art, as if the scene has been bunched up on top of itself…. And yet there is something to this so-called rumpled-fabric narration… This cyclic form, with its repetition of mantra (e.g. “Glenn was the genius”) models the verbal thought process, which repeats itself in tidbits of semantic meaning, and only through repetition of these sense-phrases (nonsense) is able to penetrate the subject matter (to reveal more nonsense)

Three characters is too many. The obvious homology between Wertheimer and the author will surely flatten itself.

“If we look at things squarely the only thing left from the greatest philosophical enterprises is a pitiful aphoristic aftertaste, he said, no matter what the philosophy, no matter what the philosopher, everything falls to bits when we set to work with all our faculties and that means with all our mental instruments, he said, I thought.”
The narrator's musings become more and more off-base. Everything in this quotation contradicts the previous narrative. Never in all the ‘he said, I thought’ does Wertheimer use the term ‘peculiar’. And these additional characters are neglected from the monistic narrative (how is it that, after 20 years of solitude, one has dozens of such acquiantances?) Of course this is bernhard's intention, otherwise he has let slip quite the tidbit --> “These artists, she said, were peculiar types, the word peculiar wasn’t hers either, she got it from Wertheimer who was fond of the word peculiar, as I thought. For a long time people like Wertheimer (and me!) put up with their isolation, I thought, then they have to have company, for twenty years Wertheimer held out without company, then he filled his house with all sorts of people.” In fact, the narrator has incidentally been ruined by his monologue. Rendered an incompetent driveler who cannot even relate an the answer to a simple request. (when asked about W.’s funeral, he instead parades his tawdry opinions about the city of Vienna, so tawdry in fact that they reveal the root of the very ‘cretinism’ he criticizes in the ‘volk’ and which directly colludes with the rise of H. in Austria. And Wertheimer/Witt himself is Jewish.) Such 'slips' of narration are winks at the reader. He's coy. Anyone who takes Bernhard's diatribe verbatim is one such 'cretin'.

Finally, some specific phrases which pleased me when i first read them. The latter two are particularly representative of his style and which I hope to remember forever:

“Monk’s Mountain, which is also called Suicide Mountain, since it is especially suited for suicide”

“We’re so arrogant that we think we’re studying music whereas we’re not even capable of living,”

“Wertheimer had put all his eggs in his piano virtuoso career, as I have to call it, I hadn’t put any eggs in such a piano virtuoso career, that was the difference.”

“he said, I thought.”

“I had thought then, I thought.” ( )

The unnamed narrator of this novel enrolls in a class in Salzburg offered by the piano virtuoso, Horowitz. There he encounters and befriends Wertheimer, the eponymous “loser”, and Glenn Gould, the Canadian pianist and genius. Gould’s playing of The Goldberg Variations so astonishes Wertheimer that he finds he must give up the piano entirely. The narrator also abandons his hopes for a career as a virtuoso. Both acknowledge Gould’s supremacy, even greater than that of their teacher, Horowitz. That Gould himself gives up his career of public performance in order to become a recluse in the woods outside New York continuously perfecting his Bach (note — this is Bernhard’s fictional Gould) only underscores Wertheimer’s and the narrator’s need to also have abandoned their careers. But it is Gould’s early demise (in this novel, by stroke) that triggers Wertheimer’s eventual suicide at much the same age. The narrator considers both events and what led up to and surrounds them, what lends them significance, and in the process reevaluates his own life choices.

For devotees of Bernhard’s late style of uninterrupted misanthropic monologue, The Loser satisfies every hope. It is bleak, full of envy and spite, wreathed in self-loathing, and sporadically darkly humorous. And yet, with the almost miraculous figure of Gould, it’s clear that Bernhard commits himself to the possibility of a kind of human perfection, though that might necessitate an unremitting devotion to a specific artistic project. Still, the very possibility of Gould’s recordings makes life, for some, bearable. Alas, not for Wertheimer as he was, from the outset and always, the loser.

Heartily recommended for those who love Bernhard’s style, and gently so for everyone else. ( )

I was going to comment on the similarity of the incessant prose to that of Bach's compositions, but the afterword already covered that, I thought. ( )