Three Novellas

by Thomas Bernhard, Kenneth J. Northcott (Translator), Peter Jansen (Translator)

Uninitiated readers should consider Three Novellas a passport to the absurd, dark, and uncommonly comic world of Bernhard. Two of the three novellas here have never before been published in English, and all of them show an early preoccupation with the themes-illness and madness, isolation, tragic friendships-that would obsess Bernhard throughout his career. Amras, one of his earliest works, tells the story of two brothers, one epileptic, who have survived a family suicide pact and are now living in a ruined tower, struggling with madness, trying either to come fully back to life or finally to die. In Playing Watten, the narrator, a doctor who lost his practice due to morphine abuse, describes a visit paid him by a truck driver who wanted the doctor to return to his habit of playing a game of cards (watten) every Wednesday—a habit that the doctor had interrupted when one of the players killed himself. The last novella, Walking, records the conversations of the narrator and his friend Oehler while they walk, discussing anything that comes to mind but always circling back to their mutual friend Karrer, who has gone irrevocably mad. Perhaps the most overtly philosophical work in Bernhard’s highly philosophical oeuvre, Walking provides a penetrating meditation on the impossibility of truly thinking.

Three Novellas offers a superb introduction to the fiction of perhaps the greatest unsung hero of twentieth-century literature. Rarely have the words suffocating, intense, and obsessive been meant so positively.

Genres: German Literature, Fiction, Short Stories, Novella, Philosophy, Literature

184 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Thomas Bernhard was an Austrian writer who ranks among the most distinguished German-speaking writers of the second half of the 20th century.

Although internationally he’s most acclaimed because of his novels, he was also a prolific playwright. His characters are often at work on a lifetime and never-ending major project while they deal with themes such as suicide, madness and obsession, and, as Bernhard did, a love-hate relationship with Austria. His prose is tumultuous but sober at the same time, philosophic by turns, with a musical cadence and plenty of black humor.

He started publishing in the year 1963 with the novel Frost. His last published work, appearing in the year 1986, was Extinction. Some of his best-known works include The Loser (about a student’s fictionalized relationship with the pianist Glenn Gould), Wittgenstein’s Nephew, and Woodcutters.

Reviews

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

"All I have to look forward to, and I have thought this ever since childhood, is deterioration."

Death and madness are typical themes for Bernhard and the three short prose pieces here deal with both in different ways. "Amras" is the story of two brothers, survivors of a familial suicide pact that killed their parents but left them scarred and vulnerable, living in their uncle's rural tower. "Playing Watten", vying for the outstanding genius award of this volume with the following one, is about a scandalized doctor arguing with a truck driver over playing watten again, and is a vast, impenetrable discourse on the suicide of one of the other regular players. "Walking", probably my favorite, is a long rant on how to think, or, rather, how not to think oneself into a corner, precisely by thinking oneself into a corner and then trying to walk through the wall. Perhaps best summed up with the pristine quote: "Everything is a vile simplification of the cosmos."

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

We have no power to make decisions any more. What we are doing is nothing. What we breathe is nothing. When we walk, we walk from one hopelessness to another. We walk and we always walk into a still more hopeless hopelessness. Walking away, nothing but walking away.

I often find myself wondering why I bother to read fiction any more. It’s a tic or a compulsion or a means to obfuscation. A blurring of a moment coming into being that I refuse to use other means to fill. Each sentence read is a distraction from the necessary (and the other unnecessary) actions I take to live my life.

You know all the terrible conditions. You know all the attempts (to live), those who do not emerge from these attempts, this whole attempt at life, this whole state of attempting, seen as a life.

People read for different reasons. I used to think I read for multiple reasons. I worked in a library where it was my job to order the books and I would order books I wanted to read and that I thought other people would want to read (and some that I thought that they should read) and I would put certain of these books on hold for myself so that I could read them when they arrived brand new out of the box. They were different types of books, nonfiction and fiction—whatever I thought sounded interesting to me—and it was all kind of serendipitous in a way and I liked that and it allowed me to read a wide spectrum of books for free. But then I left that job because it was in a terrible place and I had been through an ordeal so I needed to get away from there. I moved very far away from that place and I applied for other jobs in other libraries in the new place but it never worked out for various reasons so I no longer had that direct pipeline to new books. Around that time I created my first Goodreads account but it was quite a while (years) before I found interesting people on this site. When I did, though, it helped to reinvigorate and transform my reading, and subsequently my writing. I am thankful to all of those people, most of whom are either gone from here now or mostly dormant. For this I am sometimes sad although not surprised about, for I know how life is and I have also watched the quality of this site steadily degrade ever since Amazon first took over and began monetizing everything like they do with all the things they acquire.

Thus we are always on the point of throwing away thoughts, throwing away the thoughts we have and the thoughts that we always have, because we are in the habit of always having thoughts, throughout our lives, as far as we know, we throw thoughts away, we do nothing else because we are nothing but people who are always tipping out their minds like garbage cans and emptying them wherever they may be. […] It is for this reason that the world is always full of a stench, because everybody is always emptying out their heads like a garbage can. Unless we find a different method, says Oehler, the world will, without doubt, one day be suffocated by the stench that this thought refuse generates.

I fill this space with the stench of my thought refuse because it is what people do and I am a person and close to a decade ago I discovered Thomas Bernhard’s writing thanks to the aforementioned people on this here weak shadow of what used to be a good site and there is probably no other writer who has had as penetrating an effect on me as he has. There are other writers who mean a lot to me but even some of those (more contemporary) writers have in the course of their own writing development been influenced by Thomas Bernhard (e.g., Brian Evenson, who wrote the foreword to this collection of early novellas) so there is tangential Bernhardian energy there flowing through them, which I also savor.

We often go on asking the same question for months at a time, he says, ask ourselves or ask others but above all we ask ourselves and when, even after the longest time, even after the passage of years, we have still not been able to answer this question because it is not possible for us to answer it, it doesn’t matter what the question is, says Oehler, we ask another, a new, question, but perhaps again a question that we have already asked ourselves, and so it goes on throughout life, until the mind can stand it no longer.

So again, I ask myself, why do I keep reading fiction. I am revisiting Bernhard in an attempt to answer this question. Is it a question I’ve asked myself before, yes. Can my mind stand it any longer, probably not. After months of searching those many years ago I did finally find another job, though not in a public library and almost by accident, through a contact at a radical leftist library where I was volunteering. Suddenly I was connected to a large university with reciprocal lending access to libraries at the most prestigious universities in the country. Jackpot. I began requesting stacks of books every week—all the obscure out-of-print tomes I craved. Like any other addiction it was a bottomless pit but I kept on diving anyway, until I finally got the bends and stopped reading fiction altogether for a time.

When we are dealing with people we are only dealing with so-called people, just as when we are dealing with facts we are only dealing with so-called facts, just as the whole of matter, since it only emanates from the human mind, is only so-called matter, just as we know that everything emanates from the human mind and from nothing else, if we understand the concept knowledge and accept it as a concept that we understand.

When I returned to fiction I mined in unfamiliar directions but ultimately it did not make a difference—I was hollowed out and nothing could fill me. So I returned again and again to the ones who had first shaken me. What became clear—and by clear of course I mean a so-called clarity akin to peering through a smeared windshield someone has halfheartedly rubbed with an oil-soaked rag—was that I had already found the writers who would always be most important to me and the distillation of their spirits was so volatile that I could achieve no greater intoxication. I was not actually hollowed out—I was full up and anything else I poured in there only spilled over the sides onto the ground, where it dried up into ashy word flakes that crumbled into a powder I no longer recognized after a week or two.

The consciousness that you are nothing but fragments, that short periods and longer ones and the longest ones are nothing but fragments…that the duration of cities and countries is nothing but fragments…and the earth a fragment…that all of evolution is a fragment…there is no completion…that the fragments have evolved and are evolving…no trajectory, only arrivals…that the end is without consciousness…that then there is nothing without you and that therefore nothing is…

A life in reading is composed of fragments because life is composed of fragments. Perhaps to be deliberate in one’s reading is an attempt, conscious or not, to deny this. Likewise, when I write I do not see a beginning, middle, and end because I do not see that in life. To be deliberate in writing from a so-called start to a so-called finish denies the fragments I see in everything. Thomas Bernhard knew this—he was a story destroyer, after all. And every other writer I hold close to me writes like they also are writing the fragments of life—perhaps those of their own lives cloaked in the velvety robe of fiction or perhaps not. It is not important to me either way. What matters is I feel their words in my blood.

[Mariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dear sir, I cannot evade your inquiry: I saw the disorder in our tower, which was placed at our disposal by our uncle, I looked into the black kitchen, even while I was looking at the half-opened door to the internist's consulting room... into the tower, in which the chaotic conditions of a pair of brothers chained to each other unto death, spoiled by learning and by dreams, forsaken by their parents, prevailed among mountains of books and hopelessness...

- from 'Amras'

Dear Sir, it was suicide. There is no first and last of brother Walter, no life before death and no death after life for Walter's brother. I wondered at the breath he draws without his brother. Strapped in the epileptics chair, body collapsing. Disgust and body must eat itself when it hasn't what it needs to survive. If there is a body version like how the stomach does that. If the soul needs the body kind of thing. In the black kitchen and shut away from the world. Two boys rescued, naked in a no rebirth from a family suicide pact. Smother me in skins of waiting rooms. I wonder that he writes to his uncle or remains to be haunted by his dead brother. He doesn't breathe. It's a lost beating of not wanting anything. If you tried to talk to him he would defeat you with nothing really matters. He stays in the waiting Manor. I felt the restlessness of the useless. It is the feeling that I can only go to sleep (pills help) to escape. My image of this brother is of existing on borrowed time. It must have been paid off before it was his. There's nothing left to run on. It is a I wish none of it had ever really happened. A wish to never have been born rather than to die. He stays in the mental asylum, a waiting room within his own body. I would want to leave my own body, not stay in it.

You want me to go and play watten again. But I am not going to play watten again. I no longer play watten. Tear up the floor of the hut and you will find some horrible things, I say. A person like me is full of tricks and is constantly waiting for a person who will destroy his tricks while destroying his head, dear sir.

- from Watten

The humor in Thomas Bernhard is elusive to me. I would say that I relate to the person the fevered men are talking to. Hostage to their fervor in an out of body experience. Time stops and their will takes place inside of my head, my true self a host like in stories of possession. I could feel it happening with my hands, with my tongue, and yet it was not me. I feel this for the people in Bernhard works. I've said it before that if I should ever become a sister in a Thomas Bernhard novel I would like you to shoot me (especially The Lime Works). I don't know what it is I have to built up enough inside to protect myself to see the humor. I saw it in The Loser and Woodcutters but none of the others. Almost in Watten. I want something else to say than funny, though. The cab driver wants the doctor to play watten. He hasn't played since the suicide of one of the other players. The inability to move past the suicide of another one is in Amras, Watten and the third novella Walking.

What we see we think, and, as a result, do not see it, says Oehler, whereas others have no problem in seeing what they are seeing being they do not think what they see.

from Walking

Oehler's friend Karrer killed himself. He used to go walking with Karrer and now he goes walking with another friend who doesn't speak. Karrer was disturbed by the suicide of another man, the genius, the scientist who could not be appreciated as he ought to have been by Austria, killed by their country and no other option. Oehler is disturbed by their deaths, the two greatest men he has ever known, though he only knew Karrer he knows the other man through his friends consuming consciousness. I wonder what would have happened if the rest of the world was good enough for these great men. What would be good enough? (The will to ask the questions?) What is the answer to the philosophical debate to what is the meaning of everything that would be enough. He walks back in time. Motion moves me out of myself, breaks up the restlessness. I can feel closer to touching answers on the chinny chin chin of my subconscious. It doesn't happen, of course, because I'm a scatter brained dingbat. I want to feel like there's something, though, and not want to say "Oh, there's nothing" as if the asking should curl up and die already. It is the sister in the Thomas Bernhard feeling. Karrer's sister who is in the other room. His meaningless is bent on her in the other room. If he is in a state of complete indifference then he could be indifferent on his own. Walter in Amras may not need the disgust over his body's collapse from his brother. I didn't want to get away from the doctor in Watten. The picture of the void was of mutual loss in Siller's suicide. He no longer played watten, he gives up and lives in a hut with vermin. Walter's brother felt the sickness of conjoined fate. Oehler walks and he thinks and he chases. I don't have the brain tentacles to seize on the meaning of anything. There is only the disturbed feeling of wanting to go to sleep and wake up not feeling chased by the dead feeling. That's not the nothing feeling. There is something in the place of nothing it feels like dead. I couldn't laugh unless it is a hollow laugh. It is a forced laugh when you aren't wallowing and you're surprised enough to see this dead and you laugh because it's how things are. How things are before you feel I wish I had never been born. I don't know. Maybe I'm too much of a crybaby because I wish I never felt like that more than anything. These guys feel like that, that can't forget enough haunting. I want to call it something else. It just feels like the chewing and eating alive of what is dead on time, what should be alone and not kill everything along with it. If it weren't too late to save them too....

[birdbassador · Rating 5 out of 5]

suicide count:
amras: between 2-6 (depending on how you count attempts and extra-textual suicides)
playing watten: 1
walking: 1 (but there's an extended discussion of how the absurd banality of the austrian state and culture grinds up its intellectuals to the extent that they are left with no option but suicide, but harder to quantify that number)

five stars

[withdrawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three novellas. Although early in his career, they all reflect the later Bernhard; the last story, ‘Walking’, spectacularly so. This has it all, bitterness, suicide, deep speculation and, of course, references to Wittgenstein. I loved it.

Perhaps a more in-depth review will happen when I have finished my wandering. I highly recommend this to Bernhard fans.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Printing Bernhard in wide pages of closely-typed print is never advisable—the reader needs a little kerning compassion to breathe inside the claustrophobic cumulus of his prose—and, alas, this collection of novellas has the most oppressive and unforgiving typesetting of any Bernhard in print. As a result, my engagement and immersion in these novellas suffered on the whole literal scanning of words from left to right thing, a.k.a. reading. The highlights for me were ‘Walking’ and ‘Playing Watten’, both in the elliptical, repetitive, maddening manner of his later works, neither rising to especial comedic or tragic heights of brilliance, with ‘Amras’ a fragmented flop that finds Bernhard fumbling for the form for which he was later famed. For completists only.

[Tommi · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Three Novellas) Sometimes I like to explore authors by reading their earlier work first. That’s the case with Bernhard, too, and I’m curious to read Frost next as it was just recently translated into Finnish – most of Bernhard appear in the same series in beautiful hardbacks. These three novellas – Amras, Watten, and Walking – are not up there with Bernhard’s best work, or that’s what I’ve gathered from people much more knowledgeable than I. Melancholy, pessimism, and suicide permeate all three hypnotic stories. Enthralling but also gruesome at times. The translator Tarja Roinila provides an excellent afterword, not only depicting the struggle to translate something as disjointed as Amras (showing examples from the German original) but also analyzing the aforementioned novella in detail.

[M. Sarki · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my second time through this collection. Amras, the first novella, is my least favorite and I still am not sure what Bernhard's fuss was all about regarding how much he personally liked it. Playing Watten and Walking were both far superior to me, and I loved them both very much. These are some of the very best writing he had ever done, even though they may have been composed a bit earlier than his other recognized masterpieces.

[David Partikian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Below are the reviews of each novella from my reading in the German original. I will post them as I reread. The American translations in this edition are quite strong.

Walking:

Among the strongest of Thomas Bernhard’s 1970’s era novellas Gehen reads like a homage to Samuel Beckett, whose German editions also appear in Suhrkamp Verlag.* As in many a Bernhard tale, the “story” involves an incident related by one middle-aged male to another middle-aged male (who then relates it to the narrator). All the dialogue takes place during a walk. Think Beckett’s Mercier et Camier**, the forerunner to En Attendant Godot. Stylistically, Bernhard’s prose in this era (which began with Kalkwerkcontains repeating ideas and phrases (with minor alterations) that could be compared to Beckett’s awful Watt. Watt? Are you kidding me? Bernhard prose is every bit as musical in as Beckett’s is annoying, clunky and Asperger-like in Watt, written by a humorless precursor to a computer programmer. Gehen is vastly superior to Watt, one of the most annoying reads from the 20th century, in that Gehenis very funny, especially when the incident which anchors the work and drove one of the initial walkers, Karrer, insane, an ill-fated stop at a store that sells trousers, is related by the other walker, Oehler, to the narrator (presumably the unnamed Bernhard). While there are other incidents and ideas bandied about that are typical of Bernhard--the necessity of symbiotic opposites, the incompetence of MD’s (in this case a psychiatrist), and the need to walk--it is the tenuous grip on sanity which is the centerpiece of the novel. As in one of Bernhard’s other 70’s era comic novellas, Die Billigesser, clunkily translated directly as The Cheap Eaters, Bernhard stresses how a single, apparently insignificant action or decision can gravely affect all future events. Bernhard obsessed over this theme throughout the70’s. An earmark of Bernhard’s, the musicality of prose and the abrasive absurdity of the oft-repeated names and phrases shines through. This element is usually lost in translation.

If this all seems like jibberish, try reading the synopsis on the inside cover of the Suhrkamp paperback; woe to the poor slob who is asked to synopsize a Bernhard work in a paragraph! Better to just read and enjoy.

This review is the result of yet another reread of one of Bernhard’s works. I am constantly rereading his writing and reappraising. Gehen withstands rereads, though some of the shock in the humor is lost.

*The book of correspondence between Bernhard and his Suhrkamp editor, Sigfried Unseld, contains a very biting exchange where Bernhard is petulantly demanding more royalties and Unseld retorts with how few books Beckett sold in Germany the previous few years.

**Mercier et Camier was heavily influenced by Flaubert’s Bouvard et Péchuchet

Amras

It would be a massive error to pigeonhole Thomas Bernhard’s Amras along with his earlier, weaker novellas, often named after absurd sounding Austrian villages-- Ungenach comes to mind. Amras, named after the Tyrolian town Ambras, is an Austrian gothic masterpiece, succinctly presented in a mere 99 pages. Although only the second substantial work of fiction that Bernhard produced, Amras (1964) contains thematic precursors, especially in the snippets from one brother’s journal entries, to his later writing when a distinctive Bernhard prose style emerged, beginning with the Prince’s monologue that culminates Verstörung.

With Amras Bernhard consciously references Austrian (Tyrolean) history and lore that is so immemorial—at least to an American—that it appears almost like a myth or fairy tale. While the Brüder Grimm come to mind, they never chronicled anything as perverse and overbearingly gloomy as the “action” in this novella which begins with two brothers (aged 20 and 21) hiding out in a phallic-like tower where they have been hidden by their uncle after a failed family suicide pact left only the parents dead; the extinction event has not been not completed; the brothers remain indifferent to life. As if an agreed upon family extinction were not enough pessimism and gloom, the sordid suicide pact was spurred on by hereditary epilepsy, the illness that plagued the mother and one son, and that—of course—also adulterated the entire Habsburg blood line. Sickness so pervades this book that Bernhard makes Thomas Mann’s obsession with hereditary illness in Doktor Faustus and other works seem like a romp on an Italian seashore. As if the suffering and insanity of the brothers were not enough, there is--in this early work--perhaps the only allusion, albeit allusive, to sex to occur in Bernhard’s entire output. In this case, the veiled depiction (pg. 22-23 in the Suhrkamp stand-alone editions) of fraternal sodomy is frenzied and insane, appearing almost natural considering their imprisonment in the phallic tower. It is worth noting that this quick, yet essential passage, is, perhaps, the only description of sexual intercourse in Bernhard’s entire oeuvre.* Thus, it stands out and requires notice. Sex is almost never mentioned in Bernhard since it is, essentially, procreation, a sin Bernhard rails against constantly in later works, much preferring extinction, or Extinction the translated title of the penultimate book he wrote. One is tempted to classify Bernhard’s outlook in Amras and later works as Albigensian.

The novella also touches upon the hereditary madness manifesting as artistic brilliance (clear homage to Novalis, but also to Mann). Bernhard uses examples from the epilleptic brother, Walter’s, diary to emphasize insanity as a prerequisite for brilliance, with the usual nods to Wittgenstein, another figure now enshrined in the Austrian pantheon, over whom Bernhard obsessed in many a novel. Later passages include the narrator’s quotidian correspondence as he is saddled with niggling estate details and the inquiry into his brother’s suicide. This revelation is not a spoiler in a book where almost everyone commits suicide and is ailing. The narrator survives, but certainly does not flourish, as one of the final passages of Amras makes clear:
Wie viele unserer Talente hätten wir zu erstaunlicher Gröβe in uns entwickeln können, wären wir nicht in Tirol geboren worden und ausgewachsen. (pg 95)
(How many of our talents would we have been able to develop to astounding levels had we not been born and raised in Tyrol) –Translation mine.

Although quite short and appearing early in his career, Amras is essential Bernhard and contains many of the themes that he refines later in his literary career. Some of the prose is utterly brilliant, comparing the eternal decay of Nature and the cosmos to mortality and insignificance. Amras is not to be overlooked, even by those who only read Bernhard in translation and might have difficulty locating an English translation of this work. Thomas Bernhard: Three Novellas (2004, University of Chicago Press edition), is the only place---to my knowledge-- to find this phenomenal work in English. Since Bernhard’s prose is so allusive and contains many neologisms and obscure examples of regional dialect, the English translation is welcome as a reference for many readers for whom German is not a native tongue.

As in many of my reviews, a film reference comes in handy. In rereading Amras this week, I felt myself lapse into a completely depressed state. I kept dwelling on Austrian Peter Haneke’s first and completely gratuitously dark film on family suicide, The Seventh Continent. Both Amras and The Seventh Continent should come with warning disclaimers.

Other points for the Bernhard obsessed:

--Gitta Honegger’s English study of Bernhard, Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian (Yale University Press) contains a short yet essential analysis of Amras.
--For those who want a photo of the Tyrolian tower that plays such a looming rôle in the novella, Auf den Spuren von Thomas Bernhard(Suhrkamp Verlag) contains some, including on the cover.



*Holzfällen contains a quick aside to a hated house host as a sexual predator, one of the many unflattering allusions in that book that earned Bernhard a court hearing for calumny and led to the first edition being confiscated by the Austrian authorities.

[Rise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why is Thomas Bernhard so funny? Three Novellas could hint at an answer. His subjects are as un-funny as can be: committing suicide, becoming mad, walking and thinking, thinking and walking. His characters can be pitiful and pathetic. His worldview can be tragic. His voice is vitriol. The commas, as well as the ellipses, are just so damn plentiful. They usher in a collapse of thinking, of thought. "Every existence is a mitigating circumstance, dear sir. Before every court, before every self-judgment." Mere existence is a burden.

The three novellas are called "Amras", "Playing Watten", and "Walking". Each is a journey into the interior, into the mind of darkness, the twisted thought processes and sense impressions of a hypersensitive man. Each is an intricate mental adventure that can be maddening and infuriating. The prose style is at least infuriating. By the time I reached the third novella, I felt like a helpless victim in a Kafkaesque story. I was ready to admit myself into a mental institution. I just felt incapable. The awareness of mortality is etched in every word.

I am walking into the bell jar of our sensations ... pointless attempt at a swift escape from hopelessness ... with my head schooled in darkness, welded to darkness, from one extreme to the other ... conflicts ... forever into the depth through depth, guided by the power of imagination ... In that thought I pursued my self for a while ... To avoid suffocation, I suddenly turned back in that thought ... as if for dear life I had run back into myself in that thought ... [from "Amras", ellipses and italics not mine]

This collection of novellas shows that there is a method to madness in Bernhard's constructions. His use of repetition must be a form of political resistance. His use of nested narrative attributions ("the landlord said to the traveler, the truck driver said") must be a form of fictional resistance.

The narratives hover between a broken record and a crazy monologue. It is freewheeling poetry, definitely not for the faint of prose. Bernhard must be so funny because otherwise he is so unremittingly bleak, so unrelentingly despairing, and deadly poisonous. In his fiction, one recognizes that the world is nothing more than an insane asylum. Is it a comedy? Is it a tragedy?

The truck driver says: if you go and play watten again, doctor, I will tell the others you are going to play the watten again. You can hear everything more clearly in the dark, I say, you see nothing, you hear everything more clearly. In desperation, no matter where you are, no matter where you have to stay in this world, I say, you can, from one moment to the next, out of desperation, exit the tragedy (you are in) and enter the comedy (you are in), or vice versa, at any moment exit the comedy (you are in) and enter the tragedy (you are in). [from "Playing Watten"]

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

"We were, as you know all too well, sworn enemies of prose, we were sickened by that loquacious literature, by that stupid narrative vein, by the regurgitation of dates, historical coincidences..." (from Amras)

Three Novellas collects some early Bernhard, Amras published in 1964 - shortly after Frost (1963), Watten (1969), and Gehen (1971) (around the time of Gargoyles and Lime Works but before Bernhard's peak), and comes with a helpful foreword from Brian Evenson, placing the works in the context of his overall output.

The latter two stories have been translated (as Playing Watten and Walking) by Kenneth Northcott (also Voice Imitator) but the first was by Peter Jansen, yet another voice to add to the long-list of Bernhard's interpreters into English. Of books I've read I count, in addition, Michael Hoffman (Frost), Richard and Clara Winston (Gargoyles), Sophie Wilkins (Lime Works & Correction), Ewald Osers (Yes & Old Masters, also the hard-to-obtain Cheap Eaters and an earlier translation of Woodcutters), David McLintock (Concrete, Wittgenstein's Nephew, Extinction & Woodcutters), Jack Dawson (Loser), Carol Brown Janeway (My Prizes), Meredith Oakes and Andrea Tierney (Heldenplatz). In addition I'm aware of Martin Chalmers (Prose & also Victor Halfwit which I haven't read), Russell Stockman (On the Mountain), as well as Gita Honneger (author also of a biography of Bernhard), Michael Mitchell, David Horrocks, Peter Eyre & Tom Cairns and James Reidel (various stories, plays and poems). It is testament to the power and distinctiveness of Bernhard's narrative voice that it shines through consistently in English.

Amras, the first novella, is notably less developed than his later works, fragmentary and feverish, and at times melancholy rather than the characteristic bitterness and bile.

It is narrated by one of two brothers, one a science and one a musical student, orphaned after a family suicide attempt which they, to their regret, survived, and hiding from the authorities ("in contravention to the crude Tyrolean health regulation concerning persons apprehended in the act of suicide, condemned to excruciating survival and thereby disfigured, we were spared consignment to the insane asylum") and family debtors, in an ancient tower. Looking back on the family's life of diminishing economic wealth (albeit from a high base) and illness (both the brother and mother suffered from epilepsy):

"a sad degeneration of everything in which we were allowed timidly to thrive cast its shadow over the last ten years our family spent together"

Although when discussing the Tyrol region ("our parents themselves had been the products of those dreadful Tyrolean oxidations") or the Austrian university system, the characteristic Bernhard voice surfaces:

"...the very awakening in our parent's house had been sheer torment to us, for in truth it was already a wakening in the high-ceilinged and gray and answerless courtrooms of dull curricula, world views, of dusty theories and philosphies, an awakening in the stinking laboratories and auditoriums of our gloomy provincial capital...In those months we had soon exhausted ourselves in the memorisation of the depressing conventions of pseudointellectualism, in the nauseating subdeliria of academia...We could find the wellsprings of our music and our natural science not in the soil of the state system but only in ourselves...After all, so called education as well as so called higher education had always been hateful to us, had also been hateful to our father...With the day-to-day ingestion, imposed on us by the state, of the viscious poisons of erudition that contaminates the whole world, destroying all subtler traits in our young brains so utterly unsuited to coarseness, we had soon overtaxed our natural talents...Our time at the university was probably our worst time, hardly a time of life"

Rather than Bernhard's trademark stream of prose, the narration is more disjointed, with the narrator's thoughts interposed with letters and jottings from his brother's journal, and the cumulative effect is much less powerful as a result. It's as if Bernhard hadn't yet developed the courage for the more extreme narrative style he would develop in his later novels, commencing with Gargoyles.

Overall Amras is really only for people - like myself - who have read most of his major works and are hunting out the more obscure and formative works - 2 stars on a standalone basis.

Watten is a Tyrolean card game - hence the need for the explanatory "playing" in the English title, played in two pairs, similar to Bridge except that more explicit communication is allowed - the subtlety is to try and inform your partner of your hand and not the opposing pair (http://www.wattn.com/English/start_en...). Not that the nature of the card game - other than it's highly social nature and role in local customs - seems important to the novel, but the very frequent, rythmic repetition of the word can't help but lead the reader to want to know more.

Stylistically, the novel takes us to another stage in Bernhard's development of form - the monologue as a single multi-page unbroken repetitive paragraph, full of twice-reported speech ("the traveller said to the landlord, said the truck driver", "To have to hear, the truck driver thinks, I think to myself, the way the doctor always calls the so called library, the so called library, and apparently he takes the greatest pleasure in the name") leading to The Lime Works.

In this case, Bernhard seems to feel obliged to explain the form, so has the narrator be prompted by a request to "write a report on your perceptions, over a period of several hours, of the day before the day you received this letter"

In Playing Watten too, the narrator, a struck-off doctor, has withdrawn from social society, abandoning the family castle for a hut. Indeed his refusal to rejoin the game of Watten following the foehn (another Bernhardian fixation) induced suicide of one of the regular players is sign of his social withdrawal. The novella consists largely of a recalled dialogue with the "truck-driver" (actually owner of a successful haulage business), another Watten regular, trying to lure the Doctor back, but an seemingly unwelcome guest:

"When we invite people in and after they've sat down in our armchairs they thrust us down into the abyss. They lure us back into earlier times, impose our childhood, youth, age, and so forth upon us, and thrust us into what for ages we believed we had escaped...People come into our house, just as they come into my hut, in order to destroy us, to destroy me. In every case, to make us ridiculous, just as the truck driver, after all, only comes into my hut to make me ridiculous. They knock on the door and clap their curiosity, like a deathly piece of mastiness, onto our head. People come in as harmlessness itself and suddenly oppress us with their frightful corporeality, I think to myself. People ask something irrelevant in order to drive us into irrelevance and at the same time they tear down the curtain our own filth is hidden behind"

Overall 3.5 stars - certainly worth reading.

Walking is fully formed Bernhard, both stylistically ith multi-layered reported speech ("Suddenly Rustenschacher says, I tell Scherrer, says Oehler, that Karrer can try to tear a button off the trousers that are lying on the counter"), and in content. Indeed one could argue it all his later works are reworkings of the same themes, neatly encapsulated in the following passage which sets out the contradicition at the heart of Bernhard's work:

"If we hear something, says Oehler on Wednesday, we check what we have heard and we check what we have heard until we have to say that what we have heard is not true, what we have heard is a lie. If we see something, we check what we see until we are forced to say that what we are looking at is horrible...if we do something, we think about what we are doing until we are forced to say that it is something nasty, something low, something outrageous, what we are doing is something terribly hopeless and that what we are doing is in the nature of things obviously false. Thus every day becomes hell for us whether we like it or not, and what we think will, if we think about it, if we have the requisite coolness of intellect and acuity of intellect, always become something nasty, something low and superfluous, which will depress us in the most shattering manner for the whole of our lives...What must thoroughly depress is the fact that through this outrageous thinking into a nature that is, in the nature of things, fully immunised against this thinking, we enter into an even greater depression than that in which we already are...we have not made unbearable circumstances bearable or even less unbearable but only still more unbearable, says Oehler... There is no doubt that the art lies in bearing what is unbearable and in not feeling that what is horrible is something horrible. Of course we have to label this art the most difficult of all. The art of existing against the facts, says Oehler, is the most difficult, the art that is the most difficult. To exist against the facts means existing against what is unbearable and horrible, says Oehler...It is always a question of intellectual indifference and intellectual acuity and of the ruthlessness of intellectual indifference and intellectual acuity, says Oehler."

Except of course, that in this way of thinking lies either suicide or, here, madness ("I again recognised to what degree madness is something that happens only among the higher orders of humanity...because they are ignorant of their life's theme [other] people finally become mentally ill, but never mad"). The focus of Walking is the narrator's walking companion's Oehler's friend Karrer, who has gone mad from following these thoughts too far:

"If you go as far as Karrer, says Oehler, then you are suddenly decisively and absolutely mad, and have, at one stroke, become useless. Go on thinking more and more and more and more with ever greater intensity and with an ever grerater ruthlessness and with an ever greater fanticism for finding out, says Oehler, but never for one moment think too far."

The logical conclusion of Karrer, and Oehler's, thinking is that Oehler:

"to speak radically, stood for the gradual, total demise of the human race, if had his way, no more children not a single one and thus no more human beings...The state should have the responsibility, says Oehler now, for punishing people who make children, but now it subsidises the crime...Karrer was of the same opinion, says Oehler....My whole life long, I have refused to make a child, said Karrer, Oehler says."

Indeed, Bernhard's trademark multi-layering of reported speech here serves to shield the narrator from the ultimate effect of his thoughts - he instead reports Karrer's thoughts, as reported by Oehler, to him. Karrer is very much held up as an ideal model, as well as a warning - the following is, in Bernhardian terms, an ultimate tribute:

"Just as Karrer in general, says Oehler, called everything "so called", there was nothing that he did not call only so-called, nothing that he would not have called so-called and by so doing his powers achieved an unbelievable force...things in themselves are only so-called or, to be completely accurate so-called so-called, to use Karrer's words, says Oehler."

Walking is actually one of Bernhard's strongest works - although I understand he himself was fond of Amras - 4.5 almost 5 stars on a stand-alone basis.

Overall, a fascinating collection showcasing Bernhard's development. Only Walking stands comparison with the stronger longer works (Correction, Loser, Extinction etc) but still 4 stars overall.

[Pyry]

amras 5/5...

[Jes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of novellas by Thomas Bernhard is poignant, beautiful, and full of the aesthetic. Amras is my favourite novella in the collection. Bernhard's observations about annihilation and nature is unparalleled. Bernhard is considered a contemporary of Beckett, and while several thematic and structural strains are similar in the two author's prose, Bernhard is a much easier read.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Walking is an early novella by Bernhard translated into English by Kenneth J. Northcott. The story is a stunning read even as it is presented in unparagraphed totality. It fuses philosophy’s depth of thought with poetry’s contemplative spaciousness.

The following excerpt provides an idea of the author's approach:
"we may not ask ourselves how we walk, for then we walk differently from the way we really walk and our walking simply cannot be judged, just as we may not ask ourselves how we think, for then we cannot judge how we think because it is no longer our thinking. Whereas, of course, we can observe someone else without his knowledge (or his being aware of it) and observe how he walks or thinks, that is, his walking and his thinking, we can never observe ourselves without our knowledge (or our being aware of it)."

I was reminded, ever so slightly, of some of the reveries of Thoreau or Rousseau on walking although this text is more late twentieth century than either of those authors. The famous essayist Lewis Thomas also comes to mind as he assayed the nature of how a jellyfish and a sea slug illuminate the mystery of the self. You can imagine why I might consider myself both excited and exasperated with his prose. Nonetheless in this novella and the other two, Amras and Playing Watten, I found some of the very best writing this reader of Bernhard had ever encountered, even though they may have been composed a bit earlier than his other recognized masterpieces.

[Julian · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Suddenly Karrer said to Rustenschacher, Oehler told Scherrer, if you, Rustenschacher, take up a position behind the pair of trousers that your nephew is at this moment holding up to the light for me, immediately behind this pair of trousers that your nephew is holding up to the light for me, I can see your face through this pair of trousers with a clarity with which I do not wish to see your face."

[Shane Starling · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whilst reading this book it occurred to me that this is a very difficult book, I had that thought many times, maybe 100 times, and I then thought about how difficult it is to define difficulty, to know what that really was, I thought lying in my bed with the book, how difficult can this really be, I am not under attack, I am relaxed, I am reading, but then I thought of other books that were much less difficult and affirmed some level of difficulty, I then read on until I had finished the 3 Novellas, some of which verges so closely to some kind of insanity I was relieved on some level when it was done and I could move onto another Bernhard that may also be equally difficult or perhaps less difficult.

[Eugene · Rating 4 out of 5]

maybe not the bernhard book to start with, but very useful to see the young old master's development--and the early, shocking bang of his talent.

AMRAS--originally published in 1963--shows the large ambitions of his theme and iconoclasm are already in place, driving the writing. this one literally breaks down. it begins coherently though darkly with the assessment by the sons of a family's partially failed suicide pact (the parents were successful) and then becomes beautifully and infuriatingly fragmented. as if to document the approach to death or insanity... if anything this earlier novella is more sincerely nihilistic than the later bernhard in that when bernhard arrives at his later method, at least there's the minimal solace of continuous (albeit repetitive) form. and the dark jokes seem to have punchlines and don't just break off into menacing silence like they do here. on the other hand, the devastation seems more complete and impressive in the (later) long, relentless, incantatory voice without the--in comparison--cheaper gimmickry of the fragmentation here.

on its structural self-decimation, brian evenson's excellent, brief intro has this particularly good insight::
"(C)ollapsing into fragmentation... (AMRAS) opts for the modernist solution of using a formal collapse. GARGOYLES, on the other hand, offers a voice that tears itself apart from within while leaving the edifice of monologue intact. We have the sense that, like Becket's Unnamable, Prince Sarau (in GARGOYLES) is probably only getting started" (ix).

PLAYING WATTEN i think is the most memorable of the three, maybe only because it has the most concrete central metaphor: four citizens travel to an inn--which is tucked into a treacherously disorienting wood--in order to play a card game (the eponymous WATTEN). dense, repetitive (and here, the repetition is boring in a way the later bernhard somehow manages to avoid), but also beautiful and (already) devastating. an early--maybe the first?--version of his unparagraphed style.

WALKING is at times (too) straight-forwardly didactic, so that bernhard's fiction gets almost turgid (at least for me) carrying the freight of its philosophical rhetoric. but if it's didactic, it's also ambitious, marching uninhibitedly through its themes: the misery of existence; the baseness of the (austrian) state; madness; language, thinking itself.
the translation throughout seems incredible, almost transparent. WALKING in particular, with its dependence on abstractions and its recursive structures, would seem mind-bogglingly difficult to translate.

[Lisa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Holy run on sentences Batman, the first story was almost impossible to get through, but I found a way to finish it, I read it before bed time, because as someone who has to get up ridiculously early and who is also a chronic night owl, I found it extremely helpful to read only a few pages every night, which had the awesome power of putting me to sleep no matter how wired I was, and allowed me to make it all the way to the end of the boorish nightmare of the first story, but I found it impossible to make it through all three novellas, especially once I found out the remaining two, while not composed in run sentences, were made up of one paragraph, and if it hadn't become evident already, I tried to recreate the form of writing, to the best of my ability, that the first story utilizes, and while I'm sure there was much to the story I simply couldn't appreciate I feel safe in saying it was not meant to replace prescription sleep aids, though that is what I’ll keep the book by my beside for till it’s due back at the library. I wish I was joking.

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This could be mind-numbing if you don't like repetitive-seeming or long sentences, but it's a good introduction to this brilliant austrian writer of novels, novellas, plays and memoirs.

To see my review for Books in Canada, go here:

http://www.amazon.ca/Three-Novellas-T...

[Mikko Saari · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite the heavy read. Not my favourite Bernhard (that would be Old Masters: A Comedy), but I found Watten and Gehen certainly worth reading. As usual, the Finnish translator Tarja Roinila has written excellent commentary on the novels to go with them.

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent volume for history of literature purposes; the development in Bernhard's career is very clear here, as is the improvement, as he became more ironic, funnier, and smarter. Walking is available on its own, and is truly fantastic, but Playing Watten is very, very good, and worth the extra cost.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

i'm reading the 3rd novella: "walking" it is one long paragraph. very slow and odd.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

The usual perfectly executed nihilistic monologues told by brilliant, deranged narrators, but short on the wicked humor that's in Bernhard's best work.

[lyell bark · Rating 5 out of 5]

c00l book, amras ggets 4 stars and playing watten and walking get 5 stars i guess. bye.