Frost by T. Bernhard

by T. Bernhard

Paperback Bunko

Reviews

[Kevin Tole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published in 1963, this was Thomas Bernhard’s first novel and it arrived in a roundabout way, first seeing light as an anthology of new poetry. It was rejected by the publisher and Bernhard set about turning it into a novel. Being familiar with much of Bernhard’s later novels, many of the recurrent themes within them occur here for the first time.

A medical intern is sent by his superior to spy and report on the behaviour of his brother, the artist Strauch then resident in the sombre village of Weng. The local people are stunted dwarves and drunken cretins. It is over 20 years since the medical assistant has been in touch with his brother. The intern ‘befriends’ the painter and they walk daily in the locale and come to know each other as residents within the local inn. There is a deep sense of darkness and decay not just in the geography but in everything like some inertial miasma. The painter has a degree of respect in the area but he is still an outsider as is the intern. Entropy pervades everything. The painter’s thoughts centre on morbidity and suicide.

This would hardly seem a ground for a novel which holds you to the end. And there are indeed times when its grimness can get to you as a reader. But it is the ability of Bernhard to hold us and take us through this bleak depression. As the relationship between Strauch and the unnamed intern develops the boundaries between each of them appear to elide. At times we cannot be sure if it is the intern or the painter recounting as their relationship develops.

”The nights were sleepless dull grey…. Sometimes I jumped out of bed, and slowly I saw all thought become impossible, worthless, everything successively, logically became pointless and meaningless…. And I discovered my surroundings didn’t want to be explained by me.”

Everything is futile. All that remains is being – existing. This as a theme pervades all of Bernhard’s novels as does the narrator as an earpiece for the 'hero' - the other. We learn that Strauch has long since burnt all his works as they remained a perpetual reminder of his worthlessness.

So what delivers this first work from the rest of the canon? Here we have the initial disputation of Bernhard’s life view. Austria is not fundamentally mentioned but everywhere in the locale is corrupted and malevolent. The ceaseless barking of the dogs becomes a metaphor for the country. The evident sound of madness in modern life."The yapping at the end of the world." The Church is barely functioning as a higher agent of human achievement and serves just as a titular function for the locale and a repository for the dead. What begins to appear is the nature of external identity against internal knowledge of self. The young must bear the burden of progression but they seem less to want change than the hopeless retention of the present. There is a far greater accounting with youth here than in the later novels.

”Youth is an ornament. The mistake of age, on the other hand, is seeing the mistakes of youth.”
"Youth has no ideals, nor any masochistic notions, which come later. Then, admittedly, with lethal effect."
"It can happen that a young fellow can cease to be young in the midst of youth."
“Youth somehow pulled off the stunt of fooling the world for a brief moment.”

Through the mouth of Strauch, Bernhard asks questions of us, like the questions he posits of the working class in ‘Twelfth Day’. These same questions could be asked today – though what we have now is a redefined class struggle; however these questions would have been serious at the time Bernhard wrote the novel as pertinent observations of the age. The weight of historicism is overbearing and struggle against it is futile. Life will grind you down to the lowest animalism. Is it observation or contempt to the point of hatred? It is the positing of opposites. The asking of questions; like a cry from the country to the metropolitan, against outsiders; it is anti-adventure, anti-testing oneself; the pulling strain on resources, venture against recklessness. Is he just being ironic given his complete hatred of the mundane? Bernhard makes it clear that he is not some astute prophetic saint of a writer. He bears grudges, he is irrational, bigoted, bitter, acerbic. Bernhard's view of the pastoral is as unromantic as it is possible to get. It is perfectly and extremely the complete opposite to the cutesy British bucolic country / rural bourgeois acceptance given by for instance British landscape painting. There is no rosy inner glow.

And there too hidden withing the text are comments about Art in general which also occur in the later works

”My paintings were always well-reviewed except by myself”, he said. ”Basically, there is no criticism and the people that busy themselves with Art are as uncritical as at any time in history. Maybe it was the lack of criticism that irritated me, and that’s why I never became a good painter.”

Those very questions could be just as well asked today in the age of an art world fed entirely on the juice of commerce.”The problem is that the world has become entrapped in this tinsel-isation of trivia.”

And then there is the sheer beauty and creativity of Bernhard’s prose

”Strauch’s language is the language of the heart muscle, a scandalous ‘cerebral’ pulse. It is rhythmic self-abasement under the ‘subliminal creak’ of his own rafters.”

“Poverty can stare up at wealth and that is as near as it gets.”

In this first novel it is as if Bernhard has laid himself out open and ready to be dissected like Soutine’s ‘Side of Beef’.
It feels intensely personal. The difference between the successful and competent assistant doctor Strauch and the incompetent, hopeless painter Strauch is like an ad hominem of always being a mere two steps away from disaster. This placing of opposites together in the two Strauch’s is seen many times within the novel. It is the clash between recklessness and experience; between Youth and Age (Bernhard calls this ‘the tyranny of youth’). Is Bernhard the artist Strauch? Strauch’s doctor brother. Bernhard’s doctor brother-in-law. And in the end too it is utter self-pity and the disgust of self, the helpless, the useless. It is pitiless, relentless, a mould established from page one and used through a lifetime of work.

In summation I might quote another great Austrian misanthrope, Stefan Zweig.

The terrible truth is better than the balanced lie.

[David Stark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Der erste Roman Thomas Bernhards. Man kann schon eindeutig seinen typischen Stil und seine typischen Themen erkennen.
Die Prämisse ist die ideale für einen Bernhardroman: Ein Medizinstudent wird in ein abgeschiedenes Dorf geschickt, um einen Menschen genau zu beobachten. Leider ist das Buch voll mit schwer verständlichen Monologen der untersuchten Person. Oft habe ich nicht verstanden, worum es ging. So habe ich auch nur ein mehr oder weniger vages Verständnis der Person bekommen. Dennoch hatte es auch inhaltlich seine Höhen.
Was es aber herausgerissen hat, war die Sprache Bernhards, auch wenn sie hier noch nicht ganz so genial ist, wie in seinen späteren Büchern.

[Joshua Ehrenberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ich bin großer Fan von Thomas Bernhard. Dieser, sein erster Roman trägt viele der typischen Merkmale seines späteren Stils. Mit sarkastischem Humor und steter Distanz beschreibt er banales wie tiefsinniges. Auch die Rahmenhandlung ist durchaus spannend.
Was diesen Text jedoch schwer lesbar macht, sind die zahlreichen und langen Monologe, die oft fließend zwischen Trance und Realität wechseln. Beim lesen gibt es kaum Gelegenheit zur Entspannung, stets seziert die Hauptfigur in seitenlangen Ausschweifungen die Zusammenhänge der Welt.
Oft sehr originell, aber durchgehend fordernd.