On the Mountain

by Thomas Bernhard, Russell Stockman (Translator), Sophie Wilkins (Afterword)

Written as one sentence, On The Mountain is a monologue delivered by a court reporter who encounters a variety of characters during the course of his day. It was Bernhard's first prose work which he completed in 1959.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, German Literature

143 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

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

[Szplug · Rating 4 out of 5]

One day you're cut off, at the very start you're cut off and can't go back, the language you learn and the whole business of walking and all the rest is for the sake of the single thought, how to get back again,

On the Mountain was published after Bernhard's death in 1989: the last work he released was the earliest that he ever wrote, way back in 1958 and five years prior to the publication of his first novel, Frost . Consisting of 115 pages with a bevy of commas and a single, solitary period, On the Mountain is a disjointed and raw prose-poem, streaming flashes of the thoughts of the writer as he is trying to complete his maiden book. It contains the inaugural formation of Bernhard's wonderful nihilistic rage and despair—suicide is always one quick-step-in-front-of-a-bus away—as well as the bleak humour, the repetition and fixation on select words; indeed, presents the first appearance of many of the obsessions that would prove mainstays throughout his body of work:

all these many long, difficult years, have deceived me, have tricked me, are making fun of me, spitting on me, the way you fling some stinking scrap onto the dungheap, the cataloguing of the loner's misdeeds, with absolute murderous intention, with absolute irresponsibility, reconstructing and subtracting and grafting and feeling no compunction, piling them up and rolling them together and turning them into some ridiculous object,

There is no narrative structure as typically understood to the piece—the blinking blocks of different timeframes, places, interlocutors, tormentors and mistresses may be actual events that happened to the narrator, or they may be fragments of the tale he is striving to assemble, struggling to force out onto the page by focussing on one thought, one lone thought whilst avoiding the endless distractions of the next hundred in the queue that restlessly and relentlessly try to force their way in. Knowing that whatever he manages to write will be ridiculous and misunderstood, a pathetic shadow of the original, ineffable idea he was trying to express, he still plunges on with his painful task, perhaps taking some measure of solace from his one constant companion—his dog.

I do love Bernhard's work, his beautifully bilious way of depicting, in stark, slashing sentences, the barriers, tribulations, and cruel jokes that protean life seems to take a grim pleasure in placing before his characters in their endless attempts to wring beauty and truth out of the ugliness and falsehoods that make-up their source materials. On the Mountain doesn't quite measure up to the brilliance of his more mature output, but it is always interesting to go back to the beginning and see where it all started.

it's the abyss that keeps us all alive, only the abyss,

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everything about Bernhard's career makes an eerie sort of sense. For example, this early prose effort appearing at the close of his life--not that he chose when to have a fatal heart attack, but he did choose to offer this up for publication only after his reputation had been well carved into place. It reads almost like a writer's notebook--jottings of story ideas interspersed with personal reflections and quotidian observations. There is even a reference to 'this notebook' in the following passage:

frozen ponds: the dog, the damp bread
my heart is freezing: my streets, my woods, the things I've left undone: which drives me outside and into one Gasthaus after another,
cold and restlessness are working against me and hurting me with their blows,
so that some morning it will collapse, kill me,
time has passed through me and distorted my abilities: devalued this notebook: my sorrow, as though I had said something that presupposes that I know what the soul is: without this discovery something much greater: there are only three: all of them are destroying me

Perhaps it's all there...in one single sentence, page after page...Rescue attempt, nonsense...

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I'm on top of the mountain and looking down on the rain-soaked scurvy city,"

Bernhard is like the asshole uncle you look forward to seeing because when he comes around usually something gets set on fire or some pornography is "forgotten" on the breakfast table.
This is his first novel, but only published posthumously. Bernhard was such a delightful prick that he forbade Austria, yes, that's right, the entire goddamn country, from publishing any of his works ever again. Well, they did anyway and it's a good thing too!
This is a rough work, scatterings of dark musings of a rural-bound court reporter over the length of a 116-page sentence. He loves his shitty dog and hates on his compatriots in various guises--shady innkeepers, fat, retired divas--and tries to have sex/love with various women.
Probably for the Bernhard completist, but wonderful anyway.

[Andrea Fiore · Rating 4 out of 5]

"[...] e pertanto intraprendere qualcosa è un crimine,
tutto è menzogna, ogni virgola è una menzogna, tutto non è altro che una terribile chiacchiera, un'irrilevanza, una bassezza, una umiliazione per me,
tuttavia mi aggrappo a questi pochi pensieri, ogni lettera dell'alfabeto è importante, ogni lettera e il riconoscimento dell'ottusità sono importanti, [...]"

[M. Sarki · Rating 2 out of 5]

On the Mountain failed for the second time in making feel anything. The words Bernhard chose to put down on paper were at the least inaccessible to me and at best came from his unconscious where even he was left scratching his head. But this first work triumphed over time, remained alive and at rest all through the subsequent years of Bernhard’s astounding published masterpieces to follow. Haunting and poetic, lyrical in empty spaces, Bernhard held on to this manuscript. And for good reason relented in the end to having it published. Though little understood, and rarely enjoyed, On the Mountain provides a valuable look into Bernhard’s beginnings as a writer and is relevant to his oeuvre.

[Laurent De Maertelaer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bevreemdend maar intrigerend romandebuut uit 1959 van de grote Thomas Bernhard.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading ten of Bernhard's novels and collections of short pieces in random order, I've decided to start at the beginning and proceed chronologically. This work, more or less a prose poem, is undoubtably a work of juvenilia, but its form--one long sentence--definitely lays the groundwork for the novels, and its content--a somewhat Beckettian preoccupation with mortality and futility--remains nevertheless singular in its perceptiveness and inimitability. I can't help but feel that the stream-of-consciousness nature of the observations, the unannounced ranging from interaction to interaction, is a little half-baked in execution (but maybe I just don't like that approach; I'm not crazy about it in Faulkner, either). Still, there's a lot to chew on, and there are some gorgeous and evocative passages. I'm not sure I'd find enough to love in this if I wasn't already steeped in Bernhard's more mature prose, but for the fan, this is worth your time.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

A seething monologue that derides homeland, countrymen, and self. Bernhard's usual acrid bitterness but with a tinge of humor and a youthful energy that reflects this being his first completed piece of long prose. I like the energy, and the bitterness felt good considering our current political situation. Loved the opening line especially. "Fatherland, nonsense,"

[Arlo · Rating 5 out of 5]

You're getting deep into Bernhard's ouvre if you are approaching this writing. It offers a deeper and more revealing glimpse into Bernhard's psyche. It's his first book and reads like a prose poem. Just one long sentence, that if you didn't know who the author was, reads like an alt press book. It's mind bending and insane. The ending is classic Bernhard.

[Pino Sabatelli · Rating 2 out of 5]

Un Bernhard anomalo, come sotto l’effetto di allucinogeni.
Non mi è piaciuto.

[Selma]

Dans les hauteurs de son cynisme, ce monologue m’a immédiatement fait penser aux Carnets du sous-sol de Dostoïevski.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

"on the mountain:
pull on my wool socks,
keep an eye on the innkeeper,
cheap paper,
insist on my usual room
contradict the teacher
take the Fraulein into the larch grove,
what is to come is already on the track: making its way down the boulevard with the barrier-keeper's dog, sleeping in her fouled bed,
filling the cupboards, the trunks, the commodes, the chests,
air is seeping into everything as funk,
as snow, as ice, as a spring breeze, and killing them all, even the ones who've fled to the mountains,
I see them starting to quarrel with their husbands and I see them starting to quarrel with their wives, running along the banks of the canal, wondering whether they ought to jump in and let themselves be cut to pieces or not,"

In der Höhe was written in 1959, when Bernhard was 28, and four years before Thomas Frost his first published novel, but was only published in 1989, after his death earlier that year.

But the book wasn't discovered by the executor of his will stuffed away in a drawer; rather Bernhard himself prepared it for publication before his death. Indeed it formed a rather more encouraging bequest to his readers than his more famous stipulation in his will that none of his works must ever again be published, performed or even publicly read in Austria.

The book was brought into English only two years later by Russell Stockman (yes, yet another Bernhard translator - see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). A useful afterword by another one of them, Sophie Wilkins (Lime Works and Correction) discusses the sheer difficulty of translating his prose - perhaps hinting as why so many translators have been needed. As a commissioning editor for Frost she "despaired of finding a translator capable of recreating the dazzling energy of his newly minted language", and as the translator of The Lime Works "for a year I wrested those sentences into Amerenglish, thinking that Laocoön at least had two sons helping him with those serpents."

Bernhard had previously been published as a poet, and this work is perhaps best described as a prose poem of sorts.

It is fragmentary, written in bursts of thought sometimes just a part sentence ("suddenly try to break off their conversation with me when they see I'm not one of them), at most a few pages, and with no capital letters and no full stops.

We see emerging many of the pre-occupations of Bernhard's later novels - his contempt for the "black and red swine" (Heldenplatz) - the Conservatives, Catholic Church and the Socialist state - his inability to belong to or identify with the masses, the torture of the föhn, his disdain of Austria , (""our country, ridiculous: a tiny smudge on the map, nothing but a tiny, musical, smudge") etc. Interestingly perhaps missing is his contempt also for sophisticated Viennese culture - which presumably came later in his life when his success exposed him to it.

There is also a narrative threads of sorts, with some recurring characters. The narrator is, as Bernhard was, a court reporter and he interacts, amongst other with his faithful dog (although the novel ends "my dog knows I'm going to kill him, nobody else knows it: nobody's going to have my dog"), the innkeeper of the inn at which he often stays, a young Fräulein: another guest there, an engineer's wife with whom he's having an affair, and a teacher who is his intellectual sparring partner. As Wilkins remarks, almost uniquely in Bernhard's work, the narrator has romantic relationships.

And part of the prose is addressed to the novelist himself, a form of literary manifesto. Bernhard writes:

"personality, politics, hate: write a book that completely reflects your character, a book that reflects all of them,
priority to be given to conjecture, everything has to end with the triumph of conjecture as fact,
obey with the mass, destroy with the mass, kill off with the mass, perish with the mass,
show the relationships between opposites, spell them out, be relentless above all,"

But later his self-confidence wanes and he tells himself:

"plain and simple: you're altogether worthless: complicated: you're not a poet: should you do your best not to have such thoughts anymore, not explore them any longer?, best of all, stop thinking altogether,"

Fortunately Thomas Bernhard the author didn't take the narrators advice or it would have deprived us of one of my favourite of all literary oeuvres.

On the Mountain is worthwhile it's own right but primarily valuable as a privilged peek, granted posthumously by Bernhard himself, into his own psyche.

[david-baptiste · Rating 5 out of 5]

great book--all one sentence, broken up into "paragraphs" clauses--ecstatic ending )for myself at any rate!--

[e · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this in concert with the collected poems volume Seagull put out a few years back has been illuminating, but not in a good way, more fluorescence than natural light. Bernhard famously gave up poetry around the time of his first published novel (Frost) and so these two books account for most of Bernhard's early output. For someone with such a distinct style and, for lack of a better word, weltanschaaung as Bernhard, I thought no such writer could possibly have juvenilia. Yet that is precisely my feeling here, & with the poetry. I say this as someone who loves Bernhard; I've read nine of his novels plus short story collections & now a good chunk of his poetry. I just also would simply be lying if I said that most of this read wasn't spent looking forward to it being over.

Bernhard memorably responded to Werner Wögerbauer inquiring about his early poetry in a 1986 interview, alluding, "You started out writing poetry," with "Oh, please!" which swiftly put an end to the discussion. But maybe Bernhard's dismissive opinion of his own work is correct in light of the radical change he seemed to undergo in the mid-'60s. Some of the style, that Bernhardian relentlessness is here—& even explicitly formulated at one point—but what's missing that's so crucial to the reading experience of the major works is the humor, the Bernhard that makes me laugh aloud as I drown in a sea of black bile.

Bernhard started writing poetry before transitioning to prose with this, which is a sort of book-length prose poem dropping acid rain on every phony element of Austria that happened to catch his eye at the time. The only problem is that the psychological depth necessary for such invectives & polemics is not there yet. Certainly that is the greatest failing of the poetry from the same period. And so for me what is revealed by this early period is how true that old adage of "a pessimist is just a disappointed idealist" lamentably turns out to be, lamentable because simplistic & reductive, things Bernhard often is but for comedic, self-reflective effect in the novels rather than solely unto themselves.

So the question for me lies in the problematic of locating the radical shift Bernhard underwent. It is not there yet in the early '60s poems but is fully present by The Lime-Works. I have not yet read the first two novels, maybe my answer lies with them. But for me the actually revealing thing after reading his earliest work is the nearly supernatural transfiguration that occurred in him & his work as he approached 40, which I had taken to be a constant throughout in my ignorance. I suppose that's not the worst outcome: a deeper appreciation for the work you already know & love. And it also only takes an afternoon to read this. That helps.

[Amelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frost, Bernhard’s first novel, was something that I didn’t enjoy, but which I thought was helpful in understanding his progression as a writer. I thought On The Mountain, his first prose work, would function in a similar way.

Instead, I absolutely loved On The Mountain, but if I hadn’t known when he had written it (1959), I would not have been able to decide where it went on his timeline as a writer. It’s similar to Frost in its fragmentariness, but on a much smaller scale, almost from sentence to sentence. Well, given that it’s all one sentence, I guess it fragments from one clause to the next, or one comma to the next. But also, the narrator’s monologue doesn’t have the type of recursion seen with Bernhard’s later narrators that builds on itself, or a few easily discernible underlying ideas or grievances that unite the threads of the monologue and give it its thrust.

So I can see how aspects of On The Mountain resemble both Bernhard’s early work and his later work, but I enjoyed it as a unique entity.

[Christianmaggitti · Rating 3 out of 5]

ma perché poi dovrei ricevere posta? se non scrivo a nessuno non posso neppure ricevere una lettera da qualcuno, comunque è logico che se non si scrive a nessuno non si riceva neanche una lettera da qualcuno (30)

in contrasto con tutto e con tutti (50)

Quando si accorgono che non sono dei loro cercano di troncare il colloquio con me (50)

Per notti intere non chiudo occhio, cerco di addormentarmi ma non ci riesco, resto disteso finché è mattina, finché la mattina mi aggredisce (56)

attività artistica: al limite, pura presunzione: ciononostante sono in molti a scrivere, in molti a comporre, in molti a dipingere, in molti a essere eccentrici: stupidità da baraccone (72)

chiaro, semplice: non vali niente: complicato: non sei un poeta: bisogna fare di tutto per non averli più, per non indagarli più, questi pensieri? meglio non indagare più nulla (72)

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

A throat-clear for Bernhard’s later work, the posthumously published On the Mountain from 1959 shows the young writer refining the unrelenting style that would make him an international superstar. A fragmented collage of scenes, snippets, dialogues, and oppressive interior monologues, presented in broken paragraphs as part of a single sentence with unconventional punctuation reminiscent of Arno Schmidt, the novel was more of a slog than his mature work—a choppy patchwork of autobiographical moments of huge interest to the Bernhard obsessive, less so the general reader. Translator Sophie Wilkins’s afterword is especially excellent, and worth tracking down even if you have no intention of reading this one.

[Antonio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ho un buon numero di libri di Bernhard in lista di lettura, e ho voluto cominciare da "In alto" innanzitutto per la lunghezza contenuta, e poi perché è stato il suo primo romanzo scritto, nonché ultimo (addirittura postumo) ad essere pubblicato, affascinante unione di estremi. La forma è quella di un flusso di coscienza aforistico, un diario intimo dei pensieri del protagonista, dove lo sforzo di afferrare le idee è preso nel suo nascere e si respira un clima di paranoia e furia misantropica pronta ad esplodere. Nonostante ciò, la scrittura è leggera e non priva di una sbilenca musicalità, e riesce a domare le pulsioni egocentriche senza risultare indigesta.

[Mattia Agnelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

“mi sforzo di arrivare lontano, ho sempre la lontananza e le cime più alte davanti a me, ma la vicinanza mi annienterà, l’abisso mi annienterà, una vittima delle sconfinate lontananze, una vittima della sconfinata vicinanza, oltre tutte le ombre e tutte le umiliazioni subisco mio padre, mia madre, i miei amici, questo pensiero folle delle vite in comune, questo pensiero folle delle infinitudini, e pertanto intraprendere qualcosa è un crimine, tutto è menzogna, ogni virgola è una menzogna, tutto non è altro che una terribile chiacchiera, un’irrilevanza, una bassezza, una umiliazione per me…”

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am thrilled to find that this first prose effort (posthumously published) by the man who, for me, is the greatest 20th century writer in the German language, is much better than I anticipated. Angry, reeling, frantic, and unique, "On The Mountain" only suffers rare moments of immaturity and ponderousness. However, I'd only recommend it to serious fans, and although it was the first book he ever wrote, it's definitely not the place to begin if you've not read him before.

[Maurizio Manco · Rating 4 out of 5]

"...in fondo la nostra vita non è altro che una massa insignificante in perenne vibrazione che si esprime in colori stupendi [...] ma la sostanza è imperscrutabile..." (p. 72)

[Stefano Franke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Por fin encuentro un precedente al libro El hombre es un gran faisán en el mundo de la increíble escritora Herta Muller.

Recomendado.

[Neil McCrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

An odd, rambling story of a deceptively simple mountain hike, and the people the protagonist encounters there. There is not much to the plot of the novel, but it is stylistically fascinating. The entire novel is composed as one sentence. Somehow this manages to work, making the act of reading resemble the journey of the protagonist. I'm told that this device is even more successful in the original German.

[julucha · Rating 3 out of 5]

[1959] Ejercicio de estilo de Bernhard muy clarificador de lo que mejoraría después. Ni por asomo una obra recomendable para iniciarse en él pero bastante disfrutable para los que ya hicieron el rodaje.

[Michael sinkofcabbages]

Dont get me wrong, i LOVE berhard. But maybe i wasnt in the right frame of mind for this one. Maybe at the right time this would be great.

[Rob Lloyd · Rating 4 out of 5]

An impressive debut showing glimpses of the sardonic, manic genius so prevalent in Bernhard's oeuvre.

[Augusto Pellegrinetti · Rating 3 out of 5]

0.6

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrifically scabrous.