Nathanimal’s Comments (group member since Sep 17, 2012)

Nathanimal’s comments from the Completists' Club group.

I'd heard about Welch a while ago, but only just got to him last month. I promptly read everything I could find by him: Maiden Voyage, In Youth is Pleasure, his journals, and A Voice Through a Cloud. Now if someone would just re-publish his complete stories. Exact Change, ahem, get on that.

I have read 4.

Most of these are not what I would've expected at all. For instance, it's only by a weird fluke have I read that book by Tsepeneag, whose name please council me on how to pronounce. While fun, it certainly didn't seem like a major star in the Dalkey heavens.

I love his rambling mad obsessive characters. And I like how he captures the subtle shadings at the edge of consciousness. He somehow manages to make his characters cartoonishly grotesque and complexly human both at the same time.

I've only completed Bros K, The Double, and Notes from Underground (my favorite so far) so I probably shouldn't be showing my face in here. But I have aspirations to read much much more.

Oh for sure, rants galore all through the memoir.

There's this one part where he's a young student at a boarding school run by a Nazi (literally, a Nazi) and he's trapped in a broom closet for hours practicing his violin and contemplating suicide. The writing shoots up into the stratosphere in typical Bernhardian fashion, with all the brutal repetitive harping he's so good at; and it's like you can just hear him on his violin scraping out these scales over and over in the key of suicide. I think that moment, more than any other I've read, really encapsulated his writing for me.

Yes, I've changed my handle. I was starting to confuse myself with the other Nate.

I started with the Trilogy. That may have been a mistake. By the Unnameable I was out of my depth for sure. But Molloy struck me as really funny and structurally fascinating and fairly accessible. And, MJ, I kept hearing Beckett patting Bernard Share on the back all through Inish.

I aspire to get myself all wrapped around Beckett. Ben, your adventure with all those Beckett paperbacks in the country, depression induced or not, sounds wonderful. (I had a similarly transformative month with Kafka a few years back and I long for it again.)

My Prizes is almost no a book at all. It's a collection of slight memoirish anecdotes about the different prizes he's been awarded, about his disgust for the awarders of these prizes and his disgust for himself for accepting these prizes. Oh and there's a few of his award speeches collected at the end, which are dire and opaque and brief and probably meant as a personal joke.

While there's not a lot to the book, it works well as a little bonus track slapped onto the end of Gathering Evidence. You get a glimpse of how his personality crystallized as he grew older. The funniest part, for my money, was the Austrian State Prize, where Bernhard goes around insisting to everyone that the prize was meant as an insult, since they gave him the "small prize" meant for developing writers rather than the "big prize" meant for career writers. Everybody tells him to just smile and nod and take the money, which, as you can guess, Bernhard is utterly incapable of doing. I was reading this on my lunch break in my cubicle and was laughing so hard I had to stop. I'm sure everyone thought I was watching cat videos on YouTube in there.

Anyway, to answer your question. I'm not sure how My Prizes compares to his short fiction. But certainly the novels I've read have each been a rewarding project, whereas this felt like a smattering of jaunty little excursions.

Oh, and I've read My Prizes. Just to be complete.

Thanks for putting in the work here, Megha.

I've only read The Loser, Concrete, Gathering Evidence, and I'm reading The Lime Works right now, but I have my completist sights on this guy.

Do you like his short fiction? I remember being turned off by the stories in Monkeyhouse, but maybe the later stories were better?

I liked a lot of the Palm Sunday material, and Kevorkian was somewhat entertaining, but these weren't stories, per say.

For novels I've read all but Player Piano, Jailbird, Deadeye Dick, and Bluebeard. For collections . . . crap. I didn't know he had so many.

Vonnegut was an early love but I'm not sure how much I want to complete. Mostly I should revisit Mother Night, since you guys love it so much and since I don't remember it.

Cat's Cradle was my favorite book for a long time and I re-read it every few years. After that: Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse 5, and Rosewater are faves.

You people. I'm oppressed enough by your 2000+ books-per-year reading goals as it is.

I've exhausted a few not very prolific writers, and I'm probably very near to exhausting Vonnegut. But my most exhausted writer, so far, is Kafka. I've read most of his work numerous times. I've read biographies (I know they don't count, but they do curate much of his letters and diaries.) And I've started in on non-fiction like the aphorisms and the letter to his Father. I do want to read everything, but at the end of the road I see his "legal writings." Yes, the crap he wrote at work that not even he could stand.

I find it amusing, though, the strange dark alleys we might be led down in our quest for completeness, when we could be reading something more obviously enjoyable. It's the kind of self-abnegating assiduity one might find in a novel by Thomas Bernhard (for whom I aspire to completionistitude).

My question is this: Having read MOST of Kafka there are still a few stories that I've left unread, which, in fact, I'm avoiding reading. Because when I'm done I'll never have another unread story by Kafka to read. Ever. Doesn't reaching completion of a favorite writer bereave you in some way? Don't you find it final and sad?

Thanks for inviting me, MJ.