Three Novellas

Thomas Bernhard is "one of the masters of contemporary European fiction" (George Steiner); "one of the century's most gifted writers" (New York Newsday); "a virtuoso of rancor and rage" (Bookforum). And although he is favorably compared with Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Robert Musil, Thomas Bernhard still remains relatively unknown in America.

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.

“"'Why do we still have to live,' a survivor of a family suicide pact asks in the first of these novellas, all of which revolve around madness or suicide. The Austrian master Bernhard, whose thirty-year career was devoted to the proposition that to be born is a tragedy and that to live is a punishment nobody deserves to suffer, never managed to come up with a satisfactory answer. These novellas are early works, but the point of view that found devastating expression in masterpieces like Concrete and Yes is already apparent. What is extraordinary about Bernhard is that his relentless pessimism never seems open to ridicule; his world is so powerfully imagined that it can seem to surround you like little else in literature."”

"Amras, Playing Watten, and Walking . . . reveal that the Austrian had a penchant for morbidity and isolation from the start. . . . The books' unselfconscious absurdities are hilarious, but their near disregard for the reader also generates a peculiar intimacy: It's as if you're experiencing the thoughts firsthand, getting swept up in the ruminations as they approach a fever pitch. . . . It's fascinating to watch the author slowly cordon off a space where characters can exist entirely on their own terms, no matter how tortured they claim to be by the world around them. "-- "Village Voice"
"'Why do we still have to live, ' a survivor of a family suicide pact asks in the first of these novellas, all of which revolve around madness or suicide. The Austrian master Bernhard, whose thirty-year career was devoted to the proposition that to be born is a tragedy and that to live is a punishment nobody deserves to suffer, never managed to come up with a satisfactory answer. These novellas are early works, but the point of view that found devastating expression in masterpieces like Concrete and Yes is already apparent. What is extraordinary about Bernhard is that his relentless pessimism never seems open to ridicule; his world is so powerfully imagined that it can seem to surround you like little else in literature."-- "New Yorker"
"For some readers, Bernhard's reported speech technique may not overcome an inculcated preference for conventional representations of dialogue. Having characters dwell obsessively on fine points might seem nothing short of maddening, in which case reading Bernhard will be like death by pushpin. But for those who can bear the hypnotic sentences and who will engage the grim mind behind them, Three Novellas, particularly 'Walking, ' will be refreshing, and a stimulus to thinking about other ways to conceive of fiction."-- "Books in Canada"
"In Amras, the first of the three novellas, Bernhard has not yet found his form. But in Playing Watten and in Walking, we see burgeoning signs of one of the most distinct literary voices of the twentieth century. . . . Playing Watten and in Walking are small treasures, and in its totality, Three Novellas . . . is an important addition to Bernhardt's translated oeuvre."-- "Rain Taxi"
"On picking up Three Novellas . . . the reader is instantly transported into the comic nightmare we recognize from Bernhard's longer novels and theater: It is Bernhard's postwar Austria, menacing, provincial, suffocating, where the beauty of the Alpine setting serves as a mask of hypocrisy concealing guilt and decay. . . . What is particularly exciting in the three short pieces included in this new collection is the chance to see a younger Bernhard working on a concise scale with motifs and methods he will expand into the longer works considered his masterpieces. At the same time, the works here give us a glimpse of roads not taken, experiments with pathos and plot that the writer let fall away as he refined his vision and technique."-- "Chicago Tribune"
"Reading Thomas Bernhard's Three Novellas was like revisiting my teenage obsession with gothic music and The Metamorphosis and realizing that maybe it wasn't so corny after all. The subject matter in the three short works in this collection ranges from suicide and madness, to suicide and addiction, and back to madness (without the suicide), but does so deftly and stylishly, giving audiences unfamiliar with Bernhard's longer works a good introduction to this challenging Austrian writer without feeling too goth. . . . Bernhard is one of a kind. More audiences should familiarize themselves with his skillful, challenging writing. . . . So dust off your Bauhaus records and throw one on the turntable, enjoying them again as the soundtrack to Bernhard's bleak, beautiful landscape."-- "Bookslut"

Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) grew up in Salzburg and Vienna, where he studied music. In 1957 he began a second career as a playwright, poet, and novelist. He went on to win many of the most prestigious literary prizes of Europe (including the Austrian State Prize, the Bremen and Brüchner prizes, and Le Prix Séguier), became one of the most widely admired writers of his generation, and insisted at his death that none of his works be published in Austria for seventy years, a provision later repealed by his half-brother. The University of Chicago Press has published eleven of his books in English translation, including, most recently, Extinction, The Loser, and The Voice Imitator.

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