Gargoyles (22 page)
Authors: Thomas Bernhard
“I could not fall asleep, and began writing,” the prince said. “I wrote, A son studies his father and studies only how to destroy his father. And the women have always known
how
.… As a matter of habit,” the prince said, “I still go to
the office, with the punctuality which in the course of my life has so deformed me that I no longer recognize myself.
Farming, forestry
, I think.
Incompetent
. I don’t have the strength to go out of the office, to leave the office once and for all, although there is no point in my being in the office. I think: Why am I staying in the office if not for purposes of farming and forestry? This thought stimulates the most sensitive parts of my brain and I take a variety of files from the shelves in order to calm myself. This procedure, my going to the office and not knowing what to do in the office, is now being repeated daily. I no longer have any relationship to the entire contents of the office,” the prince said. “My son,” he said, “will come back from England and destroy Hochgobernitz. The long paper comes to my mind, that draft of his. In London, it seems to me, he has entangled himself in a philosophy from which he cannot emerge other than totally deranged. Hochgobernitz will be possible for him only as a crazy Hochgobernitz. I feel that. Incidentally, my son knows nothing about farming and forestry. What my son feels to be nature is not nature. He will possibly try to sell Hochgobernitz as a whole. But there will be no takers, and so he will break it up. After my death I see Hochgobernitz as stricken with terror. Then my son will come and dissolve the tension in madness. He is my son; everything will be at his mercy. Fatal times will come then, especially for my sisters, but also for my daughters, times of utter helplessness. But probably all these creatures deserve ruthlessness more than pity. My son always regards nature as a form of literature; all his letters confirm that. My son despises me, you know, Doctor. There is no truth in his letters. His handwriting changed completely in the course of a single year. I support my son in
studies repulsive to me, and he is destroying me. We, my son and I, could never have a conversation with each other. In England he has become accustomed to such short sentences, a way of talking that is painful, killing. I have raised him to be my destroyer, I think. And this man dares to write me in his last letter that I am a dilettante, that I failed to shape my life into an art. But he, as his letter proves, is shaping his life into an art, he writes. Whenever I ought to have drawn him closer to myself, he writes, I have pushed him away of my own accord. But all education is always utterly wrong,” the prince said. “My son’s actions have always been opposed to me. The one and only thing we have in common is our fondness for the newspapers. Oh yes,” the prince said, “would you mind getting me a copy of the
Times
of September seventh and bringing it the next time you come up …?”
THOMAS
BERNHARD
Frost
A NOVEL
Thomas Bernhard’s debut novel, published in German in 1963, and now in English for the first time. Visceral, raw, singular, and distinctive,
Frost
is the story of a friendship between a young man at the beginning of his medical career and a painter who is entering his final days.
Available October 2006, in Kardcover from Knopf
$25.95 • 1-4000-4066-3
PLEASE VISIT
WWW.AAKNOPF.COM
Thomas Bernhard was born in Holland in 1931 and grew up in Austria. He studied music at the Akademie Mozarteum in Salzburg. In 1957 he began a second career as a playwright, poet, and novelist. The winner of the three most distinguished and coveted literary prizes awarded in Germany, he has become one of the most widely translated and admired writers of his generation. He published nine novels, an autobiography, one volume of poetry, four collections of short stories, and six volumes of plays. Thomas Bernhard died in Austria in 1989.
T
HOMAS
B
ERNHARD
CONCRETE
Instead of the book he’s meant to write, Rudolph, a Viennese musicologist, produces this dark and grotesquely funny account of small woes writ large, of profound horrors detailed and rehearsed to the point of distraction. We learn of Rudolph’s sister, whose help he invites, then reviles as malevolent meddling; his “really marvelous” house, which he hates; the suspicious illness he carefully nurses; his ten-year-long attempt to write the perfect opening sentence; and, finally, his escape to the island of Majorca, which turns our to be the site of someone else’s very real horror story.
Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7757-1
CORRECTION
The scientist Roithamer has dedicated the last six years of his life to “the Cone,” an edifice of mathematically exact construction that he has erected in the center of his family’s estate in honor of his beloved sister. Not long after its completion, he takes his own life. As an unnamed friend pieces together the puzzle of his breakdown, what emerges is the story of a genius ceaselessly compelled to correct and refine his perceptions until the only logical conclusion is the negation of his own soul.
Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7760-1
FROST
Visceral, raw, singular, and unforgettable,
Frost
is the story of a friendship between a young man beginning his medical career and a painter in his final days. A young man has accepted an unusual assignment, to travel to a miserable mining town in the middle of nowhere in order to clinically—and secretly—observe and report on his mentor’s reclusive brother, the painter Strauch. Carefully disguising himself, he befriends the aging artist and attempts to carry out his mission, only to find himself caught up in his subject’s madness.
Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-3351-5
GARGOYLES
One morning a doctor and his son set out on daily rounds through the grim, mountainous Austrian countryside. They observe the colorful characters they encounter—from an innkeeper whose wife has been murdered to a crippled musical prodigy kept in a cage—coping with physical misery, madness, and the brutality of the austere landscape. The parade of human grotesques culminates in a hundred-page monologue, a relentlessly flowing cascade of words that is classic Bernhard.
Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7755-7
THE LIME WORKS
For five years, Konrad has imprisoned himself and his crippled wife in an abandoned lime works where he’s conducted odd auditory experiments and prepared to write his masterwork,
The Sense of Hearing
. As the story begins, he’s just blown off his wife’s head with the Mannlicher carbine she kept strapped to her wheelchair. The murder and the bizarre life that led to it are the subject of a mass of hearsay related by an unnamed life insurance salesman in a narrative as mazy, byzantine, and mysterious as the lime works itself—Konrad’s sanctuary and tomb.
Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7758-8
THE LOSER
The Loser
centers on a fictional relationship between piano virtuoso Glenn Gould and two of his fellow students who feel compelled to renounce their musical ambitions in the face of Gould’s incomparable genius. One commits suicide, while the other—the obsessive, witty, and self-mocking narrator—has retreated into obscurity. Written in one remarkable unbroken paragraph,
The Loser
is a brilliant meditation on success, failure, genius, and fame.
Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7754-0
WITTGENSTEIN’S NEPHEW
It is 1967. In separate wings of a Viennese hospital, two men lie bedridden. The narrator, named Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of the celebrated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, is suffering from one of his periodic bouts of madness. As their oncecasual friendship quickens, these two eccentric men begin to discover in each other a possible antidote to their feelings of hopelessness and mortality—a spiritual symmetry forged by their shared passion for music, strange sense of humor, disgust for bourgeois Vienna, and great fear in the face of death. Part memoir, part fiction,
Wittgenstein’s Nephew
is both a meditation on the artist’s struggle to maintain a solid foothold in a world gone incomprehensibly askew, and a stunning—if not haunting—eulogy to real-life friendship.
Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7756-4
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
Concrete
Correction
Frost
Extinction
Gargoyles
Gathering Evidence
The Lime Works
The Loser
My Prizes
Wittgenstein’s Nephew
Woodcutters