Prose Contributor(s): Bernhard, Thomas (Author), Chalmers, Martin (Translator) |
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ISBN: 0857425765 ISBN-13: 9780857425768 Publisher: Seagull Books OUR PRICE: $17.10 Product Type: Paperback Published: August 2018 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Fiction | Short Stories (single Author) |
Series: German List |
Physical Information: 0.6" H x 4.9" W x 7.8" (0.57 lbs) 180 pages |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: "His manner of speaking, like that of all the subordinated, excluded, was awkward, like a body full of wounds, into which at any time anyone can strew salt, yet so insistent, that it is painful to listen to him," from The Carpenter The Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is acknowledged as among the major writers of our time. The seven stories in this collection capture Bernhard's distinct darkly comic voice and vision--often compared to Kafka and Musil--commenting on a corrupted world. First published in German in 1967, these stories were written at the same time as Bernhard's early novels Frost, Gargoyles, and The Lime Works, and they display the same obsessions, restlessness, and disarming mastery of language. Martin Chalmer's outstanding translation, which renders the work in English for the first time, captures the essential personality of the work. The narrators of these stories lack the strength to do anything but listen and then write, the reader in turn becoming a captive listener, deciphering the traps laid by memory--and the mere words, the neverending words with which we try to pin it down. Words that are always close to driving the narrator crazy, but yet, as Bernhard writes "not completely crazy." "Bernhard's glorious talent for bleak existential monologues is second only to Beckett's, and seems to have sprung up fully mature in his mesmerizing debut."--From Publishers Weekly, on Frost "The feeling grows that Thomas Bernhard is the most original, concentrated novelist writing in German. His connections . . . with the great constellation of Kafka, Musil, and Broch become ever clearer." --George Steiner, Times Literary Supplement, on Gargoyles |
Contributor Bio(s): Chalmers, Martin: - Martin Chalmers (1948-2014) was a Berlin-based translator from Glasgow. He translated some of the best-known German-language writers, including Herta Müller, Elfriede Jelinek, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Bernhard, Thomas: - Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) 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. |