Tag Archives: Thomas Bernhard

My Year in Reading: 2022

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The voice remains. It somehow survives that cataclysmic leap from oral epic to self-consciousness fiction. The inimical voice of writers like Beckett, Woolf and Bernhard. This isn’t the first year I read Jon Fosse’s writing, but it is the first in which his voice became a tremendous presence.

I’ve read most of Fosse’s books available in English translation, saving Trilogy, and his writing seems to have that rare transcending quality called literature. In his essay, Anagoge Fosse writes, “Why do we never read with our attention turned towards the thing in literature which makes it so obvious that it both belongs to the world and does not belong to the world? That makes it incomprehensibly comprehensible? Which gives it meaning without meaning? Why don’t we read to see how the paradox of literature is a strange fusion of the extremely heavy and the extremely light, of the material and the spiritual?”

My most cherished literary discoveries encapsulate literature in precisely those terms: writers like Mayröcker, Llansol, Lispector and Murnane. This year, Fosse’s Septology, translated by Damion Searls and Melancholia II, translated by Eric Dickens, left the most significant impression, together with Thomas Bernhard’s Yes, translated by Ewald Osers and Friederike Mayröcker’s brutt, or The Sighing Gardens, translated by Roslyn Theobald.

Much of the summer was spent with Geoffrey Hill’s Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012. A planned chronological reading ended up with the repeated rereading of Tenebrae and For the Unfallen: Poems 1952-1958 before getting entangled, against my usual practice, with explicatory secondary texts. Hill is a highly lucid poet, particularly in his early days. These are poems to get to know throughout a lifetime, but the scholars help to build light.

For a few months, I carefully followed Iain McGilchrist’s prose in The Matter With Things, a book I shall undoubtedly reread, enhanced by my later reading of Geoffrey Hill and Jon Fosse. Perhaps these coincidents only seem so; the future’s roots are buried in the past.

Also notable this year was one of Steve Mitchelmore’s favourites of last year: Ellis Sharp’s mesmerising Twenty-Twenty, which records daily for a year his struggle against the compulsion to write and a return to Beckett’s Company, a reminder to slow down and look back more often.

 

Thomas Bernhard’s Yes

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“This book is here on the table in front of me,” wrote Ágota Kristóf, of Thomas Bernhard’s Yes, It “is the first book of his that I read. I lent it to several friends, telling them that I had never laughed so hard when reading a book . . . It is true that the content is terrible, for this ‘yes’ is indeed a ‘yes’, but a ‘yes’ to death, and thus ‘no’ to life”.

After reading Kristóf’s The Illiterate I turned next to Bernhard’s Yes. How could I not? This is how I like to read, have always read, led from one book to the next by that sometimes barely discernible thread, though more direct in the journey from Kristóf to Bernhard, about who she writes, “[He] will live on eternally as an example to all those who claim to be writers”.

I read Bernhard’s books singly. He is not for me a writer to binge-read, though I expect to read each of his books eventually. So far, none of the eight I’ve read have disappointed. Yes goes straight onto my list of favourite books. It has that immediacy that comes with Bernhard’s novels and the ability to deliver character and voice by the most economical means. The pervading sense of disillusionment is counterbalanced by a stream of not-quite humorous misanthropy, source, I imagine, of Kristóf’s laughter.

A pattern of truly serendipitous reading would next entail Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, but that maddening text and I have crossed paths before so I shall turn instead this evening to Bernhard’s protagonist’s other source of solace: Robert Schumann’s late symphonies.

“Mundus Imaginalis”

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What, I wonder, would the world be like without this intermediate world of the imaginative consciousness that we enter when we read? This world that allows cognitive imagination to blossom. Reading this morning the pared down precision of Ágota Kristóf’s prose gives rise to a clear flow of mental images that eludes me in writing that is over-polished, that tries too hard, where the images and ideas clash and strain credibility.

I am rereading her series of novels considered a trilogy because the same characters reappear in each. Kristóf was less definite. The Notebook is bleak, sublimely intense while the subsequent books are lesser, but the part is in this case always equal to the whole. In Kristóf’s The Illiterate she mentions one of her favourite writers, Thomas Bernhard, specifically his novel Yes so, as is my habit, I also began to read that book.

Friedrike Mayröcker I continue to read to prolong the voice, just a few sentences can be sufficient. This weekend also Anne Carson’s solemn The Glass Essay which lead me to search biographies of Emily Brontë, a writer revered, I think, by Maria Gabriela Llansol. A few pages too of Woolf’s The Waves, browsing the text that I wrote in the margins thirteen years ago.

The perplexities of this world of reading, the books that fade completely away, the voices that stay alive, Llansol’s transformations into figures, the profusion of minds. This simultaneous narrative and its possibilities.

A Year End Post of Sorts

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Mircea Cărtărescu’s Nostalgia is a world in miniature, and also, a people. In fervent minds such as Maria Gabriela Llansol’s and his, ideas come together from will to achievement to produce an extraordinarily rich vision, a higher synthesis in which contrasting ideas come forth to forge an incomparable unity. Like every brilliant work, Nostalgia and Llansol’s Geography of Rebels trilogy need nothing. The tone and flavour of their work makes allusions to art that has gone before, but they are uniquely their own. Made of nothing but words they transmit  a vital atmosphere that seems freshly formed from nothing.

Of this year’s reading, a good year in which I’ve read several fine works that will stay with me for a long time, it is these two writers that give me both the passionate excitement and the contemplative rapture I find only from literature. Both stem the flow of time and leave me refreshed to perceive the world with altered lens.

I am reading Nostalgia again, so I shall begin the new years’s reading as I end this one. The list below summarises the books that stayed with me from this year’s solitary and mediative pursuit of reading literature. In Jon Fosse I think I may also have found another literary companion to accompany me through the dark forest of the next decade. I’ve long awaited a translation of Bazlen’s Notes and it was all I hoped it would be.

Fanny Howe, The Wedding Dress
Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers (t. Willa and Edwin Muir)
Reading and re-reading Maria Gabriela Llansol’s trilogy (t. Audrey Young)
Ricardo Piglia, The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years (t. Robert Croll)
Reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle end to end (t. Don Bartlett)
Moyra Davey, Moyra Davey
Roberto Bazlen, Notes Without a Text (t. Alex Andriesse)
Thomas Bernhard, The Loser (t. Jack Dawson)
Jon Fosse, An Angel Walks Through the Stage and Other Essays (t. May-Brit Akerholt)
Mircea Cărtărescu, Nostalgia (t. Julian Semilian)

A special thanks to Andrei, keeper of The Untranslated blog. It is through him that I discovered both Llansol and Cărtărescu and, of course, to the bold translators and publishers that interpret these remarkable texts into the English language.

All is Quiet

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in his essay, Karl Ove Knausgaard captures concisely and perceptively the literary qualities of Thomas Bernhard, Michel Houellebecq, Jon Fosse and by extension his own writing; “the presence we feel has to do with a certain receptiveness, a certain alertness, a certain temperament, and what this opens up for us in the text. The strange thing about writing is that the self seems to let go, that what in our self-conception normally keeps the I together, becomes dissolved, the inner being reconfigurating in new and unfamiliar ways.”

I’ve yet to read Fosse’s fiction, but the essays that Knausgaard describes are collected in An Angel Walks Through the Stage and Other Essays (trans. May-Brit Akerholt) from Dalkey Archive. I require more time with the essays, but am fascinated with his singular way of looking at literature and art.

That it is influenced by Maurice Blanchot reminds me yet again to spend more time with his work, as what Fosse describes is close to what I seek and am fortunate to find in my literary touchstones: “Whereas telling connects with the social world, the narrative situation itself, and moreover comprises some element of entertainment, writing, Fosse seems to believe, connects with something else, with that part of our language which perhaps communicates only itself, like a stone or a crack in a wall.”