Thomas Bernhard

 

I recently finished The Loser, Thomas Bernhard's celebrated novel of artistry, excellence, and failure. At its core, this is a book about competition and comparison: about how, despite ourselves, we cannot avoid the tendency to differentiate, to distinguish. Bernard's focus is on elite piano players and their evolution over time and space. To label one of the three "a loser" is a bit of a stretch as that player is himself an exceptional talent. But compared with the virtuoso, with the genius, he can be nothing, at that level, but a failure. The plot of The Loser is not, though, what has attracted attention: instead, is is Bernhard's style, which fluctuates between the present and a sort of perpetual past. Bernhard captures that sense of the past in a number of ways: via memory, recollection, and imagination; but mostly, through an unusual interplay of syntax, repetition, and conjugating verbs in all forms of the past tense. A character had done, or was doing, or did do, or will have had to have done: it's almost to the point of Gertrude Stein, but that is not, in my reading, Bernhard's objective. Instead, he seems to be making a point about our ability as humans to construct entire stories from memory, from supposition. And even if I found the style here a bit, well, a bit gimmicky at times, I take the point that events are, by their very nature, transformed into the past, and that history, no matter how recent, can only be made real through the articulation of memories. In this way, at least, Bernhard packs a considerable punch: his story, told largely in the past tense, becomes immediately present, casting a double sense of sorrow: for what was, and for what now is.