Walking: A Novella

ISBN-13: 9780226311043 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 104 str.

Thomas Bernhard

Opis

Thomas Bernhard is -one of the masters of contemporary European fiction- (George Steiner); -one of the century's most gifted writers- (Newsday); -a virtuoso of rancor and rage- (Bookforum). And although he is favorably compared with Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Robert Musil, it is only in recent years that he has gained a devoted cult following in America.
A powerful, compact novella, Walking provides a perfect introduction to the absurd, dark, and uncommonly comic world of Bernhard, showing a preoccupation with themes--illness and madness, isolation, tragic friendships--that would obsess Bernhard throughout his career. Walking records the conversations of the unnamed 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.

O autorze

Born in 1931, the illegitimate child of an abandoned mother, Thomas Bernhard was brought up by an eccentric grandmother and an adored grandfather. Tormented as a young student in rightwing, Catholic Austria, Bernhard ran away from home aged fifteen. At eighteen, he contracted pneumonia. Placed in a hospital ward for the old and terminally ill, he observed with unflinching acuity protracted suffering and death. From the age of 21, everything he wrote was shaped by the urgency of a dying man's testament - his witness, the quintessence of his life and knowledge - and where this account of his life ends, his art begins.