The Loser
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ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019
'If you haven't read Bernhard, you will not know of the most radical advance in fiction since Joyce ... My advice: dive in.' Lucy Ellmann
'I absolutely love Bernhard: he is one of the darkest and funniest writers ... A must read for everybody.' Karl Ove Knausgaard
Mid-century Austria. Three aspiring concert pianists - Wertheimer, Glenn Gould, and the narrator - have dedicated their lives to achieving the status of a virtuoso. But one day, two of them overhear Gould playing Bach's Goldberg Variations, and his incomparable genius instantly destroys them both.
They are forced to abandon their musical ambitions: Wertheimer, over a tortured process of disintegration that sees him becoming obsessed with both writing and his own sister, with whom he has a quasi-incestuous relationship culminating in death; and the narrator, instantly, retreating into obscurity to write a book that he periodically destroys and restarts.
Written as a monologue in one remarkable unbroken paragraph, Thomas Bernhard's dazzling meditation on failure, genius, and fame is a radical new reading experience: musical, paralysing, raging, and inimitable.
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Thomas Bernhard was born in the Netherlands to Austrian parents in 1931. He was raised in Austria and studied dramatic arts at Mozarteum University in Salzburg. His writing first appeared in newspapers in the early 1950s, and he published his first book, a poetry collection, in 1957. His first novel, Frost, was published in 1963, and his first full-length play, A Party for Boris, premiered in 1970. In total he published nine novels, five autobiographical stories, around ten short story collections, eighteen plays and five volumes of poetry. His works were awarded numerous German and European literary prizes. He died in Austria in 1989. Bernhard is one of the most widely translated and admired European writers.
Leanne Shapton is an award-winning author, artist and publisher based in New York City. She is the co-founder of J&L Books and the author of Swimming Studies, Toys Talking, Women in Clothes (with Sheila Heti and Heidi Julavits) , Was She Pretty?, Waterloo-City, City-Waterloo, and most recently, Guestbook: Ghost Stories.
