Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Old Masters: A Comedy
    Unavailable
    Old Masters: A Comedy
    Unavailable
    Old Masters: A Comedy
    Ebook199 pages3 hours

    Old Masters: A Comedy

    By Thomas Bernhard and Ewald Osers

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    In this exuberantly satirical novel, the tutor Atzbacher has been summoned by his friend Reger to meet him in a Viennese museum. While Reger gazes at a Tintoretto portrait, Atzbacher—who fears Reger's plans to kill himself—gives us a portrait of the musicologist: his wisdom, his devotion to his wife, and his love-hate relationship with
    art. With characteristically acerbic wit, Bernhard exposes the pretensions and aspirations of humanity in a novel at once pessimistic and strangely exhilarating.

    "Bernhard's . . . most enjoyable novel."—Robert Craft, New York Review of Books.

    "Bernhard is one of the masters of contemporary European fiction."—George Steiner
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateAug 15, 2019
    ISBN9780226074344
    Unavailable
    Old Masters: A Comedy

    Read more from Thomas Bernhard

    Related to Old Masters

    Titles in the series (7)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Reviews for Old Masters

    4/5

    176 ratings9 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Second rate Bernhard, which is a bit like saying that the two-inch slice a foot from the end of the three-foot long salami is not as good as the two-inch slice six inches to the right. It's all salami. Still, I won't rush to re-read this one.
    • 3/5
      For a comedy this was pretty depressing. A elderly man is trying to cope with his wife's sudden death and spends the book either talking about killing himself or complaining about artists. Just can't understand why this gets so many great reviews?
    • 4/5
      If I were to start by saying that this book is one very long paragraph most of which consists of an intemperate rant, written in reported speech but without quotation marks, about Austria and the arts more generally, I suspect that would sound like hard work. Despite all of that, this book is quite readable, entertaining and full of interesting perspectives. Ostensibly this is a tale of a friendship between two old men, and we learn very little about one of them, the narrator Atzbacher, who is mostly content to relate the thoughts of his friend Reger, who has summoned him to Vienna's art history museum. Reger is a recently widowed critic, who writes music reviews for The Times and has been visiting the museum every other day for over thirty years. Reger is disillusioned with almost everything, including the greatest art, music and literature which he is drawn to to escape a culture he founds intolerable, and his dislikes are elucidated at great length. Occasionally Atzbacher speaks for himself, and when this happens the change in narrative perspective is not always immediately apparent.This was my first experience of Bernhard, and I found it intriguing without feeling I want to explore his world more deeply any time soon.
    • 3/5
      Whether it’s the German love for subordination, or the translator’s love for redundant accuracy, this is a rocky road for reading. I have read forty pages in six mornings, the slowest I’ve ever progressed in purported English. For instance, the writer and the translator repeat Kunsthistorisches Museum four times in as many lines, or no paragraph separations—one long paragraph, 156 pp—or get this very first sentence, with the fishhook at the end:“Although I had arranged to meet Reger at the Kunsthistorisches Museum at half-past eleven, I arrived at the agreed spot at half-past ten in order, as I had for some time decided to do, to observe him, for once, from the most ideal angle possible and undisturbed, Atzbacher writes.” Hmm. The translator Osers tries to replicate, because this translation needs translation. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of better English, “I had read Stifter in my youth, and my memory of him had been based on these reading experiences”(34). Surely, those reading experiences. Being a translator myself should help me read, but… Besides German and Czech (where he was born) Osers from the BBC also translated Silesian, Macedonian, and Slovak poetry. His literalness produces such replicative plenitude:“This contrast of the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Ambassador is what my thinking needs more than anything else, exposure on the one side and shelter on the other, the atmosphere of the Kunsthistorisches Museum on the one side and the atmosphere of the Ambassador on the other, exposure on the one side and shelter on the other, my dear Atzbacher…”(11)Some of this redundancy can be fun, like the mirroring of Reger’s obsessions,“The art historians are the real wreckers of art. The art historians twaddle so long about art until they have killed it with their twaddle…we should not allow art to be wrecked by the art historians who are the real wreckers of art. Listening to an art historian we feel sick…with the twaddle of the art historian art shrivels and is ruined”(15). This amused my wife, the artist Susan Mohl Powers (wikipedia), because art history classes in college, the darkened slide shows, put her to sleep. Maybe she didn’t realize she was listening to twaddle.Also amusing, Reger reflects on the over-rated Bruckner in music (and R is an international music critic) and Stifter in literature, who was appointed to the School Board in Linz after the Revolution of 1848. “Stifter writes in a terrible style…and Bruckner hs similarly slipped the reins with his chaotically wild…religiously pubertal intoxication of sounds”(34).We learn little about Atzbacher except he wears a wonderfully fitted Polish-Russian border sheepskin coat, and he is a philosophical writer who does not publish, and…he is a great listener, pretends not to have heard before what Reger has said before.For instance, Reger has told him where he met his wife, by chance, and Reger has criticized the poor clothes of the Viennese, especially the young with their ready-made bright colors.But all Reger’s self-contradictory criticism can be amusing, can even elicit rousing approval from another old crank, this reader. I have been urging that poetry readings be given from memory, to shorten and improve them; my new recent book of verse honoring my brilliant fellow student of Archobald MacLeish features parodies of a couple dozen poets. Imagine my huzzah at this,“There is nothing more distasteful than a so-called poet’s reading, Reger said, there is hardly anything I detest more, but none of these people see anything wrong in reading their rubbish everywhere”(111).On the other hand, many Reger’s criticisms I oppose, such as, “And everywhere that nauseating twaddle of democracy!”(106)
    • 5/5
      Atzbacher has been asked to meet his friend, the recently-widowed music critic Reger, in front of Tintoretto's White-bearded man in the Kunsthistorisches Museum at 11.30. He gets there early, spends 120 pages or so daydreaming, then they meet and Reger rants for most of the remaining 200 pages about what's wrong with the world, the arts, Austria and Vienna, in the best Bernhardian style. But then, two pages from the end of the book, Reger suddenly remembers the somewhat trivial reason why he asked Atzbacher to come. Not a book to read if what you are after is a fast-moving action story, then, but you wouldn't expect that from Bernhard anyway. The ranting here is of the very finest quality, though, and the absurdity of the situation keeps us wanting to know more: why does this man who claims to hate all art, especially old art, choose to sit religiously in front of the Tintoretto three mornings a week for thirty years? Reger's diatribe is not only ludicrously and magnificently negative about everything (Vienna, it seems, has the dirtiest toilets, the most corrupt Catholic-National-Socialist judges, the most hypocritical politicians and the most mediocre writers and artists in Europe. Amongst other things...), but turns out to have been cunningly conceived to lead us into a very moving analysis of what it's like to lose the person who's been at the centre of your life for many years. Bernhard calls this book a comedy, but the distraught Reger's reaction to the death of his wife is obviously a fictional working-out of Bernhard's reaction to the death of his life-companion Hedwig Stavianicek in 1984. Only Bernhard could imagine a character who fights his way out of a near-terminal depression by reading Schopenhauer...
    • 2/5
      He writes very well, and he really has gotten into the head of the main protagonist in the book. However, somehow I just did not get into the book, and it left me cold. It could have been a better experience.
    • 5/5
      In which we get the rambling thoughts of Reger, an 82-year-old music critic, whose irascibility is only matched by his erudition, as he sits in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum before Tintoretto's 'Portrait of a White Bearded Man'. Reger hates almost everything but reserves great passion for those things he loves. The prose - in a single paragraph, a la Garcia Marquez - is hypnotic.

      "...I am basically always unhappy, I am sure you understand, Reger said then. Even though this is nonsense, Reger said then..."

      The narrative voice hugely reminded me of one of my favourite writers, Max Sebald. So I looked it up and found that, yes, Bernhard was a great influence on Sebald. I read the novel in the beautifully designed Penguin Central European Classics version - a pleasure in itself. The music critic as hero - this book was bound to appeal to me, then. I shall definitely be seeking out another Bernhard novel to read.
    • 5/5
      Der Großmeister der schlechten Laune. Passieren tut wirklich überhaupt gar nichts, aber alles ist furchtbar. Österreich, die Österreicher, die Kunst, das Essen, die Toiletten und die Menschen. Ich hab Lachtränen in den Augen beim Lesen, bis zum allerletzten Satz, der das Sahnehäubchen auf dieser Tiraden-Torte ist. Besonders im Lichte der Lektüre weiterer Romane von Bernhard (die ja auch zumeist glänzende Perlen des Gemeckers über die Erbärmlichkeit der Welt und insbesondere der Kunst sind) fällt auf, dass das hier kein wahlloser Rant ist, denn was in dem einen Roman vernichtend in Grund und Boden gegrantelt wird, kann im nächsten schon wieder wohlwollend gelobt werden. Eine Satire und Liebeserklärung zugleich an das freie Recht, alles doof zu finden, was einem so von der Welt angeboten wird. Feuer frei!
    • 4/5
      I had a rough start with this, but ended up being moved by it - something I was not expecting. Bernhard writes one long, no paragraphs or page breaks, rant about the state of Austrian society and culture. This rant is by a man, Reger, in his 80s who goes daily to an Austrian art museum to sit in front of one painting, Tintoretto's White-Bearded Man. His rant is retold by a friend, Atzbatcher - an interesting authorial device in itself - sort of removes the reader one step. We know also that Reger's wife has recently died. Reger rants about many things: Austrian bathrooms, Austrian government, Austrian composers (spoiler - he's not a fan of Brucker or Mahler), Austrian authors, Austrian artists, and the Austrian people themselves, among other topics. This was amusing at times, especially the topics I had better context for, and really annoying at times. It's very repetitive, which does help hammer the points home. So just when I was about to give up and skim to the end, the details of Reger's wife's death start to come out. And then I was hooked. Lots of things become clear about just why Reger is so annoyed with Austria and why he's been ranting specifically about some of his topics. You also understand his anger is mixed with grief. It's all very moving and is a realistic portrait of grief, which is rarely just sadness and often includes anger. I did not find this an easy book to read, but I am very glad I read it and think it will be a memorable book for me.