The 3 best books of Thomas Bernhard

Taking advantage of the recent award of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2019 to Peter Handke, today I bring up another great Austrian author who has already disappeared, Thomas Bernhard. A writer who stands out in the novel (in addition to many other creative aspects) due to the combination of the fictional with that always subjective realism (sometimes idealizing and at other times demeaning) of the autobiographical.

Novels with historical chronicle notes, plots loaded with satirical revision, always novel as a critic focused on the success of the vulgar or the mean (something recurrent in many authors but that conforms in Bernhard's imaginary that pessimistic construct also inherited from a childhood, let's say atypical)

Beyond his plays (I do not know if they have been performed again on any public stage, since Thomas Bernhard himself prohibited its representation as a bitter inheritance bequeathed to humanity), some of his most acclaimed novels are those that share an introspection in parallel between Bernhard's vital journey and the future of the world, a rich composition worthy of the recognition of a great literary work of the XNUMXth century.

Top Recommended Novels by Thomas Bernhard

The ill-fated

If there is a complex musical instrument, rich in nuances, emblematic and surrounded by its special paraphernalia, that is the piano.

On the keys of a piano you can spin notes for all emotions, from the darkest suspended chords to dramatization to the liveliest sequences that evoke joy. That all as a possible tool for the good pianist is this novel about two musicians united and separated by the same music even after one of them commits suicide.

The return of the surviving friend to the Austria they once shared fills him with emptiness, guilt, nostalgia and frustration. Because in reality there were three of them, a triangle between the virtuosity of the great pianist Glenn Gould, the blinding will of the deceased, Wertheimer, and the narrator's assumption of defeat. Nothingness loomed into the lives of Wertheimer and the narrator as Glenn Gould grew into a phenomenon at the piano.

And the vacuous attempts to overcome that emptiness, the impossible genius that is not available, is in tune with a frustration perhaps more internalized by the author, that of lucidity in the face of disenchantment, in that stark struggle that almost never ends well.

Extinction

It is always appreciated when new editions of works by great authors emerge. In this case Alfaguara reprises Bernhard's latest novel, a story with which the Austrian genius said goodbye in style to his particular setting.

A novel that focuses the universe on the small Austrian town of Wolfsegg. Because from there he was the protagonist of the story. A guy named Franz- Josef Murau who would like not to have to step back into that space that turned the memory of his childhood into a redoubt without oxygen, a suffocating evocation of that insurmountable childhood in which any childhood lived in the place would overshadow. The protagonist's sick hatred for that place must be ignored to face the farewell of his entire family. The fatal outcome of a traffic accident further darkens memories.

And yet, in fatality there can be reconciliation. But only someone like Bernhard can teach us it, but not before going through all the hells to which fear leads. In the end, you discover that intuition of the few hours someone has left to write more stories.

And to top it all off, the author seems to want to make us smile when we look for acid sarcasm in his work. The narrative takes on very special nuances between the metalinguistic and the metaphysical, reaching at its end a brilliant extinction like a macabre joke.

Concrete

Another of the works recovered by Alfaguara. One of the shortest compositions of the author. Once again we enter the labyrinths of obsessions, of those drives that repeatedly push the human spirit.

And nothing better to stage these tendencies of reason than the characterization of an erudite music scholar with his particular fixation on the German composer Mendelssohn. Nothing distances him from his intention to occupy the soul of the musician, assaulting it from his notes, reaching some shared space in which he can dialogue with him through the legacy of his work.

With that subtle touch of corrosive humor, we accompany a Rudolf who lives between his sister's snubs for his lack of understanding and an intellectual assignment about Mendelssohn that has not even begun.

Under a new light of Mallorca, in which Rudolf longs to channel his own inner light. Until something new crosses his path, a new fixation on a woman whose strange memory ends up leading him to a cemetery where he now resides.

The metaphor of concrete as a title closes at the end of the brief but intense story, between soliloquies in which Rudolf fruitfully reviews his messianic and absurd vision of the world. And there, in front of the concrete with which the mausoleums are built, the circle of a sinister allegory about will and nothingness closes.