Thomas Bernhard in topvorm. Alles krijgt er genadeloos van langs: van de staat tot de bezoekers in het Kunsthistorisches Museum, van de lezer tot de kunst (de oude meesters, Adelbert Stifter, Bruckner, Mahler, om er maar een paar te noemen). Stilistisch geweldig en inhoudelijk scherp, een genot om te lezen.

Oostenrijk zuigt

Thomas Bernhard was mentioned in Helen Garner’s work “How To End A Story”, it’s a diary about Garner and her then on-par famous writer husband’s suffering marriage. The husband in Garner’s diary is arrogant, misogynistic and annoying. He had an affair with another female and his taste in arts and literature was part of the bait. Thomas Bernhard is a guage for the husband to decide if a person has taste or not:

“The publisher remarks that V’s habit of judging people according to whether or not they’ve read Thomas Bernhard is ‘the kind of insane snobbery that Bernhard himself would despise’”. (p219 “How to End A Story”)

Indeed, Bernhard criticises the prevalence of appreciation of arts for superficial reason: to exhibit one’s superiority either in taste or class in “Old Masters: A Comedy”. And also not shy away from pointing out the uselessness of arts, and at the same time concludes as a matter-of-fact: “art is altogether nothing but a survival skill… to cope with the world and its revolting aspects”.

I also found the character’s criticism on Catholic arts (so almost all European art from old days) refreshing in literature. And enjoy the character’s lecture on how we should see the important art works as caricature so we can criticise an art rather than admire it mindlessly.

Although the character gets tired of “Winterreise”, I started to listening to the piece along with reading and enjoy it very much. The book is a guide for classical music too.

On storytelling, I like how sentences being short and sharp, and I’d love to read more Thomas Bernhard in future.

"Old Masters" is essentially 200 pages of sarcastic yet deeply pessimistic rambling about life, society and (most of all) any and all art. Oh and not to mention how much Bernhard, *I mean the protagonist*, hates Austria.

There are a lot of interesting thoughts in here - particularly about how you often still need the very things/people you also despise - but despite my respect for it, the book did grate on my patience.

It's probably one of those books I'll appreciate more as I get older.

Comedy dark as scorched earth, delivered via stream of consciousness dammed and channeled by strategic shifts in person that one-up even the famed instance in MADAME BOVARY, giving the ferocious, hilariously bilious/fed-up minds to which we're here exposed a successively-layered, Russian-doll aspect that really keep you off balance, in an unusual kind of suspense. The novel is exceptionally short, but even so, that Bernhard can so fleetly sustain the immersive intensity of tone and embodiment (of an educated-class hypervigilance, exhaustion, and desperation in the face of, among a large handful of other post-industrialized maladies, what DeLillo calls "glut") he attempts here is impressive to the point of uncanniness. It is -- formally, conceptually, and (anti)philosophically -- a truly bottomless vortex.

Did I mention it's funny? It's hardly just insult humor, but the insults it does contain are among the most exquisitely particular and acute at which you'll ever helplessly laugh out loud.

Five stars for the constant shifting of the layers of the narrative, which Bernhard has developed to the point of a type of poetry in itself, and which W. G. Sebald did a perfect imitation of in Austerlitz (and particularly for the topmost layer, which is acknowledged only at the very beginning and the very end); five stars for the story of the doubling of the Tintoretto; and five stars for the final sentence, which might be the shortest in the entire book. Everything else is merely great.

Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum

Old Masters - Thomas Bernhard's 1985 novel written in the form of one unending paragraph spanning 156 pages is a torrent of passion and ideas that will captivate and fascinate readers who enjoy reflections on art and aesthetic experience, on literature, music and the interplay of culture and society.

The opening sentence sets the scene: "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." Indeed, the tale revolves around the museum's Bordone Room where Atzbacher, the novel's first-person narrator, reports how his friend Reger, a man in his eighties, has been sitting on a velvet-covered settee in front of Tintoretto's White-Bearded Man every other day except Monday for well over thirty years.

Longtime widower Herr Reger studied music in Leipzig and Vienna and continues to write music reviews for The Times even in his advanced age. Young Atzbacher, in turn, has made a career of art appreciation as well as writing unpublished philosophy essays. Alzbacher slides back and forth in his telling between Reger's obsessive thinking and his own. The more pages I turned, the more Reger reminded me alternately of Hermann Hesse's Harry Haller the Steppenwolf and Alceste the Misanthrope from Molière's famous play. There's good reason why Thomas Bernhard labeled Old Masters a comedy.

Since we are at the magnificent Kunsthistorisches Museum, one of Austria's grand jewels, let's begin with a quote from nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first.” Well, just so happens Schopenhauer is among Reger's favorite thinkers and Reger let many exquisite paintings from the golden age of the old masters speak to him. And what did these revered masterpieces have to say to Reger? As we come to learn, Herr Reger judges these so-called masterpieces as nothing more than a third-rate batch of kitsch created by grossly overvalued bunglers more interested in amassing wealth than anything resembling true art. What!?? Why such an outrageous, harsh pronouncement?

Here's a snippet from Reger's rant that goes on for pages: "The old masters, as they have now been called for centuries, only stand up to superficial viewing; if we view them thoroughly they gradually become diminished, and when we have studied them really and truly, and that means as thoroughly as possible for as long as possible, they dissolve, they crumble for us, leaving a flat taste, in fact most of the time, a very bad taste in our mouths."

And the main culprit responsible for producing such bad art? According to Reger, without question the diabolical prime cause is the state, particularly the Catholic state. In support of his position, Reger says, "Just look at Velazquez, nothing but state art, or Lotto, or Giotto, always only state art, just as that dreadful proto-Nazi and pre-Nazi Dürer, who put nature on his canvas and killed it . . . The so-called old masters only ever served the state or the Church, which comes to the same thing."

And the main tool for making sure the Catholic state snuffs out opposition and gets exactly what it wants? Both Reger and Atzbacher sharpen their critical swords and go on the attack when speaking of schools, art education and teachers. "These teachers teach what this Catholic state is and instructs them to teach: narrow-mindedness and brutality, vileness and meanness, depravity and chaos." Atzbacher draws on his own schoolboy days to recall how he received nothing from these feeble-minded, perverted mediators of the state but their incompetence, dull-wittedness and brainlessness. One of his abiding memories is his fingers swollen from repeated canings administered by a hazel switch. Beginning at an early age, these dullards ruin a youngster's artistic taste and drive out any spark for art.



In the spirit of the novel, I can imagine Reger and Atzbacher requiring all schoolteachers and museum guides wear a large placard around their necks to serve as warning: I'M A DULL, VICIOUS MOUTHPIECE OF THE SOUL-DESTROYING STATE

Reger's slam continues well beyond the visual arts. He is relentless in his attack on literature and one of his fellow countrymen comes in for a particular scalding: Adalbert Stifter - a writer Reger recognizes as nothing more than a philistine blockhead. And the fact Stifler committed suicide alters not one iota his mediocrity and the undeniable fact he was a muddled poopstick capable only of the most cramped verse and constipated prose.

And German-Austrian philosophy. Ha! For Reger, Martin Heidegger expresses a kind of German sausage feeble-mindedness, "the women's philosopher, straight from the scholars' frying pan." This is only the warm up. Reger's Heidegger rant goes on for several pages.

Lets pause and step back. Why all the ranting and raging? As we discover in the second half of the novel, Reger is a broken man, a man racked with intense unending pain since the death of his beloved wife ten years prior. The undeniable, ever-present reality of death is the lens through which Reger has come to view all life and art.

Art has let him down, big time. On two counts. First, he can see painters, art historians, museum-goers, the general public use art as a shield to seal off the reality of death - art as a colossal distraction; art as sublimation and illusion. In Reger's words: “Art altogether is nothing but a survival skill, we should never lose sight of this fact, it is, time and again, just an attempt - an attempt that seems touching even to our intellect - to cope with this world and its revolting aspects, which, as we know, is invariably possible only by resorting to lies and falsehoods, to hypocrisy and self-deception."

Secondly, on a profoundly more personal level, Reger himself has attempted to assuage his suffering over the death of his dear wife by immersing himself even more in music, literature and the arts. Try as he might, the arts have failed him. The reality of death, the suffering and psychic agony he has had to endure for the last ten years have triumphed.

Old Masters was my second Thomas Bernhard; Gargoyles was my first. I can see why the author is considered one of the major voices of postwar Europe. Since I'm especially drawn to novels of the existential variety, I plan to read more Thomas Bernhard.


Austrian author Thomas Bernhard, 1931-1989

This novel, Old Masters, came out right after Bernhard's masterpiece "Woodcutter," and right before his Magnum Opus "Extinction."

In his other novels, Bernhard's ranting prose works, in my opinion, because it is framed well. However, I felt that wasn't the case with this novel. The condemnation of all things Austrian goes on and on, which became repetition without much merit. (To note, all Bernhard's novels are exemplary of novels made of repetition.)

One justification that could be made: the narrator bemoans the state of writers in Austria, how they are all soulless, bunch of cons after only money and fame, who write nothing but soulless books, that say nothing meaningful. If Bernhard aimed this very novel to be the representative of those aforementioned books that just go on and on aimlessly, soullessly, then, it makes sense the book (Old Masters) is bad, but as a reader, and as a biggest fan of Bernhard, this one didn't work for me.

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Tintoretto's White-Bearded Man

Art altogether is nothing but a survival skill, we should never lose sight of this fact, it is, time and again, just an attempt - an attempt that seems touching even to our intellect - to cope with this world and its revolting aspects, which, as we know, is invariably possible only by resorting to lies and falsehoods, to hypocrisy and self- deception, Reger said. P. 151

thinking vs. reading

Our greatest pleasure, surely, is in fragments, just as we derive the most pleasure from life if we regard it as a fragment, whereas the whole and the complete and perfect are basically abhorrent to us.

After all, we do not love Pascal because he is so perfect but because he is fundamentally so helpless, just as we love Montaigne for his helplessness in lifelong searching and failing to find, and Voltaire for his helplessness.

The teachers are the henchmen of the state, and seeing that his Austrian state today is a spiritually and morally totally crippled state, on which teaches nothing but brutalization and corruption and dangerous chaos, the teachers, quite naturally, are also spiritually and morally deformed and brutalized and corrupt and chaotic.