Conversational Reading pointed me to this excellent essay on Thomas Bernhard by Douglas Glover, titled “A Scrupulous Fidelity, On Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser“. [The Brooklyn Rail, via Conversational Reading]
It’s a great look at what makes Bernhard work.
An excerpt:
The Loser is very much a novel-as-performance, both image and allegory, more image than discursive thought yet very much a novel of ideas with the ideas implicit in the structure, action, and style. Besides the aesthetics of German Romanticism The Loser reflects a conception of art inherited from Schopenhauer—especially Schopenhauer’s notion that art itself is the intermediary between the supra-sensory and the merely human, that in creating or correctly appreciating great art we enter an eternal realm of Platonic Ideas (Beauty, God, or even Being in Heidegger’s sense) and leave the tawdry realm of existence behind (what the narrator calls “the existence machine”).
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