Reviews
so much more straightforward in its prose, The Loser speaks of the patrimonial hatred and enviousness rooted in a being that sees the world in a very nihilistic lens.
I only came to understand the plot after reaching the epilogue, which to some extent felt like une arnaque... Why wasn't it simply put at the prologue ? Even if it goes against the author's style/satire ! I cannot keep a positive memory of it now :( Although I was a little bit more curious to read more books by the same author... But I don't think I can be as patient this time! In any case, this is the kind of books that requires a préalable knowledge about the author, the era and even cultural subtleties ... Between long sentences and ambiguous characters I lost interest more than once,and was recalled back by some nihilistic announcement, such as: "We try out all possible avenues and then abandon them, abruptly throw decades of work in the garbage can." "The biggest mistake is to think that one can be rescued by so-called simple people. A person goes to them in an extremely needy condition and begs desperately to be rescued and they thrust this person even more deeply into his own despair." As the narrator professed : "That’s why he especially loved Dostoevsky and all his disciples, Russian literature in general, because it actually is a deadly literature, but also the depressing French philosophers." The story is a bad imitation of Russian existential literature, and a nihilistic farce !
Highlights
As a child I had wanted to become a beer-truck driver, admired beer-truck drivers, I thought, couldn't look often enough at beer-truck drivers.
The courts, even after they have destroyed innocent people and their families for life, go back to their everyday business, I thought, the jurors, who always follow the mere whim of a moment in their judgment, but also a boundless hatred for their fellowman, will quickly come to terms with their mistake and themselves even after they have long since recognized that they’ve committed an irreparable crime against innocent people.
We should observe and treat people not from our point of view but from all angles, I thought, associate with them in such a way that we can say we associate with them so to speak in a completely unbiased way, which however isn't possible, since we actually are always biased against everybody.
The so-called bottom line is he killed himself, not I, I thought, I was just picking up my suitcase from the floor to put it on the bench, when the innkeeper walked in. She was surprised, she said, hadn't heard me, I thought, she's lying to me. She surely saw me enter the inn, has been spying on me the whole time, hasn't come into the restaurant on purpose, that disgusting, repulsive and yet seductive creature, who’s left her blouse open to the waist.
Over a hundred pages of standing in the entrance to the inn, thinking and recollecting, THEN the innkeeper shows up.
But people didn't understand what I meant, as usual, when I say something they don't understand it, for what I say doesn't mean that I said what I said, he said, I thought. I say something, he said, I thought, and I'm saying something completely different, thus I've spent my entire life in misunderstandings, in nothing but misunderstandings, he said, I thought. We are, to put it precisely, born into misunderstanding and never escape this condition of misunderstanding as long as we live, we can squirm and twist as much as we like, it doesn’t help.
The so-called intellectual consumes himself in what he considers pathbreaking work and in the end has only succeeded in making himself ridiculous, whether he's called Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, it doesn't matter, even if he was Kleist or Voltaire we still see a pitiful being who has misused his head and finally driven himself into nonsense.
Our great philosophers, our greatest poets, shrivel down to a single successful sentence, he said, I thought, that's the truth, often we remember only a so-called philosophical hue, he said, I thought. We study a monumental work, for example Kant's work, and in time it shrivels down to Kant's little East Prussian head and to a thoroughly amorphous world of night and fog, which winds up in the same state of helplessness as all the others, he said, I thought. He wanted it to be a monumental world and only a single ridiculous detail is left, he said, I thought, that's how it always is. In the end the so-called great minds wind up in a state where we can only feel pity for their ridiculousnes, their pitifulness. Even Shakespeare shrivels down to something ridiculous for us in a clearheaded moment, he said, I thought.
In Chur I had never been able to sleep, I thought, I had always lain awake in complete despair. Chur is actually the gloomiest place I've ever seen, not even Salzburg is as gloomy and, in the final analysis, as sickening as Chur. And the Churians are just the same. A person can be ruined for life in Chur, even if he spends only one night there.
He wanted to publish a book, but it never came to that, for he kept changing his manuscript, changing it so often and to such an extent that nothing was left of the manuscript, for the change in his manuscript was nothing other than the complete deletion of the manuscript, of which nothing remained except the title, The Loser.
I took a few steps toward the kitchen window although I'd already realized I couldn't look through the kitchen window because, as already mentioned, it's covered with filth from top to bottom. Austrian kitchen windows are all totally filthy and we can't look through them and and naturally it's to our greatest advantage, I thought, not to be able to look through them because then we find ourselves staring into the mouth of catastrophe, into the chaos of Austrian kitchen filth. So I reversed the few steps I had taken to the kitchen window and remained where I had been standing the whole time.
We both failed for the opposite reasons, Wertheimer said, I thought. I had nothing to prove, only everything to lose, he said, I thought.
In fact we could only have continued Horowitz's course by moving out of Salzburg, which at bottom is the sworn enemy of all art and culture, a cretinous provincial dump with stupid people and cold walls where everything without exception is eventually made cretinous.