Thomas Bernhard

A Novel

The Loser

Nathan Johnson

This book feels like satire and a joke that a well-known author plays on his audience. Bernhard is well renown for his disdain of his home country among many other things, and he brings that energy to this complicated book. The story is well and truly over within the first 2 pages, and yet the rest of the book has you diving deeper into character history, motivations, influences, animosities - teaching you more about human relationships than about any cultures or individual stories. Would recommend to read, if you are willing to bear with a book without a story.

Hamed Khalidi

jess

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.

Safiya 

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 !

The Loser A Novel

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