Austria – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.24 THE SOJOURN by Andrew Krivak /2011/the-sojourn-by-andrew-krivak/ /2011/the-sojourn-by-andrew-krivak/#comments Wed, 25 May 2011 13:53:00 +0000 /?p=18166 Book Quote:

“If I could have ceased what pendulums swung, or wheels turned, or water clocks emptied, then, in order to keep the Fates from marching in time, I would have, for though it is what a boy naturally wishes when he fears change will come upon what he loves and take it away, a man remembers it, too, and in his heart wishes the same when all around him he feels only loss, loss that has been his companion for some time, and promises to remain at his side.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (MAY 25, 2011)

World War I was the deadliest conflict in Western history, but contemporary portrayals of war in literature and cinema primarily focus on examples of combat from the past fifty or sixty years. At a time when the Great War is receding into the annals of distant history, this elegiac and edifying novel has been released–a small, slim but powerful story of a young soldier, Josef Vinich, who hails from a disenfranchised and impoverished family in rural Austria-Hungary.

Josef was born in the rural mining town of Pueblo, Colorado, in 1899, to immigrant parents from Austria-Hungary who dreamed of a better life in the United States. The opening eleven-page prologue, a stunning and deeply felt family tragedy, is subsequently followed by a move back to the Empire, to his father’s village of Pastvina (which is now part of the Czech Republic). Josef’s father then marries a cruel woman with two young sons. They live the hardscrabble existence of shepherds, barely able to put food on the table, in the cold and brutal climate of the region. Josef and his father live for part of the year in a cabin in the Carpathian Mountains and ply their trade of husbandry in order to survive.

At the age of ten, Josef is introduced to his father’s Krag rifle, and is instructed in the art of hiding and hunting their prey. A distant cousin, Marian Pes–nicknamed Zlee–who was one year older than Josef, is sent to live with them. Zlee has an instinct for shepherding, and together they form a brotherly bond of love and respect. Josef’s sleep is haunted by dreams of loss and he gradually becomes distant from his father.

In 1916, when Zlee turns eighteen, both boys go to the conscription office to join up. Josef alters the age on his identity card so that he can go, too. During artillery training, they are recognized for their skill of aiming and shooting, and are sent to train as snipers, or “sharpshooters,” which in German is called Scharfschützen. What follows is a coming of age story set in the harsh climate and geography in the trenches of war–to Austria to train as Scharfschützen, and eventually to the sub-zero temperature of the Italian Alps.

Krivak writes with the precision and beauty of a finely cut gem and with the meticulous pace and purpose of a classical conductor. Every word is necessary and neatly positioned. His prose is evocative, poetic, and distilled. There is a place between the breath of the living and the faces of the dead, and that is where Josef’s soul resides. When the author takes the reader to the abyss of loss and the ghosts of Time, it is riveting. However, the emotional resonance was primarily potent in the prologue and only periodically in the body of the story, and was otherwise low-timbred and somewhat distancing. The narrative is so deliberately controlled that at times it felt antiseptic and dispassionate.

Krivak’s first novel is highly recommended as an addition to a library of World War I literature. This is an admirable debut, and it is evident from the prologue that Krivak is capable of crafting an emotionally satisfying story.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 13 readers
PUBLISHER: Bellevue Literary Press (April 19, 2011)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Publisher page on Andrew Krivak
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

]]> /2011/the-sojourn-by-andrew-krivak/feed/ 1 CONCRETE by Thomas Bernhard /2010/concrete-by-thomas-bernhard/ Tue, 12 Oct 2010 14:42:11 +0000 /?p=12856 Book Quote:

“No doctrine holds water any longer; everything that is said and preached is destined to become ludicrous.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (OCT 12, 2010)

I’d read wildly different reviews of a Thomas Bernhard book. One review was overwhelmingly positive while another review thought the same book (The Old Masters) pointless. After reading both reviews and salient quotes, I leaned towards the pointless reaction, but then again, the reviewers’ reactions to the same book were so different, I was curious to try a Bernhard novel. This brings me to Concrete, and after reading it, I now understand how this author could provoke such vastly different reactions from readers.

Concrete is narrated by a 45-year-old bachelor, Rudolph who lives in the town of Peiskam, Austria. When I say narrated by I mean that quite literally. Rudolph, who suffers from sarcoidosis, hopped full of prednisolone, wants to write a book about Mendelssohn Bartholdy. He’s spent years on the project and has an entire room full of notes to prove it, but Rudolph, who’s a classic procrastinator, has a litany of excuses about why his masterpiece isn’t finished. Concrete is a 156-page rant against several of Rudolph’s pet peeves: his pushy sister, charity, religion, Vienna, pet owners, so-called “simple people,” –you name it–Rudolph complains about it. And complain he does endlessly, repetitively and utterly pointlessly. Concrete is a brilliant, brilliantly funny look at the labyrinth of one man’s peevish, petty, rambling yet repetitive obsessions, and if you’ve read Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground, you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

When the novel begins, Rudolph’s successful sister has finally ended her visit at the old family home to which she has “the right to domicile.” She left urging Rudolph to visit Vienna, and Rudolph claims to be thrilled to see the back of her. The first part of the novel is a litany of complaints about his sister, and she’s portrayed as a monstrously domineering woman who is “the excuse for every failure” in Rudolph’s life:

“Although she had gone, I still felt the presence of my sister in every part of the house. It would be impossible to imagine a person more hostile to anything intellectual than my sister. The very thought of her robs me of my capacity for any intellectual activity, and she has always stifled at birth any intellectual projects I have had. She’s been gone a long time now, and yet she is still controlling me, I thought as I pressed my hands against the cold wall of the hall.”

According to Rudolph, there’s “no defence” against someone like his sister–a woman who’s so “wretched, malignant, deceitful” her husband “fled from her stranglehold and went to South America, to Peru, never to be heard of again.” Monstrous indeed, but as Rudolph shifts from one rant to another, we arrive at the conclusion that perhaps Rudolph’s relentless sister isn’t so bad after all.

Spurred on by his sister’s suggestion that he’s stagnating in Peiskam, Rudolph decides to take a long-delayed holiday and he ends up in Majorca. His fussy preparations for the trip include dragging along a suitcase of notes on Mendelssohn–along with adequate medicines for his chronic condition.

Concrete (and the meaning of the title becomes horribly clear at the end of the book) is an interior narrative rendered by an extremely unreliable, unhappy narrator. Seclusion and illness–combined with adequate funds to allow complete ostracism from the world–combine to create a situation in which Rudolph need have very little contact with humanity. His primary unsatisfying relationships are with his sister and his housekeeper, and apart from that he keeps himself company. While this is all very funny, undercurrents within the text illustrate how chronic disease erodes self-confidence while demanding a controlling relationship from its human host.

There’s the sense that we are in the same darkened room with Rudolph as he mutters one diatribe after another, curses fate, and argues himself into the position that he hasn’t published anything because to do so is “evidence of a certain defect of character.” He’s one of those people who ramble on like broken records about the same half-dozen issues. You could leave that darkened room, come back four hours later, and he wouldn’t have noticed your absence. But since Rudolph’s agonized rants are in print, we don’t have to miss a word. (Translated from German by David McLintock.)

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-5-0from 7 readers
PUBLISHER: Vintage (August 10, 2010)
REVIEWER: Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Thomas Bernhard

Wikipedia page on Thomas Bernhard
EXTRAS: Excerpt

Guy Savage has more to say about Concrete
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Woodcutters

Wittgenstein’s Nephew

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

About:

]]> WOODCUTTERS by Thomas Bernhard /2010/woodcutters-by-thomas-bernhard/ Tue, 12 Oct 2010 14:34:26 +0000 /?p=12866 Book Quote:

“You used to be in love with these ridiculous people, I told myself as I sat in the wing chair, head in heels in love with these ridiculous, low, vicious people, who suddenly saw you again after twenty years, in the Graben of all places, and on the very day Joana killed herself. They came up and spoke to you and invited you to attend their artistic dinner party with the famous Burgtheater actor in the Gentzgasse. What ridiculous, vicious people they are! I thought sitting in the wing chair. And suddenly it struck me what a low ridiculous character I myself was, having accepted their invitation and nonchalantly taken my place in their wing chair as though nothing had happened – stretching out and crossing my legs and finishing off what must by now have been my third or fourth glass of champagne.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (OCT 12, 2010)

Thomas Bernhard is a writer of semi-autobiographical fiction and satire who possesses an acerbic wit. Born out of wedlock in Holland in 1931, he was raised for several years in Vienna by his maternal grandfather, himself a writer. His grandfather introduced him to the many literati of his generation and also to Schopenhauer, who remained a strong influence on Bernhard’s life and writing. Bernhard considered Vienna his home though he maintained a love/hate relationship with it. The Boston Review cites that “In his final will and testament, Thomas Bernhard – Austria’s most infamous novelist and playwright for the past half-century, and the most outspoken critic the state has endured since Karl Kraus – performed an unlikely post-mortem disappearing act. With characteristic bravado, he banned any further production and publication of his works within his home country for the duration of their copyright.” Bernhard suffered from chronic tuberculosis to which he succumbed in 1989 at the age of 58. He speaks at great length about his illness in his novel, Wittgenstein’s Nephew.

Woodcutters, originally written as part of a trilogy, is Bernhard’s diatribe about his disgust, revulsion, loathing, hatred and vilification of the hypocrites and losers that make up the art circle in Vienna from the 1950’s through the 1980’s. In his unique style, with not one paragraph in nearly 200 pages, this novel is told primarily in stream of consciousness from the viewpoint of a writer, one not unlike Bernhard himself. The novel is in three identifiable parts – the writer sitting in a wing chair observing a dinner party, the writer discussing his relationship with a recently deceased friend, and the conversations of an actor during dinner.

The first segment of the book has almost every sentence beginning with, containing, or ending with the phrase ” …from my wing chair.” As the writer looks on at those attending the party, from his wingchair, he remembers all the reasons that he has been estranged from these very same people for the last twenty or thirty years. He remembers all the slights he received, the lies that were told about him and the hypocrisies he’s witnessed. He tries to figure out why he accepted this invitation and ruminates about it over and over, finally coming to a semi-belief that it was because his friend had committed suicide yesterday and he was feeling more vulnerable when he was invited. He recollects his history with all of the attendees, each relationship ending poorly, with the writer getting the bad end of the stick. He can think of nothing positive to say about anyone nor can he imagine why he even remains at such a despicable gathering.

The middle part of the book takes place at Joana’s funeral. Joana was the writer’s friend who committed suicide the previous day.  It is the afternoon of her funeral. As the writer recalls Joana’s time as the reigning queen of Vienna’s art scene, he describes her lovely costumes, her graciousness, and her mentoring of others. She marries a weaver, a man who creates great tapestries that are sold throughout the world. It was Joana who made him famous and created the mystique that surrounded him. When he was in his prime, her husband left her for a Mexican woman and Joana, in her grief, succumbed to uncontrolled alcoholism despite several treatments. It was not without surprise that the writer learned that Joana had taken her life.

The third part of the book is the arrival, two hours late, of the actor in whose honor this dinner party is being held. (The story goes back and forth in time as gaps are filled in about different characters and the writer’s relationships with them). We are privy to the conversations at the table and the rudeness, drunkenness, and shameful behaviors of the guests. The actor has just finished up an Ibsen play and is tired, as are the guests, as the dinner did not start until close to midnight. The writer is a listener and observer, discussing in his own mind the implications and audacities of all that he hears. He is especially disgusted at the rudeness of an egomaniacal woman writer who keeps alluding to the actor’s old age. The actor finally snaps and gives this woman a piece of his mind, an action that the writer finds stunning. While he originally had thought poorly of the actor, the actor starts speaking about how he’d like to live in the woods and be a woodcutter. For some reason, the writer finds this a lovely idea and he ends up liking the actor.

As the dinner party ends, the writer wants to be sure to leave alone. As a misanthrope, having company is one of the worst things he can imagine. He says polite and hypocritical goodbyes to his hosts creating his own self-loathing as he sees he is no better than those he criticizes for their false charms and graciousness. What he’d like to say to his hosts is that he hates them, that he has no idea why he came to this awful party, and that he hopes he doesn’t see them for another twenty or thirty years. However, he does not do this. He plays his role as polite guest and leaves in an almost manic mood. He walks and runs around the streets of Vienna alternately embracing and hating this city that is his, despite all its foibles.

For those of us who can embrace Bernhard’s unique style, he is a breath of fresh air. His writing has a post-modern feel to it as he examines everything as part of something else, yet everything having a separate and distinct context in its own right. Everything is connected and nothing touches anything else. We can wonder till the planets’ ends and still come up with more and more reasons for why any particular event, action, or thought exists. The last thing Bernhard would call himself is a philosopher, but despite his self-description, there is a lot of philosophizing going on in his book. (Translated from German by David McLintock.)

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-5-0from 8 readers
PUBLISHER: Vintage (August 10, 2010)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Thomas Bernhard

Wikipedia page on Thomas Bernhard
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Wittgenstein’s Nephew

Concrete

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

About:

]]> THE POST OFFICE GIRL by Stefan Zweig /2010/the-post-office-girl-by-stefan-zweig/ Mon, 20 Sep 2010 20:32:56 +0000 /?p=12280 Book Quote:

“And to think that it all turns on nothing but money, filthy, low-down, vile, despicable money. With a little money, two or three banknotes, I could have been among the blessed.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (SEP 20, 2010)

Christine Hoflehner, the postmistress in a small village in Austria, seems an unlikely Cinderella. Coming of age in the crippling poverty prevalent in Austria after the First World War, she is now twenty-six, barely holding out on her meager salary as a state employee, without social life, without future. But then a fairy godmother appears in the form of an aunt who has married well in America, who invites her to stay with them at a luxury hotel in the Swiss Alps. Once there, she lends her fashionable clothes, buys her expensive accessories, and takes her to a beauty salon to complete the transformation. Drab no longer, Christine is now the belle of the ball, courted by the rich and titled of several nations. It takes a week or more before her personal clock strikes midnight, but when it does and she flees home in shame, she can no longer be content with the humdrum life she had left behind. This becomes the story of a Cinderella after the ball, with no prince to appear with the glass slipper.

The book’s German title, added by the publisher, is RAUSCH DER VERWANDLUNG (The Intoxication of Transformation), suggesting the heady change that comes over Christine in her grand hotel, but also implying the disillusionment that must inevitably follow. This is the subject of Zweig’s second part, which was left unfinished at his death in 1942. I have to admit that I found the ending unexpectedly abrupt, though I did not feel unsatisfied. It seemed to leave the outcome open, even optimistic, rather than continuing the downward spiral that was probable in real life. After some months of depression, Christine meets a fellow spirit named Ferdinand, a wounded veteran of the War returning from extended captivity as a POW to find a country unwilling to make any use of his talents. Now bitterly aware of the social inequalities that surround them, Christine and Ferdinand conceive a plan to start their lives anew, and it is on this note of muted possibility that the book ends.

It is a weakness, I think, that the two parts of the book have such a very different tone. The opening, aided by a racy translation by Joel Rotenberg making ample use of twenties American slang, reads almost like F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is all action and excitement. Just listen to Zweig’s evocation of the Jazz Age: “But the diabolical music drives everything along, strongly syncopated, lurid, lively and spirited and yet rhythmically precise, with a pleasantly slashing ride cymbal, a soothing fiddle, and a jarring, kneading, pummeling beat, hard and propulsive. The musicians are tawny Argentineans in brown jackets with gold buttons, and they play like fiends, in fact they look like fiends, like liveried and festooned demons, and every one of them seemingly out of his head.” Anyone who has ever lived for even a day beyond their means in a luxury resort will feel Christine’s enchantment, and anybody who has merely looked in from the sidewalk will know her subsequent pain.

In the second part, I think more of Steinbeck. Action is mostly replaced by description, interior monologue, and (once Ferdinand comes on the scene) impassioned speeches about political inequality. This section tells us a great deal about the kind of social conditions that would provide a fertile seedbed for National Socialism only a few years later. But it makes a less exciting story. Perhaps if Zweig had written a third part, he would have answered the heady opening with high-speed adventure of a different kind. But it is difficult to imagine any upbeat ending to the misery of those interwar years, that would drive Zweig into exile, see his books burned, and give birth to another War. This book may be unfinished, but so was history. Even as it is, this is a novel that will first intoxicate you, then open your eyes to reality — sobering yet undeniably important. Its belated publication is very welcome.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 17 readers
PUBLISHER: NYRB Classics (April 15, 2008)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia on Stefan Zweig

Kirjasto on Stefan Zweig
EXTRAS: Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Another read from the past:

The Vera Wright Trilogy by Elizabeth Jolley

Partial Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

]]> WITTGENSTEIN’S NEPHEW by Thomas Bernhard /2009/wittgensteins-nephew-by-thomas-bernhard/ Tue, 22 Dec 2009 03:01:31 +0000 /?p=6915 Book Quote:

“Some Dutchman sitting by the window in a loud yellow pullover, essentially picking pellets of snot from his nose and believing himself unobserved, would at once inspire a blanket condemnation of everything pertaining to the Netherlands, which we suddenly felt we detested all our lives.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (DEC 21, 2009)

Thomas Bernhard is a wonderful wordsmith. He weaves his story in riffs like jazz motifs or the most beautiful of tapestries. In a tapestry, there may be repeat stitches but the colors and gauge change, the dynamic conspires to grow and become something else just as it is being created. Like a weaver or jazz musician, Bernhard repeats the essence of his message in many ways, giving the reader a marvelous opportunity to see into the protagonist’s mind. He is a natural story teller.

This book, originally published in 1982, is considered a novel but it is very autobiographical in nature. The novel opens up in 1967 in a Viennese hospital. It is about the author’s friendship with the nephew of the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ludwig’s nephew’s name is Paul and he is considered a madman, a “lunatic” in his day. He is also considered a great lover of opera and music, perhaps a bit of a dandy at times.

The story starts out as the author is recuperating in a hospital that has two pavilions, one for pulmonary patients and one for psychiatric patients. The author is in the pulmonary wing. He has just had a huge tumor removed from his thoracic region and is expected to die. Paul Wittgenstein is in the psychiatric unit for one of his regular stays. He suffers from an unnamed ailment but his relatives find him a burden and suspect he is harmful to others so they have him committed. The author is no friend of psychiatry. He states “Psychiatrists are the real demons of our age, going about their business with impunity and constrained by neither law nor conscience.”

Paul Wittgenstein was born to great wealth and prestige but used up all his money and now lives on the hand-outs of family and friends. He has a loyal wife who stands by him through thick and thin. The author is a writer who met Paul at a mutual friend’s home and they became “difficult” friends from the start. There was nothing they could not talk about, be it music, philosophy, literature, politics. Paul is an opera lover, a lover of music in general and also a lover of race car driving. He is a man of anomalies and paradoxes. In a sense, we learn much more about Paul in this book than we learn about the author. The book seems to be an homage to Paul and to a great friendship.

The author is appalled at the state of psychiatric care in Vienna. He believes that Paul is hospitalized to drain him of his life forces. Paul is given electro-convulsive therapy, medications, treatments and put in an environment designed to sap the life out of him. When he is as close to death as he can be, he is discharged until he gets sick again, usually in four or five months. The symptoms that plague Paul sound very much like manic depressive disorder – pressured speech, volatile moods, strange movements, serious depression, obvious mania, narcissism.

The story plays out in the author’s telling of multiple vignettes and thoughts about the nature of the friendship. He repeats aspects of the stories over and over in different words in order to get to the essence of what really was or what he truly believes. It is as if he is trying to reach the Platonic ideal of truth in his telling the story of his friendship with Paul. Some of the stories are tragic and others are laugh-out-loud funny. There is one vignette about the two of them driving hundreds of miles throughout Austria to find a particular newspaper. They can’t find it and determine that Austria is barbaric. It is like the country, not civilized urbanity. Both men hate the country.

The author discourses a lot about health and death. He has lived his life near death for a long time and compares death of the body to death of the spirit or mind. He resents healthy people who he feels are hypocrites and truly hate sick people.

Here are two men, both misanthropic and narcissistic, carrying on the grandest of activities together – going to literary ceremonies, award banquets, operas, sitting together at coffee houses. They ebb and flow in the friendship, always trying to stay on the other’s good side. Each is opinionated and difficult and the friendship is as different and wonderful as any I’ve read about.

Bernhard is a word weaver and he creates his book as an art form in itself. There are no paragraphs. The book slips as easily from idea to idea and story to story as an Olympic ice skater. One has to be able to relate to Bernhard’s style of writing. I certainly could. I loved the book and found myself completely entrenched in it.

Towards the end of his life, when Paul was dying, the author abandoned him. This book is his way to seek forgiveness for that, to pay homage to the great and difficult man that was his friend.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-5-0from 8 readers
PUBLISHER: Vintage (October 13, 2009)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Thomas Bernhard

Wikipedia page on Thomas Bernhard
EXTRAS: Kirjasto on Thomas Bernhard
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Also consider these republished authors:

Richard Yates

Lynn Sharon Schwartz

J. G. Farrell

Sandor Marai

Bibliography (only those translated to English):

Nonfiction:

About:

]]>