Tag: Thomas Bernhard

Review: The Lime Works by Thomas Bernhard

The Lime Works [1970/86] – ★★★★

“I am interested only in “nonsense”; only in that which makes no practical sense. I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestations.”Daniil Kharms

“The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.” Albert Camus

The Lime Works is a slowly suffocating narrative with a cobweb-like structure, inside which one can find both a spider (“monster”), Konrad, a man with peculiar obsessions, and its caught wrapped prey (“victim”), Konrad’s loyal, but disabled wife Zryd. Both have moved into a very expansive, but, paradoxically, also claustrophobic lime works in the town of Sicking, Austria, and have lived there in relative seclusion. Konrad’s sole purpose in life has revolved around his strange auditory experiments with which he pesters his wife incessantly so that his dream materialises – the finishing of his book titled The Sense of Hearing. He fantasises about the conclusion of this task even as he is still to write the book’s first sentence. Then comes the horrifying murder. What happened, and how the man with such abundant academic ambition living apparently peacefully could have gone so wrong? The writing, with its restlessness and peculiarly Bernhardian anxiety, crafts a tale of obsession, expectation and one quiet, horrifying descend into madness.

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Mini-Reviews: Bernhard’s Woodcutters, & Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K

Woodcutters [1984] by Thomas Bernhard – ★★★★

In this unusual, but pretty much in line with Bernhard’s style, story, our narrator does not know how exactly he ended up where he is now – in a wing chair at the apartment of one aristocratic married couple, the Auersbergers. The last time he was there, some thirty years previously, he was still in love with everything that the Auersbergers represented, everything artistic. Now, however, some thirty years on, he again finds himself in their house as their “old friend”, but now despises everything about his hosts. The reason he is there in the first place is that he stumbled upon the rich couple on the street, and the death of their mutual friend Joana, brought them all to the same funeral. Now that he accepted their dinner invitation and sits in his comfy wing chair, his mind goes back to the past, as he tries to recall where he met the Auersbergers and Joana, a country girl, who once aspired to be an actress or a ballerina, but whose only claim to fame was her eventual marriage to celebrated tapestry weaver Fritz, who then left her.

Continue reading “Mini-Reviews: Bernhard’s Woodcutters, & Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K” →