Thomas Bernhard's Meine Preise

[Viva June]

A "new" book by Thomas Bernhard was recently published in Germany. It looks like this:

Meine Preise (My Awards) was written in 1980 and approved by Bernhard for publication in 1989, the year of his death, but somehow it just never materialised until now. Nowhere in the editor's commentary is the reason for the delay explained (did it have something to do with the famous will?), so I suppose we just have to be grateful that the book did eventually appear.

I had only read one of Bernhard's books, Wittgenstein's Nephew, before attempting Meine Preise. It just so happens that the two were written around the same time and have a lot in common: Meine Preise contains nine brief reminiscences, each describing one of the many occasions on which Bernhard suffered the indignity of having a literary award as well as a large sum of money bestowed upon him by some swinish philistine, and at least two of these reminiscences also appear in partial form in Wittgenstein's Nephew. If you have read that novel, you know what to expect: comic descriptions of absurd events, tirades against the cultural establishment in Vienna and elsewhere, vicious asides ("honour is a perversion, in the entire world there is no honour")—all of this Meine Preise has in spades, but it also offers understated and quite moving portraits of people whom Bernhard happened to like (his "aunt" first and foremost). The book also includes some speeches given by Bernhard on various occasions, all of them rather short but very interesting.

A full review in English can be found here.

Edit: An English translation is scheduled to appear in November!

 

[1kgGehacktesBitte]

Yes, I own a copy of this one, and I have to say, that Bernhard can sometimes be a hilarious prose writer. He had a special kind of wit in his vocabulary, in a way that seems very serious at the same time. And he wrote one of the greates and saddest autobiography I have ever read. With sentences, that take almost a hole page. I love this man and I can recommend for the German readers the Book by the German critic Reich-Ranicki on Bernhard!

 

[waffles]

Just saw a review of the English translation in the New York Times

Book Review - 'My Prizes' and 'Prose' by Thomas Bernhard - NYTimes.com

 

[gveranon]

From "The Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen" in My Prizes by Thomas Bernhard (trans. Carol Brown Janeway):


. . . It was not the prize itself that saved me from my emotional, indeed my existential catastrophe, it was the thought that the prize money of ten thousand marks would enable me to get my life under control, give it a radical new direction, make it possible again. The prize was announced, the amount of the prize was known to me already. I had the chance to do the most sensible thing with the money. It had always been my wish to have a house to myself, and even if not a proper house, at least walls around me within which I can do what I want, permit what I want, lock myself in if I want. So I thought, I'll use the prize money to get these walls and I made contact with a real estate agent who immediately came to see me in Sankt Veit and proposed various properties to me. . . .

[skipping a couple of pages]

. . . he [the real estate agent] didn't say a single word, came to a sudden stop and indicated that we were to get out. And I actually saw a huge wall in front of me in the fog, built of great blocks of stone. The real estate agent moved a large gate that had been torn off its hinges and we went into a big farmyard. There was also more than three feet of snow in the farmyard. It looked as if the owners of the property had departed in a rush, leaving everything lying or standing where it was. I thought: the owners have met with some great misfortune. The property had been standing empty for a year, said the real estate agent, and went ahead of us. In every room we stepped into, he said this was a particularly beautiful room and he kept repeating the words exceptional proportions and it didn't bother him in the slightest that at every moment he was putting a foot through one of the rotted floors and had to rescue himself from the depths of the rot with a well-executed jump. The real estate agent led the way. I followed behind him and my aunt behind me. We went through the rooms as if we were walking along planks that we needed to cross some dull fetid pond, sometimes I looked around for my aunt, who turned out however to be very agile, even more agile than me and the real estate agent. There were eleven or twelve rooms to inspect, all of them in totally dilapidated condition and the smell of hundreds if not thousands, I thought, of desiccated ancient mice and rats filled the air. All the floors were rotted through, completely punky and most of the window frames had been torn out by the wind or the weather. Down in the kitchen, where there was a large rusting enameled stove encrusted in dirt, the water had not been turned off and water was running onto the floor and under the floor and the real estate agent said the owners, who'd left the house a year ago, had forgotten to turn off the tap and he went over to the tap and turned it off. He himself, he said, had never inspected the property before this, we were the first he'd shown it to, he was enchanted by the exceptional proportions. My aunt held a handkerchief in front of her mouth to block the stench that pervaded the property, not only the smell of rot, the stalls were full of enormous heaps of manure which the owners had not cleared away. The real estate agent kept saying exceptional proportions and the more often he asserted this, the clearer it became to me that he was right, in the end it wasn't him saying the property had exceptional proportions, it was me saying it, and saying it at every moment. I kept working myself up to say exceptional proportions at briefer and briefer intervals until finally I was convinced that the entire property really did have exceptional proportions. From one moment to the next, I had been possessed by the entire property and when we were outside the gate again, to drive to the next one and the real estate agent was now hurrying, for we still had ten or twelve properties ahead of us to be inspected, I said that all these properties no longer interested me, I had already found the property for me: it was this one, for it had truly exceptional proportions, they were ideal for me and I wished to conclude the requisite contract with the real estate agent immediately. . . .