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Thomas Bernhard
Dec. 28th, 2010 07:18 pmWho among you has read him? Dale Peck in the NYT book review says his writing is the most significant achievement since World War Two.
He firmly categorizes it in what he calls the punk tradition, which he traces back to Cervantes or to, perhaps, Achilles, up through Sterne and Tristam Shandy, Dostoevsky's underground man (much cited by my hero, the Marxist Marshall Berman), Knut Hamsun.
It is the flipside of the mainstream or democratic trad, he writes, from the Iliad to Freedom. Without as much as breathing a word of it, he stands Bernhard and his greatest achievement since World War Two against the shockingly Heepish obsequies of Tanenhaus in the same publication on the occasion of the publication of Freedom.
Which the more I think about it, the more I think it is warmed-over undead suburban adultery lit, so beloved by Shawn of the New Yorker, for, uh, personal reasons, that the essentially naughty whiteboy narratives of Cheever and Updike were alleged, for 60 years, to be American literature. I mean, who gives a damn?
Who has read Thomas Bernhard (a close and superior relative, Peck avers, to Bolano [TILDE] who I know at least one of you punks out there loves)? And what do you recommend?
He firmly categorizes it in what he calls the punk tradition, which he traces back to Cervantes or to, perhaps, Achilles, up through Sterne and Tristam Shandy, Dostoevsky's underground man (much cited by my hero, the Marxist Marshall Berman), Knut Hamsun.
It is the flipside of the mainstream or democratic trad, he writes, from the Iliad to Freedom. Without as much as breathing a word of it, he stands Bernhard and his greatest achievement since World War Two against the shockingly Heepish obsequies of Tanenhaus in the same publication on the occasion of the publication of Freedom.
Which the more I think about it, the more I think it is warmed-over undead suburban adultery lit, so beloved by Shawn of the New Yorker, for, uh, personal reasons, that the essentially naughty whiteboy narratives of Cheever and Updike were alleged, for 60 years, to be American literature. I mean, who gives a damn?
Who has read Thomas Bernhard (a close and superior relative, Peck avers, to Bolano [TILDE] who I know at least one of you punks out there loves)? And what do you recommend?
