Prose (Seagull Books - Seagull World Literature)
"This newly translated collection of Thomas Bernhard’s prose,Prose,should be welcomed as a major event in contemporary letters. Most of these stories, in classic Bernhard fashion, take as their subject a failure who will not fail, a madman who will not go mad, an impossible suicide—a suicide always reverting back to what the 'I,' the voice which insists itself, can or would do—has, would have, or will have done. Translator Martin Chalmers renders Bernhard’s German with poetic precision, and without missing any earmarks of the latter’s dense and rich writing style: sentences which wind around themselves, and which constantly, in multiform ways, miss and re-encounter their subjects—which are always ending and beginning again, repeating or forgetting themselves. Each one of the seven stories inProseshimmers with the shadow contained in—and containing—any one of Bernhard’s novels."—Faster Times(Alec NiedenthalFaster Times)