Gargoyles (Phoenix Fiction S.) - Softcover

Thomas Bernhard

3.93

2,513 ratings by Goodreads

9780226043999: Gargoyles (Phoenix Fiction S.)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226043991 ISBN 13: 9780226043999

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1986

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Early one morning a doctor sets out with his son on his daily rounds through the forbidding mountainous countryside. Their visits, a succession of grotesque portraits a diabetic industrialist living in incestuous isolation with his half-sister; three brothers, occupying a mill set in a deep gorge, who have just strangled a bevy of exotic birds; a crippled musical prodigy whose sister locks him in a cage lead them to a castle and a paranoid prince, whose "almost uninterrupted monologue for a hundred pages is a virtuoso verbal performance . . . [in] an extraordinary, somber first novel." A.C. Foote, "Book World" "What he shares with the best of [writers such as Sartre, Camus, Mann, and Kafka] is the ability to extract more than utter gloom from his landscape of inconceivable devastation. While the external surface of life is unquestionably grim, he somehow suggests more the mystic element in experience that calls for symbolic interpretation; the inner significance of states that are akin to surrealistic dream-worlds; man's yearning for health, compassion, sanity." Robert Maurer, "The Saturday Review" "The feeling grows that Thomas Bernhard is now the most original, concentrated novelist writing in German. His connections . . . with the great constellation of Kafka, Musil, and Broch become ever clearer." George Steiner, "Times Literary Supplement" "

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Review:

"Here is a novelist with uncommon talents of a sort possessed by Kafka, Musil, and Beckett." --Saturday Review"Extraordinary . . . a virtuoso verbal performance." --Book World"The feeling grows that Thomas Bernhard is the most original, concentrated novelist writing in German. His connections...with the great constellation of Kafka, Musil, and Broch become ever clearer." --George Steiner, The Times Literary Supplement

About the Author:

THOMAS BERNHARD was born in Holland in 1931 and grew up in Austria. He studied music at the Akademie Mozarteum in Salzburg. In 1957 he began a second career, as a playwright, poet, and novelist. The winner of the three most distinguished and coveted literary prizes awarded in Germany, he has become one of the most widely translated and admired writers of his generation. His novels published in English include Gargoyles, The Lime Works, Correction, Concrete, Woodcutters, and Wittgenstein's Nephew; a number of his plays have been produced off Broadway, at the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, and at theaters in London and throughout Europe. The five segments of his memoir were published in one volume, Gathering Evidence, in 1985. Thomas Bernhard died in 1989.

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