Volume 54, Number 1 · January 11, 2007
The Genius of Bad News
By Tim Parks
Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian
by Gitta Honegger
Yale University Press, 341 pp., $35.00
Frost
by Thomas Bernhard, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann
Knopf, 352 pp., $25.95
The many novels and plays of Thomas Bernhard, at his death in 1989 Austria's most prominent and controversial writer, achieve their full impact and are properly understood only within the context of the author's native culture and language. Such is the persuasive argument of Gitta Honegger's biography, Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian. But where does this assessment leave those of us whose grasp of Austrian history is shaky, those who are unable to tackle the original German? Is our sense of his importance to us the fruit of a misunderstanding?
Review, 5297 words
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