'Woodcutters' by Thomas Bernhard

The narrator, a writer recently returned to Vienna after two decades overseas, attends an ‘artistic dinner’ given by a bourgeois couple he was once close to, in honour of a distinguished actor. In the first half of the book, the narrator sits mostly silently in a wing chair as the company awaits the actor’s arrival, and experiences a vitriolic fugue of invective against his hosts, their behaviour past and present, their associates and everything they think and do and say and represent. That afternoon, the narrator, the hosts and the majority of the guests had attended the funeral of Joana, with whom the narrator had once had a close affinity, who had failed to make any sort of artistic impact in Vienna and had fallen into years of alcoholism and despair that led eventually to her suicide. The narrator’s stream of invective, which is both razor-sharp and frequently very funny, could be seen as a subconscious strategy of avoiding thinking of Joana’s death, as an outlet for his anger at a milieu that allows one of its members to descend to suicide, and, not least, as an indirect expression of his nauseation at everything to do with himself, his past and, in particular, his unacknowledgeable shortcomings in his relationship with Joana. As always in Bernhard, all loathing is primarily self-loathing and only secondarily loathing of the world as it is distilled in the loather. The strongest statements are the most unstable: in the second half of the book, when the loathed actor arrives and the dinner progresses, the narrator’s extreme opinions run up against their objects outside his head and undergo disconcerting reversals leading to a highly unsettling end. Woodcutters is one of Bernhard’s finest and most incisive books, and a good one to start with if you haven’t read him before.

(February 2014)