The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Three Novellas: Amras, Playing Watten, Walking, by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Peter Jansen and Kenneth J. Northcott
reviewed by Jeffrey DeShell

Untitled document

Thomas Bernhard. Three Novellas: Amras, Playing Watten, Walking. Trans. Peter Jansen and Kenneth J. Northcott. Foreword Brian Evanson. Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003. 174 pp. $25.00.

This volume is a welcome addition to the translated oeuvre of one of this century’s most important and celebrated (outside the U.S.) writers. As Brian Evanson argues in his intelligent and perceptive forward, we can see many of Bernhard’s topics and techniques developed in miniature in these novellas, from the themes of madness, suicide, and philosophical speculation to the stylistic techniques of unparagraphed prose, obsessive repetition, and an emphasis on the musicality of language. For readers already familiar with Bernhard’s work, these new translations are a valuable complement to the novels and plays, for here one may more easily trace the movement from the more expansive experimentation of Amras, through a sort of “middle passage” of Playing Watten, to the stylistic breakthrough into the crystallized obsession of Walking (published a mere two years after Playing Watten). For new readers of Bernhard, however, I’m not sure that this volume would be the best of introductions. Amras, which details the confinement of two brothers who survive a suicide pact in which their parents have died, is narrated by one of the brothers and is composed of letters, journal entries, his sibling’s scribblings, and other fragments. The prose remains disjointed, uneven, and ultimately perplexing. The novella lacks the distillation and purity of the later works and even seems to be missing the humor and lyrical music of the novel Gargoyles (1967); it finally seems more of a Gothic grotesque than a major or important work. In Playing Watten—the story of a morphine-abusing doctor who refuses to play his weekly game of cards after the suicide of one of the players—we see a transition from disjointed fractions or unfinished fragments to unbroken, unparagraphed prose, with longer, somewhat repetitive sentences. It is finally with Walking, however, that Bernhard’s writing comes into its own. We have the familiar acerbic meditations on art, madness, philosophy, and suicide, here in the context of two friends taking a walk. This novella, a fine introduction to Wittgenstein, contains one of the best encapsulations of Bernhard’s aesthetics and ontology: “The art of existing against the facts, says Oehler, is the most difficult. . . . If we do not constantly exist against, but only constantly with the facts, says Oehler, we shall go under in the shortest possible space of time.” It is with Walking, worth the price of admission, that we understand how Bernhard’s writing, a writing constantly struggling against, is a consistent, desperate, humorous, bitter, and all-too-human attempt to keep from going under.


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Three Novellas: Amras, Playing Watten, Walking, by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Peter Jansen and Kenneth J. Northcott reviewed by Jeffrey DeShell Untitled document Thomas Bernhard. Three Novellas: Amras, Playing Watten, Walking. Trans. Peter Jansen and Kenneth J. Northcott. Foreword Brian Evanson. Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003. 174 pp. $25.00. This volume is a welcome addition to the translated oeuvre of one of this century’s most important and celebrated (outside the U.S.) writers. As Brian Evanson argues in his intelligent and perceptive forward, we can see many of Bernhard’s topics and techniques developed in miniature in these novellas, from the themes of madness, suicide, and philosophical speculation to the stylistic techniques of unparagraphed prose, obsessive repetition, and an emphasis on the musicality of language. For readers already familiar with Bernhard’s work, these new translations are a valuable complement to the novels and plays, for here one may more easily trace the movement from the more expansive experimentation of Amras, through a sort of “middle passage” of Playing Watten, to the stylistic breakthrough into the crystallized obsession of Walking (published a mere two years after Playing Watten). For new readers of Bernhard, however, I’m not sure that this volume would be the best of introductions. Amras, which details the confinement of two brothers who survive a suicide pact in which their parents have died, is narrated by one of the brothers and is composed of letters, journal entries, his sibling’s scribblings, and other fragments. The prose remains disjointed, uneven, and ultimately perplexing. The novella lacks the distillation and purity of the later works and even seems to be missing the humor and lyrical music of the novel Gargoyles (1967); it finally seems more of a Gothic grotesque than a major or important work. In Playing Watten—the story of a morphine-abusing doctor who refuses to play his weekly game of cards after the suicide of one of the players—we see a transition from disjointed fractions or unfinished fragments to unbroken, unparagraphed prose, with longer, somewhat repetitive sentences. It is finally with Walking, however, that Bernhard’s writing comes into its own. We have the familiar acerbic meditations on art, madness, philosophy, and suicide, here in the context of two friends taking a walk. This novella, a fine introduction to Wittgenstein, contains one of the best encapsulations of Bernhard’s aesthetics and ontology: “The art of existing against the facts, says Oehler, is the most difficult. . . . If we do not constantly exist against, but only constantly with the facts, says Oehler, we shall go under in the shortest possible space of time.” It is with Walking, worth the price of admission, that we understand how Bernhard’s writing, a writing constantly struggling against, is a consistent, desperate, humorous, bitter, and all-too-human attempt to keep from going under.

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