Thomas Bernhard is my go-to author when I need to read a Thomas Bernhard novel. That is to say, I've developed a taste for Thomas Bernhard. Just as in classical music I sometimes have a sudden aching desire that only hearing a Bruckner symphony can satisfy, I'm now periodically subject to the odd, fierce, undeniable Bernhard craving.

Seated in my wingchair, I found Woodcutters screamingly funny. The narrator protagonist, is the ultimate early mid-century Viennese shaky, pretentious, breathlessly non-stop failed musician/composer's ego who hates his oldest friends even more than they hate him. A more acidic send-up of an artificial society you will be unlikely to find. A caveat, though: after finishing this you may find yourself having purchased your own wingchair and sitting and sitting in it as your mind's most insistently claustrophobic, neurotic loop tape plays and plays and plays. ( )

Elkin's synopsis is correct: "The 'late style' is an unraveled 'middle style'," though he is mistaken to count as flaw that the narrator, though he is narrowly Bernhard himself, does not engage in discussion with others at the so-called Artistic Dinner as Person of Interest.

The Bernhardian narrator is literally Invisible i.e. DOES NOT REFLECT. This is essential, and clearest in his works which double back to reflect upon the original speaker e.g. Correction in which the pulmonary invalid disappears entirely.

This is a love story, but also possibly Bernhard's least successful work. ( )

> Esprit, No. 135 (2) (Février 1988), pp. 135-138 : https://www.jstor.org/stable/24469124 (Première page)
> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Bernhard-Des-arbres-a-abattre/6348
> BAnQ (Le devoir, 23 janv. 1988) : https://collections.banq.qc.ca/ark:/52327/2761340

It says something about modernity that Austria chose to ban this Bernhard novel, the one that ends (spoiler alert, but really, this is a Bernhard novel, and you're not reading for plot) with a (for Bernhard) grand affirmation of the worthwhileness of human and specifically Viennese existence, to wit, everything is worth hating, but everything is also worth loving.

Austria, c'est nous: more worried about being personally offended than about rampant nihilism.

That aside, this is great. Not quite the stylistic brilliance of The Loser, but very good. I occasionally worry about diminishing returns with Tommy, but so far so good. It helps that he mocks people who claim to be interested in Wittgenstein:

"That Joana should commit suicide was the last thing they would have expected, the Auersbergers had said in the Graben, and before rushing off with all their parcels they told me that they had bought *everything by Ludwig Wittgenstein*, so that they could *immerse themselves in Wittgenstein during the coming weeks.* They've probably got Wittgenstein in the smallest parcel, I thought, the one dangling from her right arm."

I imagine that they, like so many readers of Wittgenstein, will both be ravished by his construction of the ideal logical system, outlining everything that can possibly be said in philosophy, which turns out to be nothing, and thus leaves philosophers with nothing to do--and thrilled by his belated recognition that that probably wasn't the case, nor is such a thing possible, and that academic philosophers should stop thinking it is. They will be ravished and thrilled despite not being academic philosophers.

Sigh. ( )

Bosco, bosco ad alto fusto, a colpi d'ascia ( )