The Loser

Mid-century Austria. Three aspiring concert pianists - Wertheimer, Glenn Gould, and the narrator - have dedicated their lives to achieving the status of a virtuoso. But one day, two of them overhear Gould playing Bach's GOLDBERG VARIATIONS, and his incomparable genius instantly destroys them both. They are forced to abandon their musical ambitions: Wertheimer, over a tortured process of disintegration that sees him becoming obsessed with both writing and his own sister, with whom he has a quasi-incestuous relationship culminating in death; and the narrator, instantly, retreating into obscurity to write a book that he periodically destroys and restarts. Written as a monologue in one remarkable unbroken paragraph, Thomas Bernhard's dazzling meditation on failure, genius, and fame is a radical new reading experience: musical, paralysing, raging, and inimitable. [From Amazon.] In 1953 three friends, among whom is the later to be famous Glenn Gould, study with Horowitz. Rarely sleeping, hardly eating, they burn intensely with the flame of ambition. Gould achieves success, while the two others renounce their ambition in strikingly different ways Thomas Bernhard ; Translated From The German By Jack Dawson ; Afterword By Mark M. Anderson. Translation Of: Der Untergeher.