A Thomas Bernhard novel would feel like a singular reading experience, had I not read two in a row. The Loser overlaps so heavily in style, substance, theme, and even detail with Wittgenstein’s Nephew that I felt somewhat disoriented; Wittgenstein’s Nephew was supposed to be the autobiographical one, and The Loser, I assumed, the work of some old fashioned fiction. But both fact and fiction are drawing from the same well.
The narrator of The Loser once set his sights on becoming a piano virtuoso, but arrives at the brink of such an achievement in the company of none other than Glenn Gould, real life “most important piano virtuoso of the century” and decides there is little point in even trying. He sells his piano and begins a twenty-seven year “deterioration process”. His friend Wertheimer did likewise only to go as far as to ultimately commit suicide. It’s a little intense.
At least there is the afterward so at least I could reorient myself with the fact that Bernhard himself had spent time pursuing his own “piano radicalism”, studying at the Musik-Akademie in Vienna, and in terms of age was a close contemporary of Gould. The afterword explains that the novel is a love story, which I think is the kind of ironic take that is both enlightening and obviously too cute. I also discovered the following paragraph:
In a way, what Bernhard says about art in The Loser is what stopwatches say about sport: there are winners and there are losers. He scratches at Austria’s dark history but does not say: there are stringer and more gifted specimens of humanity. However, he situates his three music students in a house once occupied by a Nazi sculptor. He has Gould laugh and laugh and hurl a bottle of champagne at the head of one of the artist’s remaining marble hulks. There is a contrapuntal Mobius strip of the `idealized’ at work here. Bernhard does not appear to believe in winners — certainly not the triumphal kind.
Afterword to The Loser — Leanne Shapton
Contrapuntal means for something to be in counterpoint. In music, this takes the form of two or more independent melodic lines. I Googled it. I did not have to Google what a Mobius strip is because I am a mathematician with a specialization in topology. I have been places with Mobius strips, but I have no idea what the fuck that sentence means. You can remove the sentence from the paragraph and then it becomes clear that there is some bridge missing from the first half of the paragraph to the conclusion being reached in the rest of the paragraph. If that Mobius strip sentence is supposed to be that bridge, you would think I — of all people — might have some intuitive sense of how the bridge offered could be traversed. And I guess everyone else involved in the process that brought the paragraph to the press, to the page, to the bookstore, and into my hands in Vienna simply assumed it made sense. How the fuck can a Mobius strip be contrapuntal?