Product Description

Playwright, novelist, and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) gives us one of his most darkly comic works. A series of parable-like anecdotes--some drawn from newspaper reports, some from conversation, some even from hearsay--this satire portrays an ordinary world careening into absurdity and disaster.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #300813 in Books
• Published on: 1998-10-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 114 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780226044026
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
The work of late Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard was no one's idea of an uplifting read. Given to writing mostly dense, bleak, darkly comic, one-paragraph novels such as The Loser, Bernhard has rarely received the audience he deserves. The Voice Imitator, while unlikely to change this basic fact, does give us Bernhard's singularly pessimistic worldview in perhaps more digestible little chunks--some of them very little, indeed. (Here is the entirety of the short story "Mail": "For years after our mother's death, the Post Office still delivered letters that were addressed to her. The Post Office had taken no notice of her death.")

In fact, none of the 104 stories collected here are longer than a page--and with the tremendous variety of disaster and tragedy they contain (e.g., suicide, disappearance, murder, madness, corruption), there's not much room for characterization or plot. These read more like fragments, anecdotes, or snippets of news stories than conventional short narratives. Despite their brevity, however, these stories display all the signature elements of the Bernhardian oeuvre: cynicism, misanthropy, contempt for his native country, and withering scorn for the futility of all human effort. They might be an acquired taste--but one with undeniable force. With his black humor, deadly satire, and loathing for bureaucracy, Bernhard is the spiritual heir of writers such as Kafka, Grass, and Beckett--perhaps on a very bad day.

From Library Journal
Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet Bernhard (Extinction, LJ 8/95) created this collection of 104 one-page stories to portray the everyday ironies that for him make life absurd. The vignettes cover suicides, painful deaths, surprises, disappearances, lunacy, character attacks, and other topics. One story tells of a geography teacher, tormented by his pupils, committing suicide and leaving everything to them, hoping for their forgiveness. The shocking gallows humor is reminiscent of the "News from the Weird" syndicated newspaper column. Though the stories are brief, the sentences, true to the original German, are long?one has 125 words. This nontraditional collection will do best in academic libraries.?Ann Irvine, Montgomery Cty. P.L., Md.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
The Voice Imitator, a collection of 104 one-page short stories, proffers its ironies with a blank, journalistic tone. A great comic actor throws himself off a cliff; a man is committed to an insane asylum for suggesting that Goethe's last words were "no more" rather than "more light"; monkeys in a city zoo offer food to the zoo's visitors. Some of the stories seem more indicative than narrative, like facts in a case Bernhard builds for a skeptical world view. The stories repeatedly suggest that the world does not reward its inhabitants for their survival; instead, society punishes them or they punish themselves. And the phrase "in the nature of things," which appears and reappears as a link between the odd events described and a more ordinary status quo beyond the book's reach, signifies less with each repetition. Sometimes the tales Bernhard tells are unsettling reminders of the individual's insecure anchor-hold in the universe; other stories blend dry wit with absurdity. This volume, palatable and brief, should serve as a feasible introduction to the rest of Bernhard's work.
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved. -- From The Boston Review

Bernhard (1931-1989) seems to have never met a person he didn't hate or consider a hollow purveyor of the moral lassitude he saw as inherent to modern life. His anger against hypocrisy, corruption and, most of all, Austria ... penetrates the page like acid applied to a copper plate. -- The New York Times Book Review, Peter Filkins

Customer Reviews

Thomas Bernhard's Most Accessible Book
I'm pleased that this book is finally in print by a serious publisher. These are amazingly everyday stories, like we hear on the 11:00 news. A bus of school children goes off the road and into a ravine. What event years later would make a town recall this event?Two men look through a telescope over a glacier. One of them drops dead, and the other one lives after having looked through the same lens.On and one, these 104 short stories work on you, as the language grows more complex and compelling.

haunting and strangely amusing
these stories stick like a long, thin, glass splinter in your core. bernhard tools scenes from the everyday, but they're not simply everyday occurences. he seems to tap into the same magical realm that garcia lorca does in his ability to write terse, packed prose that somehow floats above its literal meaning. they are tiny details and instances set briefly side-by-side as if in a complex still-life whose parts are disparate but make sense together, somehow.
in The Voice Imitator, bernhard gets to you. you can take it in little doses or all at once, but in the end, you'll be grinning and you won't know why.

A bleak worldview that you can't escape, nor should you try
Thomas Bernhard has a very dark and cynical view on the human condition, yet the very short (each contained by a single page) stories of The Voice Imitator are engrossing; and, this book is impossible to put down until you finish the entirety of the collection.

The Voice Imitator is not for everyone (depressives should steer clear by a few miles), but it is also more than a pessimistic trail of Bernhard's moldy breadcrumbs. The skill that he demonstrates in telling a complete story in as few of words as possible is masterful. Devoid of plot, these stories are more like voyeuristic glimpses into the intimate and horrible moments of a life. This book will do more than satisfy your morbid curiosity, it will turn you to introspection and to examine your soul.

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A Guide to my Book Rating System:

1 star = The wood pulp would have been better utilized as toilet paper.
2 stars = Don't bother, clean your bathroom instead.
3 stars = Wasn't a waste of time, but it was time wasted.
4 stars = Good book, but not life altering.
5 stars = This book changed my world in at least some small way.