I've been meaning to read Thomas Bernhard for quite a while. His reputation as a difficult, formal, and unpleasant writer made me expect deliciously corrosive misanthropy along the lines of Schopenhauer or his fellow Austrian (film director) Michael Haneke. The cover of The Loser refers to its "obsessive, witty, and self-mocking narrator" –– catnip to my ears!
Alas, I didn't find the narrative voice witty, compulsive or "outrageously cantankerous." And since the narrative voice is pretty much all there is to the book, I never engaged with it. Everything I'd heard about Bernhard made me expect to love his work, or to be challenged by it; instead I was bored by it.
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