The Piano Teacher, the most famous novel of Elfriede Jelinek, who was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a shocking, searing, aching portrait of a woman bound between a repressive society …
It is 1967. In separate wings of a Viennese hospital, two men lie bedridden. The narrator, Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of the celebrated philosopher Ludwi…
Quel est le destin d’une ouvrière, ou plutôt comment échapper à son destin quand on est ouvrière ? Le plus simple : le mariage. Encore faut-il choisir avec circonspection son futur époux et se garder …
Instead of the book he's meant to write, Rudolph, a Viennese musicologist, produces this tale of procrastination, failure, and despair, a dark and grotesquely funny story of small woes writ large and …
Roithamer, a character based on Wittgenstein, has committed suicide having been driven to madness by his own frightening powers of pure thought. We witness the gradual breakdown of a genius ceaselessl…
This controversial portrayal of Viennese artistic circles begins as the writer-narrator arrives at an 'artistic dinner' given by a composer and his society wife—a couple that the writer once admired b…
Old Masters (subtitled A Comedy) is a novel by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, which was first published in 1985. It tells of the life and opinions of Reger, a ‘musical philosopher’, through the …
G.H., a well-to-do Rio sculptress, enters the room of her maid, which is as clear and white 'as in an insane asylum from which dangerous objects have been removed'. There she sees a cockroach - black,…
Set in postwar Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy’s eerily beautiful novel begins simply and innocently enough: "At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell." But there is nothing truly simple or …
“ The German Lesson marks a double triumph––a book of rare depth and brilliance, to begin with, presented in an English version that succeeds against improbable odds in conveying the full power of the…
