Thomas Bernhard is “one of the masters of contemporary European fiction” (George Steiner); “one of the century’s most gifted writers” (Newsday); “a virtuoso of rancor and rage” (Bookforum). And although he is favorably compared with Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Robert Musil, it is only in recent years that he has gained a devoted cult following in America.
A powerful, compact novella, Walking provides a perfect introduction to the absurd, dark, and uncommonly comic world of Bernhard, showing a preoccupation with themes—illness and madness, isolation, tragic friendships—that would obsess Bernhard throughout his career. Walking records the conversations of the unnamed narrator and his friend Oehler while they walk, discussing anything that comes to mind but always circling back to their mutual friend Karrer, who has gone irrevocably mad. Perhaps the most overtly philosophical work in Bernhard’s highly philosophical oeuvre, Walking provides a penetrating meditation on the impossibility of truly thinking.
Industry Reviews
"Walking is indispensible Bernhard, a novella that can go toe to toe with his finest novels. At a brisk eighty-six pages, it's also a great entry point for readers who haven't yet made time for Bernhard. All of his obsessions and stylistic mannerisms--the things that make Bernhard Bernhard--are on full display here. . . . As is usual with Bernhard, the ceaseless pessimism is actually very comic, and as Oehler and the narrator continue to state positions on the slow death of intellectualism and thinking, the narrative ramps toward one of the greatest moments in all of literature, . . . eighteen pages of brutal hilarity."-- "Rain Taxi Review of Books"
"In Walking, we see burgeoning signs of one of the most distinct literary voices of the twentieth century. . . . A small treasure."-- "Rain Taxi"
"It is with Walking, worth the price of admission, that we understand how Bernhard's writing, a writing constantly struggling against, is a consistent, desperate, humorous, bitter, and all-too-human attempt to keep from going under."-- "Review of Contemporary Fiction"
"Our precious individual lives, we discover, are only a symptom of a swirling, uncentered excess of thought in which we lose our direction and identity. We lose ourselves into madness, we find, not at the end of reason's course but in the infinity between two beats of reason's clock. It is Bernhard's genius to be able to make this revelation darkly, but giddily, humorous. Kenneth J. Northcott's translation brilliantly renders the drama of this piece, which reads like a soliloquy revealing the complex inner tides constituting an individual psyche. . . . Uncompromising."-- "Chicago Tribune"
"There's very little peace to be found within the minds of the characters of Austrian author Bernhard's celebrated philosophical novella Walking. It's not the easiest of reads--an account of the conversations between the unnamed narrator and his friend and walking companion Oehler, the two men's discussion inevitably drawn back to that of the fate of a mutual friend of theirs, Karrer, who recently went mad and is now in an asylum--but there's an absurd humour lurking between the lines."--Lucy Scholes "Independent (UK)"
