Prose

Prose, seven stories by Thomas Bernhard, was first published in German in 1967 and is now appearing in English for the first time. Written at the same time as Bernhard's early novels "Frost", "Gargoyles", and "The Lime Works", and they display the same obsessions, restlessness, and disarming mastery of language. The narrators of these stories lack the strength to do anything but listen and then write, the reader in turn becoming a captive listener, deciphering the traps laid by memory - and the mere words, the never-ending words with which we try to pin it down. Words that are always close to driving the narrator crazy, yet, as Bernhard writes, 'not completely crazy'.