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cage—coping with physical misery, madness, and the brutality of the austere landscape. But when they meet the insomniac Prince Saurau in his castle at
Hochgobernitz, his solitary, stationary mind takes over the rest of the novel in an uninterrupted obsessive paragraph. It's a hundred-page monologue by an eccentric, paranoid man, a relentlessly flowing cascade of words that is classic Bernhard: the furious logorrhea is a mesmeric rant, completing the stylistic formation of his art of exaggeration, where he uses metaphors of physical and mental illness to explore the decay of his homeland.
290:"My sisters but also my daughters always try to keep me going by fraudulent means, deceptions major and minor, but especially through one scandalous ruse: their attention. Each basically knows," he said, "that the world will collapse if I am suddenly not here anymore. If I lose interest and have myself laid out in the summer cottage. Plan to have myself laid out in the summer cottage like my father. A dead father," he said, "really instils fear. Often I think for hours on end of nothing but the mailman. The mail has got to come, I think. Mail! Mail! Mail!
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fear of his expatriate son who will someday return from exile to liquidate the estate of the old prince is dead. But he says towards the end: "I often think that it is my duty to write to my son in London and tell him what is awaiting him here in
Hochgobernitz some day, when I am dead: cold. Isolation. Madness. Deadly monologuing." Saurau's chilling (and bitingly self-reflexive) list is the corrupt inheritance that awaits the sons of Austria's grand monarchical tradition.
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Gargoyles is a dark, broken work, the first of
Bernhard's novels to be translated and the first to gain him national recognition. The writing style is haunting and compulsive, the setting is the fairy-tale landscape of rural Austria, especially the area surrounding a remote mountain gorge. Then there
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the ability to extract more than utter gloom from his landscape of inconceivable devastation. While the external surface of life is unquestionably grim, he somehow suggests more – the mystic element in experience that calls for symbolic interpretation; the inner significance of states that are akin
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Communication, family, and death are Saurau’s main interests, bound up as they are with the fate of the old ancestral castle. He is the patriarch of a moribund clan whose life and history centre on
Hochgobernitz . It, like Saurau and his family, is a pathetic relic of Old Austria. Saurau lives in
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One morning a doctor takes his son—an idealistic student of science and rationality—on his daily rounds through the grim mountainous
Austrian countryside. They observe the rural grotesques they encounter—from an innkeeper whose wife has been murdered to a crippled musical prodigy kept in a
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Each patient doctor and son visit suffers from a different nightmarish ailment by which the father means to expose the boy to the ubiquity of sickness, brutality, and death. "It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact," his father cautions him, "that everything is
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219:’s earliest novels, which made the author known both nationally and internationally. Originally published in German in 1967, it’s a kaleidoscopic work, considered by critics his most disquieting and nihilistic. The German title,
235:, perhaps in order to render the array of human freaks the novel depicts to its very end. In fact, this is a singular, surreal study of the nature of humanity.
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stand-in who steals the show with a hundred-page monologue about his own descent into madness and his fraught relationship with his own son.
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movie. Its owner - old prince Saurau - is the expression of the best (or worst) Bernhardian values: the
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is the
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383:“Beautifully Depressing Thomas Bernhard,” by Jessica Ferri
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This article is about the 1967 novel. For other uses, see
351:"An Introduction to Thomas Bernhard", by Thomas Cousineau
379:, critical review by S. Mitchelmore (SpikeMagazine 1999)
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The
Nihilism of Thomas Bernhard, by Charles W. Martin
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Le silence Ă©ternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.
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Understanding Thomas
Bernhard, by Stephen D. Dowden
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358:The Novels of Thomas Bernhard
16:1967 novel by Thomas Bernhard
285:fundamentally sick and sad.
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606:Novels by Thomas Bernhard
248:Imagery, style and themes
126:Published in English
68:Richard and Clara Winston
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21:Gargoyle (disambiguation)
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387:MoreIntelligentLife
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371:Books and Writers
367:"Thomas Bernhard"
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98:Insel Verlag
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601:1967 novels
562:Old Masters
554:Woodcutters
463:Heldenplatz
229:Derangement
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570:Extinction
514:Correction
325:References
319:Pensée 206
221:Verstörung
215:is one of
64:Translator
58:Verstörung
27:Gargoyles
546:The Loser
498:Gargoyles
255:Nosferatu
233:Gargoyles
225:Confusion
212:Gargoyles
144:Paperback
120:, Austria
94:Publisher
530:Concrete
277:Excerpts
259:Habsburg
179:76066649
140:Hardback
74:Language
447:Am Ziel
270:Beckett
138:Print (
581:(1989)
573:(1986)
565:(1985)
557:(1984)
549:(1983)
541:(1982)
533:(1982)
525:(1978)
517:(1975)
509:(1970)
501:(1967)
493:(1964)
485:(1963)
466:(1988)
458:(1984)
450:(1981)
442:(1975)
362:(2001)
353:(2001)
347:(1995)
333:(1995)
315:Pascal
154:224 pp
142:&
118:Styria
78:German
44:Author
490:Amras
482:Frost
474:Prose
431:Drama
292:News!
266:Kafka
151:Pages
88:Novel
84:Genre
268:and
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160:ISBN
130:1970
109:1967
522:Yes
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