A Novel with No Moving Parts

 More bookshop serendipity: in the selfsame charity bookshop where I recently picked up Death in Rome – 'the most devastating novel about the Germans that I have ever read' (Michael Hoffman) – I spotted another novel from the German-speaking world that I had never heard of, by an author I had barely heard of: Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard. Reading the notes on the author, I discovered that Bernhard's literary career was one long assault on the 'mindless cultural sewer' of Austria, and that in his will (he died in 1989) he forbade any further publication or performance of his work in Austria.
  How could I resist? It was clearly time to move on from the Germans to the Austrians... However, Old Masters is a very different book from Death in Rome. To begin with, it has no chapters or even paragraph breaks, but consists of one 240-page-long paragraph, in the course of which it would be fair to say that, in terms of action, almost nothing happens. It has, as Michael Hoffman has said of all Bernhard's novels, 'no moving parts'. The funny thing is that it is all ridiculously, mesmerically readable – which is all the more surprising as the body of the novel consists entirely of one long rant (punctuated by 'Reger said' at well judged intervals, like the 'Austerlitz said' in Sebald's Austerlitz). The ranter is one Reger, an 82-year-old music critic, who every other day comes to the Bordone Room in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum and sits on a bench staring at a particular painting, Tintoretto's Man with a White Beard. Reporting Reger's endless rant is his friend, Atzbacher, who fills in some background, particularly about the widowed Reger's bereavement (though we are told almost nothing about his late wife). How does Bernhard make a readable novel out of this, you might well ask – as I do myself. And yet, as Reger rails against the Austrian state, Church and politics, human nature, the woeful deficiencies of just about every work of art and literature, however exalted (excluding only Schopenhauer, Goya, and this one painting of Tintoretto's), the weather, the Austrian newspapers, and even the state of Austrian public conveniences, I kept on reading, and in the end, against all the odds, enjoyed it. Old Masters is subtitled A Comedy, and there is certainly a comic element in such comprehensive, all-embracing railing conducted at such a level of ferocious, insistently repetitive hyperbole (nothing is stated without being reiterated half a dozen times in slightly different but equally hyperbolic phrasing) – and there is a kind of music, a strangely calming music, in it. I suspect that what is going on is very cleverly and subtly controlled by an author who knows just what he is doing.  It's not a book I'm likely to read again, or to keep, but I know it will stay with me – as Death in Rome has. Both are memorable reading experiences, even if not ones you'd wish to repeat. 
And now it is definitely time to move on from these German diatribes into calmer seas. English seas probably – I'll see what's on the shelves today...