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Zusatztext “Here is a novelist with uncommon talents of a sort possessed by Kafka! Musil! and Beckett.” — Saturday Review “Extraordinary . . . a virtuoso verbal performance.” — Book World "The feeling grows that Thomas Bernhard is the most original! concentrated novelist writing in German. His connections...with the great constellation of Kafka! Musil! and Broch become ever clearer." —George Steiner! The Times Literary Supplement Informationen zum Autor Thomas Bernhard Klappentext The playwright and novelist Thomas Bernhard was one of the most widely translated and admired writers of his generation, winner of the three most coveted literary prizes in Germany. Gargoyles, one of his earliest novels, is a singular, surreal study of the nature of humanity. One morning a doctor and his son set out on daily rounds through the grim mountainous Austrian countryside. They observe the colorful characters they encounter-from an innkeeper whose wife has been murdered to a crippled musical prodigy kept in a cage-coping with physical misery, madness, and the brutality of the austere landscape. The parade of human grotesques culminates in a hundred-page monologue by an eccentric, paranoid prince, a relentlessly flowing cascade of words that is classic Bernhard. ON the twenty-sixth my father drove off to Salla at two o'clock in the morning to see to a schoolteacher whom he found dying and left dead. From there he set out toward Hullberg to treat a child who had fallen into a hog tub full of boiling water that spring. Discharged from the hospital weeks ago, it was now back with its parents.He liked seeing the child, and dropped by there whenever he could. The parents were simple people, the father a miner in Koflach, the mother a servant in a butcher's household in Voitsberg. But the child was not left alone all day; it was in the care of one of the mother's sisters. On this day my father described the child to me in greater detail than ever before, adding that he was afraid it had only a short time to live. "I can say for a certainty that it won't last through the winter, so I am going to see it as often as possible now," he said. It struck me that he spoke of the child as a beloved person, very quietly and without having to consider his words. He let himself express a natural affection for the child as he hinted at the surroundings in which the child had grown up, not so much reared as guarded by its parents, and explained his speculations about these parents and their relationship to the child by filling out the details of the environment. While he spoke, he paced back and forth in his room, and soon no longer had the slightest need to lie down again.My father was the only doctor in a relatively large and "difficult" district, now that the other doctor had moved to Graz, where he had accepted a teaching post at the university. "The chance of a replacement," my father said, "is practically nil. A man would be mad to want to start a practice here." For his own part, he said, he was used to sacrificing himself to a sick populace given to violence as well as insanity. My being home for the weekend was a tranquilizer for him, he said, and one that was more and more necessary. He seemed tired. But when I threw open the shutters and the light from the Ache river dazzled us, he said he would take a walk. "Come," he said, "come along." While I was dressing, he talked about a "phenomenon of nature," a chestnut tree that had burst into blossom now, at the end of September. He had discovered it by the riverside beyond the village. This would be a good opportunity, he said, for us to discuss something he had long wanted to talk about. Probably, I thought, something connected with my studies in Leoben, something to do with mining. This was the right time for it, he said, before he was taken up with the day's quota of patients. "You know," he said, "often it's all too much for me....
