Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian post-war writer, is the main literary inspiration of my favorite Salvadoran author Horacio Castellanos Moya. He’s a genius but his books are of the kind that you either absolutely detest or abjectly love. I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone but I myself am in the camp of abject worshippers.
Woodcutters is a very typical Bernhardian novel. It’s an inner monologue of a very fussy, neurotic writer who spent 20+ years in London and comes back to Austria for a brief visit. The narrative is purposefully repetitive. The writer uses the expression “as I sat in the wing chair” over a hundred times. He’s attending an artistic dinner in the house of a rich artsy couple he used to know back in the 1950s. The writer hates everybody at the dinner and his inner monologue is delightfully venomous and gossipy. If you are not into inner monologues of repetitive neurotics, you won’t like the book. But to me it’s a “shoot it straight into my veins” type of enjoyment. I listened to an Audible version, and the voice actor is perfect for this role. If you like Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion, read Woodcutters. I will now listen to it in German while the memory of the novel is fresh in my mind.
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