Woodcutters

"[A] polemical book that lashes out not only at Austria's most cherished cultural institutions, but also at [the author's] own not-so-famous artistic contemporaries....[A]ffords a penetrating and satirical glimpse into contemporary Austrian society as well as a sampling of Mr. Bernhard's superbly distinctive and provocative prose....Mr. Bernhard's portrait of a society in dissolution has a Scandinavian darkness reminiscent of Ibsen and Strindberg, but it is filtered through a minimalist prose of obsessive repetition and ever so slight modulations. David McLintock's very English translation shies away from the deliberately neurotic quality of Mr. Bernhard's prose, chopping the dizzyingly long rhetorical constructions into more navigable passages and even eliminating overly repetitive or qualifying phrases. Still, WOODCUTTERS offers an unusually intense, engrossing literary experience.Bernhard, Thomas is the author of 'Woodcutters', published 1989 under ISBN 9780226043968 and ISBN 0226043967.