Impersonating Voices

Thomas Bernhard remains often imitated yet largely inimical, though I try

During the pandemic, I started posting reviews of everything I read or reread on Goodreads. My goal has remained to publish reviews for all Thomas Bernhard and Herman Melville works. During this process, I can—in rare instances—attempt to delve into the mind and prose of one of these masters. A long-term goal is to write a novella in the vein of Bernhard. Below, my recent take on Bernhard’s minor 1978 work, Der Stimmenimitator:

Der Stimmenimitator

by Thomas Bernhard. Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978. In English translation as either The Voice Imitator (Chicago) or The Voice Impersonator (William Drenttel, privately printed).

Also referenced: The works of Lydia Davis.

Vignettes

A curmudgeonly Austrian author and playwright who—at the 1978 publication of Der Stimmenimitator—was best known for a few bleak novels in which a callous frigid Uberösterreichische industrial landscape provides a backdrop for miserable characters whose fates propel them towards suicide—whether it be a purportedly accidental stumble into a glacial crevasse where the corpse remains vanished for decades or a more humdrum means of self-annihilation, a shotgun perhaps, where the corpse will molder at the delight of gawkers—presents a collection of “short short” tales in which, critics astutely remark, hearken back to the author’s anonymous days as a young court reporter when he, in succinct labyrinthian prose, provided the “who, what, when and where” for some sort of awful occurrence on the trial docket. These brief tales, vignettes if you will, are often obliquely autobiographical, and, hence, fodder, for readers obsessed with the author’s life and atrocious Weltanshauung in which the irrationality of existence is a constant recurring negative theme. One reader, an American who—fortunately for him since he reveres the Austrian author—reads German rather well, uses these tales primarily as a primer to see just how accurately he translates the Austrian’s grim paragraphs in his mind, all while pitying the two translators who were ostensibly paid to wrest the outlandish prose into precise legible everyday American English. Since the American reader is extremely well read, he can’t help but notice that a little known, American author published her inaugural collection of “short short” stories The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories just a mere two years before the Austrian master published his throwaway collection, Der Stimmenimitator, which may have been hastened into print to cover all the author’s financial obligations for the advances he took from his Suhrkamp publisher. The Austrian writer, who was almost certainly unaware of the American author’s offering, soon returned to lengthier formats fulminating against the state and its philistine citizenry. The little-known American writer eventually won numerous coveted awards and has published many other successful “short short” story collections, albeit ones that are not nearly as dismal in theme as the Austrian’s. Today, the American writer is widely recognized as the queen of the short short genre and has been lauded as a major woman of letters, an author of exceptional works and a translator of both Proust and Flaubert. The Austrian has been dead for well over three decades and is best remembered for his works accusing Austrians of being unrepentant war criminals. Only his obsessed fans, like the fortunate German reading American, will link the Austrian with the genre of short short fiction championed by the American writer, although many of the “tales” are as strong as hers and should bring a snicker to the face of jaded Bernhard hungry readers.