"Furious, obsessive, scathing, absolutely hilarious and oddly beautiful."
--Claire Messud, author of
The Emperor's Children, on
Salon "Bernhard's fiction is full of energy; his restless imagination cannot leave a fact or idea alone. . . . Only someone with such a brilliant, tricky, inexhaustible mind could get away with
Wittgenstein's Nephew."
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The New York Times "In its obsessive, elegant rhythms and narrative eloquence, [
Wittgenstein's Nephew] resembles a tragic aria by Richard Strauss. . . . A memento mori that approaches genius."
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Wall Street Journal "Oddly moving and funny. . . . A meditative fugue for mad, brilliant voices on the themes of death, death-in-life and the artist's and thinker's role in society."
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Chicago Tribune "Bernhard is a writer of great originality and fascination."
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The New York Review of Books "In the annals of literature, Thomas Bernhard will stand as Austria's postwar genius."
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The Washington Times "Thomas Bernhard is one of the masters of contemporary European fiction. . . . After Kafka and Canetti's, his sensibility is one of the most acute, the most capable of exemplary images and gestures, in modern literature."
--George Steiner
"It is high time that we keep Bernhard firmly in our mind, as European readers have been doing for many years now."
--
Christian Science Monitor