Four very solid pieces, undermined by some atrocious prose--which I have to assume is the translator's fault. Perhaps Reidel is of the 'alienate the reader' school of thought, according to which someone reading this book in English must be constantly reminded that the book was originally in German, but I'm pretty sure that grammatical mistakes form no part even of that dubious school.

"In the late morning of the twenty-second he, Riemer, before my appointed visit with Goethe at half past two, warned me to speak softly on one side, but not too softly on the other with that man of whom it could be said is not only the greatest man in the nation but also the greatest German of all to this day..."

That's the first part of the first sentence in the book, and it's missing a pronoun. The book doesn't get better as far as proofreading/editing/translating goes.

It's also the first part of the first sentence in the book, and the humor of enrolling Goethe, of all people, in Bernhard's guerilla war against German and Austrian everything is wonderful, and that kind of wonder is maintained throughout the book. So it's well worth reading, I'm glad someone translated it, and I hope in the second printing a few of the more egregious errors can be fixed. ( )

Typical Bernhard offering, but lacking in regards to what has already been published. Always good to read another Bernhard book, but there certainly are better ones. Reunion, the third story in this collection of four, stands up and can be counted as superior, which makes the reading of this book more than worth the little bit of time it took. ( )

These four short pieces (only adding up to a hundred pages in all), dating from the early 80s, finally appeared in book form 20 years after Bernhard's death. They fit together very nicely to make up a kind of composite picture of the Bernhardian thought-world.

The title piece is a slightly whimsical fantasy in which the dying Goethe tries to arrange a meeting with Ludwig Wittgenstein, the only man whose thinking seems to be worthy to be put side by side with his own. (When you find yourself describing a piece about the deathbed of Germany's greatest poet as "in lighter mode", you know it's got to be Bernhard...) There's a certain amount of comic business involving Goethe's court of poets and secretaries, and some reflections on the very Bernhardian theme of the paradoxically deadening power of great genius. Great fun.

(The full text of the piece "Goethe Schtirbt" as it originally appeared in Zeit in 1982 is available here: http://www.zeit.de/1982/12/goethe-schtirbt )

The two central pieces, "Montaigne" and "Wiedersehen" are about relatives — parents, especially — about whom Bernhard's feelings are much the same as those expressed in Philip Larkin's most famous lines. "Wiedersehen" is an especially fine example of the Bernhard riff at its most exuberant, where he manages to keep going for page after page on the subject of the garish red woollen walking socks worn by his parents on their senseless mountaineering trips and the garish green ones worn by his friend's parents on theirs. And a beautifully deflating joke in the last line.

Then, in the last ten pages, he hits us with "In Flammen aufgegangen", a travel report in which he comes to the conclusion that the whole world (with the possible exception of Rotterdam) is unbearable to live in, and imagines Austria as a smoking pile of ashes with only a few barely recognisable Catholic and National Socialist residues in it... ( )

En estos 4 relatos, Bernhard condensa todos los principios narrativos y el pensamiento que articula su obra. ( )