Old Masters: A Comedy (2)
An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Old Masters: A Comedy by Thomas Bernhard.
Greetings from Stickypants, New Hampshire, where we’re the proud recipients of all the weather usually in the American south, displaced upwards by Hurricane Beryl. For a week we’ve been promised a five-hour thunderstorm that in theory will cool things off a touch. Every 90 minutes or so, experts revise the forecast so that the storm arrives an hour later and shortens in duration until it disappears and a new storm is predicted some hours hence. It’s a trifle warm for postmodern fiction but here’s a brief note anyway.
Another eighty pages of whinging have passed in Old Masters and something extraordinary has happened, namely, something. Irrsigler whispered to Reger, who then exited the Bordone Room. Before Atzbacher could reposition himself, a tour group of Russians squeezed him into the Sebastiano Room and trapped him there. Atzbacher freed himself just in time to meet Reger, who returned to his settee, at the appointed time of half past eleven. This unleashed another obsessive declamation, whether Reger’s or Atzbacher’s is hard to say, about punctuality as the supreme virtue. With Reger and Atzbacher facing each other, the action, as it were, shifted from recollection to occurrence. It’s like watching butoh. In an atmosphere of despair and agony, the performers twitch across the stage. Any comparatively larger gesture looks momentous. There is a strange draw to it.
Also, toward the end of the middle third, Reger stopped complaining for long enough to praise his departed wife. She rescued him, by his reckoning (p. 156-7):
Suddenly I had a wife who was an intelligent, wealthy cosmopolitan, Reger said, who saved me with her intelligence and with her wealth, because my wife did save me, I was as the saying goes, down and out when I met my wife, he said. As you see, I owe a lot to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, he said. Maybe it is actually gratitude that makes me go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum every other day, he said with a laugh, but of course it is not that.
With this and an earlier recollection about an Englishman to whom he was drawn into a friendly exchange, Reger shows that he is more than a dark knot of loathing. At the same time, These brief turns from complaint to appreciation convey the sense that this conversation is going to end in tragedy. I’ll let you know next week. Pray for rain.
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Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Old Masters: A Comedy by Thomas Bernhard. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.
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