- Paperback: 160 pages
- Publisher: University of Chicago Press; Reprinted edition edition (1 Sep 1992)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0226043916
- ISBN-13: 978-0226043913
- Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 13.4 x 1 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 945,624 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
In this exuberantly satirical novel, the tutor Atzbacher has been summoned by his friend Reger to meet him in a Viennese museum. While Reger gazes at a Tintoretto portrait, Atzbacher--who fears Reger's plans to kill himself--gives us a portrait of the musicologist: his wisdom, his devotion to his wife, and his love-hate relationship with art. With characteristically acerbic wit, Bernhard exposes the pretensions and aspirations of humanity in a novel at once pessimistic and strangely exhilarating.
"Bernhard's . . . most enjoyable novel."--Robert Craft, "New York Review of Books."
"Bernhard is one of the masters of contemporary European fiction." --George Steiner
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
while reading Old Masters (Alte Meister), i really began to consider my own values on art, genius, talent, and all other words that cannot really be defined. bernhard's distinct style permeates this book (as it does all his works) in such a way that everything flows from one topic to the next in a single sentence. while this book does not have what can be considered a 'plot' in the typical sense of the word, it does have a sort of climax in which the two main characters meet. i recommend this book highly. humorous, yet serious, it is one of my favorites.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
5 reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
A darkly funny rant on culture
17 Mar 2003
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Thomas Bernhard must have been the bane of the Austrian cultural world during his lifetime. His favorite style is an endless, run-on paragraph, seething with rage and pain at every turn. If you don't catch that these crabby narrators are constantly undermining their own credibility, you might not see how funny these books are. Old Masters involves an old musicologist, who spends every other day in front of the same painting in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. This 150-page assault on Western art and music (few are spared: Mahler, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and especially Bruckner are given real tongue-lashings, and at one point he implies the painting he always looks at is a forgery) might annoy you, until you realize that, as flawed as these great works might be, they're all we have to keep us going day to day. Life without these Old Masters would be unbearable. The narrator is slow to admit this, but when the admission comes, it's heart-breaking. For someone to complain this vigorously about the limits of Austrian art and culture, he must have loved his homeland very dearly indeed. You won't be disappointed in this one.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Funniest book I've read in a year
27 April 2000
Format:Paperback
This a book about two grumpy old men. " ..he does not like solar radiation. He avoids the sun, there is nothing he shuns more than the sun. 'I hate the sun, you know that I hate the sun more than anything in the world,' he says. What he likes best are foggy days, on foggy days he leaves the house very early in the morning, actually takes a walk, which he does not normally do, for basically he hates walking. I hate walking, he says,it seems so pointless to me. I walk, and while I am walking I keep thinking how I hate walking, I have no other thoughts at the time, I cannot understand that there are people who are able to think of something other than that walking is pointless and useless, he says." If you cannot find this very funny then this book is not for you. In 156 pages there are no paragraphs, or chapters. But there is excellent prose and conversations on philosophy of life, art, suicide, class, Catholicism, nationalism, culture......life. Very funny and perhaps sad too, but in the end strangely exhilarating. A wonderful read.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
A Very Serious Comedy
13 Dec 1999
Format:Paperback
Yes,it is enjoyable and considering the dark and disturbing contexts of his other novels it is indeed a comedy.Yet it is seriously constructed and top quality novella.
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