Old Masters: A Comedy (Phoenix Fiction)

by Ewald Osers (Translator), Thomas Bernhard (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  1992

  $21.73

  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