Woodcutters, Thomas Bernhard
Woodcutters, Thomas Bernhard
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Woodcutters

Author: Thomas Bernhard, David McLintock

Narrator: Matthew Lloyd Davies

Unabridged: 6 hr 6 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/20/2024


Synopsis

Fiercely observed, often hilarious, and "reminiscent of Ibsen and Strindberg" (The New York Times Book Review), this exquisitely controversial novel was initially banned in its author's homeland.

A searing portrayal of Vienna's bourgeoisie, it begins with the arrival of an unnamed writer at an 'artistic dinner' hosted by a composer and his society wife—a couple he once admired and has come to loathe. The guest of honor, a distinguished actor from the Burgtheater, is late. As the other guests wait impatiently, they are seen through the critical eye of the writer, who narrates a silent but frenzied tirade against these former friends, most of whom have been brought together by Joana, a woman they buried earlier that day. Reflections on Joana's life and suicide are mixed with these denunciations until the famous actor arrives, bringing an explosive end to the evening that even the writer could not have seen coming.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Vit on January 06, 2022

Woodcutters is a story about the ruination of artistic hopes – it is a complex, multilayered and caustic tale of life in the world of arts. People hated me and everything I wrote, and ganged up against me in the most vicious fashion whenever they saw me. But ever since my return from London I had bee......more

Goodreads review by Ilse on January 01, 2023

Dreams and fairy stories were the real stuff of her life, I thought. That was why she killed herself, because a person who life is built on dreams and fairy stories can't survive in this world - has no right to survive, I thought. (Espen Terjesen) If we cannot become what we want to become, we resort......more

Goodreads review by Jason on July 19, 2013

Ok, let’s just cut to the chase. This work, this novel, this brilliantly flowing diatribe of comic vitriol, is a work of pure consummate genius. The writing, the pacing, the internal dialogue, the word choice, and probably the translation, too (though that is only a guess)—it is all perfect, perfect......more

Goodreads review by Meike on April 18, 2026

English: Woodcutters Thomas Bernhard is the Shakespeare of grumpy ramblings, fiercely holding his ground while embracing contradictory emotions. Almost 30 years after his death, his literary importance doesn’t fade, on the contrary: Bernhard has become a postmodern classic, and just recently, author......more

Goodreads review by David on November 14, 2010

In a prominent, well-trafficked gallery of the Bad Dinner Guest Hall of Fame we should logically expect to find the (unnamed) narrator of Thomas Bernhard's excoriating masterpiece Woodcutters, who not only isolates himself from the other guests, preferring a lone wing chair in the entryway to their......more