Old Masters: Comedy
by Thomas Bernhard; Translated by Carl Skoggard

Thomas Bernhard’s Alte Meister: Komödie (1985), his next to last novel, presents us with an odd little solar system—a shrunken, purely Viennese cosmos whose heavenly bodies trace neat, codependent orbits. If you like believing what you’re told, this may be the book for you. Its speakers, all of them male and well up in years, are culturebot curmudgeons who refuse to be switched off or silenced. They start up any time of day or night and for all you know might be the bearers of absolutely vital information—especially if you’re one who frets about the state of the world and is dead set on doing something about it but can’t exactly figure out what. Heidegger, the Habsburgs, the Knights of Malta, why there’s no Goya in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the servant problem, the Pope, the Art of the Fugue, scandalous loos, who’s on first—Messers Reger, Atzbacher, and Irrsigler are ready to tackle all these topics and many more from inside their stronghold, a Vienna of your wildest, most weird-ass dreams. (Sorry, there’s no sex.)