Goethe Dies

In this collection of four short stories by the irascible Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, the greatest German writer--indeed, the virtual Shakespeare of the German language--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe sends for the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein for his little book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, has risen above shelf after shelf, everything that Goethe has written and thought--which he believes will retard the German mind for the next two centuries. In "Montaigne: A Story (in 22 Instalments)," another story that reveals Bernhard's encyclopedic knowledge of the philosophy of doubt and how he makes it as much high comedy as tragedy, a young man seeks out a quiet place in a tower to read and seal himself away from the family that is existentially destroying him. "Reunion," too, takes up this same theme while satirizing the banality of "getting away," which entails its own kind of victimology. The last story is also a comedy, but here the victim is based on Bernhard himself and his persecutor, his homeland writ large, suffers flames far worse than hell--Bernhard's biting wit.