Glen Gould

A Portrait of the Artist as a Failure

A review by Jill Owens

I was initially interested in reading The Loser, at least in part,because of its fictionalized depiction of Glenn Gould. But evenfor music lovers, that is one of the most minor pleasures in ThomasBernhard's brilliant, hypnotic, and mesmerizing novel. The Loseris a long, unbroken monologue (with no chapters, and written asone enormous paragraph) about the recent suicide of the narrator'sfriend Wertheimer, and about both of their lives in the shadowof the genius Glenn Gould. In their youth, the three men werepiano students together for a master summer course in Germany.The relationships formed there both invigorated and, ultimately,according to the narrator, destroyed at least the two inferiorstudents -- the narrator stopped playing the piano shortly afterward,and Wertheimer continued to play for years and then finally committedsuicide -- and possibly Gould as well, through the nature of hisgift.This triangle of friendship forms the underlying structure ofthe book. The narrator sees himself as far superior to Wertheimer,who didn't know enough to quit music altogether after realizinghe'd never be as good as Gould, and inferior in every measureto Gould, whose gifts he would never be able to match. The readerlearns about the narrator, an intelligent, tortured, twisted creature,almost exclusively through the filters of these two exaggeratedfigures, one an abject caricature of artistic failure, the othera secluded and supremely confident artist at the top of his game.Along the way, Bernhard exhaustively explores the nature of genius,art, despair, and the age-old existential crisis of trying tolive with meaning and meaninglessness.