Woodcutters (Vintage International)

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A quarter of an hour passed, and John heard his opponent chopping again. So both of them carried on synchronously. John was starting to feel weary when the chopping from Peter stopped once again. Feeling motivated and smelling victory close by, John continued on, with a smile on his face.

Así que al narrador solo le queda hacer lo que cualquier individuo civilizado haría en su situación: sentarse en un sillón en un rincón apartado, poner una cara que espante a los pocos incautos que se atrevan a acercarse, despellejar a todos los asistentes y beber hasta que el asco desaparezca. Y, por supuesto, sentirse una víctima. High hopes of youth… But the artists grew older and their hopes got fewer… Some of them were left behind, some were over the edge, some drowned their talents in alcohol, some compromised, some became opportunistic and some sold themselves out… To get ourselves out of a tight spot, it seems to me, we are ourselves just as mendacious as those we are always accusing of mendacity, those whom we despise and drag in the dirt for their mendacity; we are not one jot better than the people we constantly find objectionable and insufferable, those repellent people with whom we want to have as few dealings as possible, though; if we are honest, we do have dealings with them and are no different from them. We reproach them with all kinds of objectionable and insufferable behavior and are no less insufferable and objectionable ourselves—perhaps we are even more insufferable and objectionable, it occurs to me.” But to John’s astonishment, Peter had actually cut down more wood. How did this even happen? “How could you have chopped down more trees than me? I heard you stop working every hour for fifteen minutes!”, exclaimed John. Alongside adding in the new Imcando Hatchet, the requirements for hatchets have been re-tiered (no more needing odd levels like 41) and some of the previous tiers have been rebalanced to better reflect this new tier scale.

Bernhard's satire of Viennese petit bourgeois society is one long frantic, hateful, angry, and at times even nostalgic internal monologue. It’s narrated as if it’s one deep exhale by an aging writer who has returned to Vienna after several decades away and has reunited with people he “didn’t like 30 years ago and doesn’t like now.” He spends the majority of the novel sitting in the corner at a dinner party hating everything about everyone, and hating himself even more for attending. That’s it. But, it’s fascinating. The blueprint is started at the Fort Forinthry blueprints. This adds four Construction hotspots around the grove cabin, with one of them optimal, which can be built to gain Construction experience. Finishing the first tier requires 160 base batches of progress, the second 360, and the third 768. These can be reduced by building at the optimal hotspots. Wait a minute… is that Thomas Bernhard I see getting up from that wing chair? Isn’t it just like him to excoriate the precious and pretentious? He has such mordant wit. And wait… wasn’t he a bass-baritone training to be an opera singer too, just like the narrator, and didn’t he also suffer from a lung complaint, the result of which was a career as an author and not as a singer. Hmmm… perhaps the resemblance is coincidental.

Exaggeration. Hyperbole is used throughout - a metaphor of exaggeration, a figure of anger. It strengthens the picture of "the enemy", and by using this type of rhetoric, you can distance yourself from the thing you criticize. The novel makes war on people, social norms and certain types of behavior. But hyperboles are often difficult to take seriously. There is too much patos, it's all to exaggerated (and sometimes quite funny). The main character might have some good points, but he gives us no evidence. He is definitely an unreliable narrator, albeit an eloquent one. This makes me ponder what his intention is. Is he really trying to convince us, or himself, of something, or does his rhythmic, intense and energizing anger have some other purpose? Auch wenn man Personen und Fakten in diesem autobiografisch inspirierten Schlüsselroman eindeutig einer äußeren Realität zuordnen kann, sind sie nur der Lehm, die Pigmente und Partikeln, aus denen Bernhard seinen Roman als neues und eigenständiges Kunstwerk formt und dabei eher wie ein Komponist vorgeht als ein Autor, indem er sein Material vor allem in einen formalen und rhythmischen Zusammenhang bringt. To make the materials required for different tiers of the Grove from raw materials the following raw materials are needed:

Detrás de tanta crítica hay una confesión. El propio narrador ya lo había advertido: no se siente culpable al acusar despiadadamente a los demás de todo tipo de atrocidades porque a sí mismo se juzga incluso con más rigor. Pero al margen del sarcasmo del narrador y su catarsis final, no hay que perder de vista que mucho de lo que dice es tristemente cierto, y no solo para Viena y para los años ochenta. El hecho de que la novela fuera prohibida en Austria por difamatoria durante años prueba que más de un callo debió pisar. La pretenciosidad de un mundo artístico endogámico, la mercadotecnia que oculta la vulgaridad de los consagrados y asfixia la originalidad de los que toman riesgos, las ayudas oficiales a cambio de apoyo político son males que aquejan al mundo artístico en todos los países y en todas las épocas. One of Bernhard’s trademark traits: He never shied away from controversy. When “Woodcutters” was first published in 1984, a former friend (composer Gerhard Lampersberg) sued the author for defamation - in consequence, all printed copies were confiscated, which of course caused an enormous scandal (Lampersberg and Bernhard later sought an extrajudicial settlement). And Lampersberg was not the only one who felt offended by Bernhard’s text.