After a first (and very successful!) meeting last week, to discuss John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed, our Book Club will have its second meeting this term on 5 December, at 5pm (venue TBC, but most likely the OTR at Queen’s).
At this meeting, we will discuss a very different type of author and book, Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser. Thomas Bernhard was an acclaimed Austrian novelist and playwright, often dealing with themes such as madness, obsession, social injustice and a love-hate relationship with modern civilization and Austrian culture, in a prose that is tumultuous, philosophical, musical, and sarcastic.
The Loser is a very short novel (c. 200 pages), about a fictional relationship between piano virtuoso Glenn Gould and two of his fellow students who feel compelled to renounce their musical ambitions in the face of Gould's incomparable genius. It is a meditation on success, failure, genius, and fame.