My Prizes
An Accounting
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A gathering of brilliant and viciously funny recollections from one of the twentieth century’s most famous literary enfants terribles.
Written in 1980 but published here for the first time, these texts tell the story of the various farces that developed around the literary prizes Thomas Bernhard received in his lifetime. Whether it was the Bremen Literature Prize, the Grillparzer Prize, or the Austrian State Prize, his participation in the acceptance ceremony—always less than gracious, it must be said—resulted in scandal (only at the awarding of the prize from Austria’s Federal Chamber of Commerce did Bernhard feel at home: he received that one, he said, in recognition of the great example he set for shopkeeping apprentices). And the remuneration connected with the prizes presented him with opportunities for adventure—of the new-house and luxury-car variety.
Here is a portrait of the writer as a prizewinner: laconic, sardonic, and shaking his head with biting amusement at the world and at himself. A revelatory work of dazzling comedy, the pinnacle of Bernhardian art.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Austrian novelist and playwright Bernhard (1931 1989) continues to upset the applecart in this chip-on-the-shoulder recounting of nine literary prizes he was awarded and sidestepped or rejected with gusto except when cash was involved. Most of the fun comes from the deadpan telling, so that reading this book is like watching a W.C. Fields movie: it is almost too painful to laugh. Whether accepting a prize to pay for a misbegotten real estate deal, or a small Austrian state prize that causes such a ruckus that a Viennese newspaper describes Bernhard as "a bug that needed to be exterminated," these withering accounts of crusty petit bourgeois expectations and stale modernity are disarmingly arch and refreshing. The rest of the fun is in a sampling of bubble-bursting speeches he delivered. After reading these tales of aggression and self-acknowledged vanity ("I hated the ceremonies, but I took part in them, I hated the prize-givers, but I took their money"), one can only imagine what if he had been so honored his Nobel acceptance speech might have been.
