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  • Published: 17 October 2006
  • ISBN: 9781400077557
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $39.99

Gargoyles

A Novel




The playwright and novelist Thomas Bernhard was one of the most widely translated and admired writers of his generation, winner of the three most coveted literary prizes in Germany. Gargoyles, one of his earliest novels, is a singular, surreal study of the nature of humanity.

 

One morning a doctor and his son set out on daily rounds through the grim mountainous Austrian countryside. They observe the colorful characters they encounter—from an innkeeper whose wife has been murdered to a crippled musical prodigy kept in a cage—coping with physical misery, madness, and the brutality of the austere landscape. The parade of human grotesques culminates in a hundred-page monologue by an eccentric, paranoid prince, a relentlessly flowing cascade of words that is classic Bernhard.

  • Published: 17 October 2006
  • ISBN: 9781400077557
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $39.99

About the author

Thomas Bernhard

Thomas Bernhard was born in Holland in 1931 but grew up in Austria. His interest in music and theatre led him to study at the Akademie Mozarteum in Salzburg. He has written a quantity of poetry, several novels, short stories and plays and three volumes of autobiography. He died in 1989.

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Praise for Gargoyles

"Here is a novelist with uncommon talents of the sort possessed by Kafka, Musil, and Beckett." --The Saturday Review

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