The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

I HAVE READ MOST OF Thomas Bernhard in German. That may have augmented how disconcerting I found him. Now, at the age of eighty-eight, I have started to reread him in translation. That takes less effort but gives me more leisure to be upset by him. It is accurate to observe that Bernhard delighted in rattling even his most sympathetic readers. Jack Dawson's version of The Loser seems faithful to me, though I have not compared it to the German text. At my age, climbing up the steps to my third-floor study and library is something I can manage only once a day. I gather that Mark Anderson, an admirable scholar of modern German literature, took the name of Jack Dawson for his own translation of The Loser. There is something Bernhardian about that.

There was everything (or almost everything) about the life of the great Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932–82) that was Bernhardian, though the two men never met. Probably Bernhard heard Gould play twice in Salzburg, in 1958 and 1959. The least Bernhardian aspect of Glenn Gould's life was his five-year love affair with Cornelia Foss, wife of the conductor and composer Lukas Foss. When Gould began to show signs of paranoia and of weird overdosings with unnecessary medications, Cornelia Foss and her two children returned to Lukas Foss, doubtless to Gould's sorrow.