The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) (28 page)

of his voice might possibly incapacitate him for carrying on with the Urbanchich method and put a sudden stop to his further experimental studies, causing him to lose his grip not only on the Urbanchich method but on his book itself. He made several attempts to speak, but in vain. You can imagine my wife’s pretended horror, her open relief, her secret joy at my sudden speechlessness, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, when I confronted her with the fact that I had lost my voice. But just as suddenly as his voice had disappeared, it came back and he could talk again; I remember exactly how it happened, Konrad said to Wieser, all at once I said
naturally
, I heard myself saying the word
naturally
, and it occurred to me that my sudden loss of voice probably was linked in some way to my eye trouble, I remember thinking that now I shall be losing my voice alternately with losing my eyesight, from this day on the fading of my voice will alternate with the fading of my vision. Yet, although he believed that now he could speak again, meaning that he could speak again quite normally, he ought to hasten upstairs to continue the experimental work using the Urbanchich method, with his wife, he nevertheless did not leap up in his usual impulsive way but stayed abed, Wieser says, thinking, as he told Wieser: now the both of us are badly in need of help, to such a degree that help becomes almost impossible to give. From here on out nothing but inadequacy and infirmity was in the cards for them both. His wife deserved a better fate than a man like himself, Konrad thought, as he said to Wieser, not me, not me, not me, he said to himself over and over again. And yet a woman as greatly in need of help as his wife, more dependent on help than anyone, and who deserved to have found the most helpful man in the world, had nevertheless turned
herself over unconditionally to Konrad, because by the time they married she had long since been sick and crippled, Konrad told Wieser, her disease began to manifest itself years before they married, it had in fact broken out suddenly with all its terrible ramifications before the actual marriage ceremony took place; Konrad had in fact married her knowing full well that she was already gravely diseased and crippled, he actually knew then, he said to Wieser, that her crippling disease was incurable. Konrad did not really understand why he had chosen to marry a sick, crippled woman, whose crippling disease would in all probability, as he insists he knew perfectly well at the time, worsen from year to year; actually, he married her precisely because of her crippling disease which would make her completely dependent on him, that was it, he said to himself: I am marrying a woman who will be totally dependent on me, a woman who needs me, needs me absolutely, he reflected at the time, a woman who cannot exist without me, or at least thinks she cannot exist without me, but who in turn will be available to me unconditionally for my purposes, i.e., for my scientific research, a woman I can use in any way I need to use her, a woman I shall even be free to abuse, misuse, if necessary, as Konrad explained to Wieser, if the exigencies of my scientific circumstances demand it. But to get back to his room where Konrad was gradually getting used to the idea, and resigned to the fact of his recurrent eye trouble, as previously mentioned, as well as to his having to suffer a temporary loss of his voice from time to time, because it was becoming clear to him as he lay on his bed thinking about it that the momentary loss of his voice had not been caused by his rapid drinking down of that glass of icy water, as he had at first believed though not for long
and only because the cold water seemed the most obvious immediate cause of his sudden mutism, but that actually the sudden loss of his voice was as mysterious as his eye trouble, both were equally inexplicable organic weaknesses arising from within, from inside his head, that is, in which, as he is supposed to have said to Wieser, quite a few other infirmities, even more disastrous ones than the two under consideration, were at this moment busily hatching out, no doubt about it: in no time at all his head was certain to breed him a lot of organic infirmities, cessations of organic functions, which were quite likely, in the circumstances, to have lethal effects quite soon. Konrad could not believe in his chances of living more than a couple of years more, he is supposed to have said just eight days before he shot his wife dead. Well, on the day he completely lost his voice for the first time he lay on his bed for hours, he is supposed to have said, occasionally wondering why she (his wife) didn’t ring for him, what could be the reason she did not ring? but actually he was only thinking how not to tell her that his temporary loss of vision was not all, that he would be suffering from a recurrent loss of voice as well, because he did not want to tell her about his new trouble, not out of consideration for her feelings, but in order to avoid giving her a pretext for urging him to drop the Urbanchich exercises and generally weakening his position in the area of the work to be done. So-called spasms, he is supposed to have said to Wieser, meaning that he alternately could not see or speak, occasionally both vision and voice might fail him simultaneously, for a few moments, and of course he might find himself unable to see or speak for lengthy periods of time, or unable either to see or speak for lengthy stretches, but what matters the most, he said, is that I can hear, after all, and
I do hear extraordinarily well, although I must say that I would not be surprised to find myself suddenly also unable to hear, but it was precisely his uninterrupted work with the Urbanchich method, his incessant experimentation with everything related to the hearing that would prevent any sudden weakening or any sudden loss of hearing, though on the other hand, he is supposed to have said to Wieser, it was of course possible that it was just such an incessant application of the Urbanchich method, incessant experimentation with the hearing that might in fact cause a sudden failure of hearing, a sudden cessation of the hearing function, naturally a man could cause his hearing to cease by making inordinate demands on it; in fact, Wieser says he wonders whether Konrad might not have actually suffered a hearing failure the night he did his wife in; that Konrad suffered a lessening of his auditory capacity for the first time that particular night was a genuine possibility, and the more he thought about it the more firmly Wieser believed that Konrad must have suffered a seizure of auditory failure on the night of the murder. To Fro, whom I finally managed to sell his policy, Konrad is supposed to have said that his, Konrad’s, great mistake was to have kept on waiting for an even more favorable moment, the most favorable moment possible to serve as a point of departure for writing his book, because he had always clung to the belief that the ideal, even the most ideal constellation of circumstances for enabling him to write his book was just around the corner, but in waiting for this moment he had lost more and more time or, as Konrad expressed it, the most valuable time, so that at last he was forced to admit to himself that he had now reached the end of his forces (!), that for two or even three decades he had waited in vain for the ideal
moment in which to begin writing his book, and just before the disaster (this is what Fro calls the murder of Mrs. Konrad by her husband) Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro that he realized there was no such thing as an ideal, not to mention a most ideal moment in which to write such a work as his, because there simply could be no such ideal moment, or most ideal moment, or point of time whatever for any undertaking or cause of any kind. Like thousands of others before him, Konrad said, he too had fallen victim to a mad dream of one day suddenly bringing his great labor to fruition by writing it all down in one consistent outpouring, all triggered by the optimal point in time, the unique moment for perfect concentration on writing it. And now he would never be able to write it, neither in the prison at Stein nor in the mental institution at Niedernhardt; Konrad’s book, like Konrad himself, was a lost cause (Wieser), an immense life work, as one must assume (says Fro, doing a sudden complete about-face) totally wiped out. Here was a failure, owing to a chronic deferment, of the realization of a concept that was basically all there, wholly and flawlessly extant in his (Konrad’s) head, as the book was, a perfect, fantastic, scientific work extant in his brain though unrealized either for lack of courage, of the necessary decisiveness, and finally the failure of intellectual audacity; it was certainly most depressing to think that such a work had remained unrealized on paper where it would have been of great benefit to others, to the world of science, to all posterity. Konrad had certainly not been lacking in the necessary ruthlessness, even or perhaps especially toward himself, for the execution of his tremendous task, during those decades that had dragged on at such humiliating length, as he is supposed to have phrased it himself,
though on the other hand they had passed at a terrifying clip, but he had lacked what was perhaps the most important quality of all: fearlessness in the face of realization, of concretization, fearlessness, simply, when it came to turning his head over, suddenly, from one moment to the next, ruthlessly flipping it over to drop everything inside his head onto the paper, all in one motion.

GARGOYLES

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, a relentlessly flowing cascade of words that is classic Bernhard.

Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7755-7

THE LOSER

The Loser
centers on 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. One commits suicide, while the other—the obsessive, witty, and self-mocking narrator—has retreated into obscurity. Written in one remarkable unbroken paragraph,
The Loser
is a brilliant meditation on success, failure, genius, and fame.

Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7754-0

FROST

Visceral, raw, singular, and unforgettable,
Frost
is the story of a friendship between a young man beginning his medical career and a painter in his final days. A young man has accepted an unusual assignment, to travel to a miserable mining town in the middle of nowhere in order to clinically—and secretly—observe and report on his mentor’s reclusive brother, the painter Strauch. Carefully disguising himself, he befriends the aging artist and attempts to carry out his mission, only to find himself caught up in his subject’s madness.

Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-3351-5

WITTGENSTEIN’S NEPHEW

It is 1967. In separate wings of a Viennese hospital, two men lie bedridden. The narrator, named Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of the celebrated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, is suffering from one of his periodic bouts of madness. As their once-casual friendship quickens, these two eccentric men begin to discover in each other a possible antidote to their feelings of hopelessness and mortality—a spiritual symmetry forged by their shared passion for music, strange sense of humor, disgust for bourgeois Vienna, and great fear in the face of death. Part memoir, part fiction,
Wittgenstein’s Nephew
is both a meditation on the artist’s struggle to maintain a solid foothold in a world gone incomprehensibly askew, and a stunning—if not haunting—eulogy to real-life friendship.

Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7756-4

CORRECTION

The scientist Roithamer has dedicated the last six years of his life to “the Cone,” an edifice of mathematically exact construction that he has erected in the center of his family’s estate in honor of his beloved sister. Not long after its completion, he takes his own life. As an unnamed friend pieces together the puzzle of his breakdown, what emerges is the story of a genius ceaselessly compelled to correct and refine his perceptions until the only logical conclusion is the negation of his own soul. Considered by many critics to be Bernhard’s masterpiece,
Correction
is a cunningly crafted meditation on the tension between the desire for perfection and the knowledge that it is unattainable.

Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7760-1

VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com

Meet with Interesting People Enjoy Stimulating Conversation Discover Wonderful Books