Old Masters

For over thirty years, Herr Reger, music critic, has sat on the same bench in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum every second day except Mondays, contemplating Tintoretto's Man With A White Beard. Not because he loves it—Reger is a hater. But because this painting alone withstands his dogged campaign to find the fatal flaw in every work of art in the world-renowned institution. Meanwhile, nothing and no-one is safe from his darts and arrows. Austria, Heidegger, public toilets, the Viennese, even art itself come under sustained fire. (The critic does, however, approve of the museum's excellent climate control and the bench he regularly inhabits—his home away from home.)

Our would-be protagonist freely admits his reliance on a pair of sock puppets who echo his every opinion, no matter how perverse. On the day everything in the novel takes place (Bernhard's novel attempts to obey the classical unities) Herr Reger's shadowy friend Atzbacher will arrive precisely one hour in advance of their rendezvous—to spy on him from a place of concealment. Why this should be is never explained—although Atzbacher does let fall in passing that Herr Reger is his "thought director." Irrsigler, a dim museum attendant of fascist sensibilities, serves as Reger's inside man at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and parrots the critic faithfully without any clue about what he's saying. An AI idiot savant avant la lettre.

All the chanting and ranting slyly conveys the author's own bad-boy claims—that every masterpiece is a failure, every genius a fraud, and every so-called "old master" merely a state-employed decorator. Could this really be a love letter disguised as a demolition? The exaltation of a disappointment that refuses to die a decent death? Maybe so and then again, maybe not.