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phantomtomatoJust one post from me to close out the final two months of 2025. Offline (which is most of where I’ve been), I spent these months on a paper deadline, moving out of Boston after my temporary residency, managing a home remodel, and doing a bit of winter break travel. Not much time for reading, so I only read three short books across two months. Expect a similarly lean next couple of months—I will be traveling internationally for a month between January and February and might compile those months into one reading post as well. Maybe I will finish at least one book!
Hope you’ve all been having a nice winter season and enjoying a break, or time with friends or family. :)
The Loser, by Thomas Bernhard
Translated by Jack Dawson
The Loser is a stream-of-consciousness style short novel about three men: the unnamed narrator, Wertheimer, and Glenn Gould (IRL pianist Glenn Gould, 1932 - 1982). All three pen were piano students together in their youth in the world of this novel, and their lives diverged from that point—Glenn Gould off to prodigal fame and an early death by stroke; Wertheimer giving up on the piano and eventually killing himself; the narrator rejecting his musical training, becoming a writer, and attempting to document the lives of his friends.
The title comes from Gould’s nickname for Wertheimer, and reveals the ultimate focus of the novel—on Wertheimer, his relationship with his sister, and his relationship with Gould/ The three men represent different visions of the same starting point: all of them come to the Mozarteum to train as concert pianists, and to believe the narrator, all three are talented and skilled players. Gould is clearly the best, but the narrator emphasizes that he and Wertheimer would have had careers among the best performers of their generation. It’s their brush with Gould’s greatness which diverts them—the friendship is the start of a lifelong obsession, from which inadequacy and despair will stem.
The narrator tells us about this shared history in an unbroken monologue. There are no chapters or paragraph breaks. His story flits between events, often losing itself in some digression and pulling back to the primary narrative a page or two later. This is my fourth such book this year and the style was a large component of why I picked it up off the sale table. I feel like I have absorbed this into my repertoire now, if that makes sense—it’s now a comfortable sort of book to read. I have a handle on how to process it. This one is in translation from German and the translator’s note made a big deal out of Bernhard’s unusual prose—how he uses italics or capitals, and apparent contradictions in the story. I found the text not particularly unusual or jarring on those points. What stood out more were other choices, such as dialogue attribution. Well, inasmuch as there is dialogue, as the book uses no quotation marks or breaks for speakers. But the narrator relates what a person has said with the format: he said, I thought. Throughout the text: someone said, and the narrator thought. I don’t know what to make of that.
But the focus: Wertheimer. Gould occupies the first third of the novel, roughly, to lay out the friendship-turned-obsession. And slowly, through digressions, we find ourselves having pivoted fully to Wertheimer, the loser, the piano player who neither succeeded professionally nor successfully rejected the practice. Wertheimer’s inadequacy kills him: he never finds another calling in life to replace the obsession, and his life devolves as he drives away companions. His personal tragedy is, in the end, more possessing than Gould’s life, as the narrator manages a comparatively scant biography of Gould, versus this rich portrait of Wertheimer. Wertheimer, who is part alter-ego, as a doubling of Bernhard’s presence also in the narrator, and partly a fictionalization of the philosopher Wittgenstein, is the person we learn the most about. He has a subtextually incestuous relationship with his sister, until she marries and escapes him, and lives out the unaddressed trauma of being a Jew who was forced to flee his Austrian home as a child during the second world war. And so the return post-war, and the life in cities which once embraced Nazis, in a family home once occupied by a Nazi, becomes a surprising new layer over the telling of Wertheimer’s suicide. I’m describing this poorly—I’m still learning how to write about such clever, confusing books. But the effect is striking.
I think that the summary of this, much like Mrs Dalloway or Shyness and Dignity, is that such a book is a journey best undertaken when one can read for prose. Ultimately the story does not matter, and the characters are necessary for voice but often peculiarly flat in that theiir relationships exist in retrospect. There’s a weird combination of amazing focus and shallow depth of field, so that perhaps one or two characters approach real, but their sharpness compared to surrounding fuzziness makes htem unreal again. I’m prepared to say that every reader should try something like it—if only to know how else a commentary can look, outside the Austen-shaped bounds of society novels. I appreciate that I’m missing a great deal of this one. Reading it made me think, though. I’ll hold some of its ideas for a while.
Old School, by Tobias Wolff
Old School is an American boarding school novel—from 2003. Written in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye or A Separate Peace, Wolff gives us a semi-autobiographical look at the life of a New England preparatory student in 1960. I find these books quite different from their British counterparts—more cynical, for one, but also more distinctly alien, in that the narrative is positioned as remote and not an invitation into that world. The boys usually leave it, violently, through war and expulsion and running away. They don’t belong there, and neither do you. I don’t quite know why; perhaps it’s something to do with the fact that boarding schools aren’t/weren’t as central in civic and social life here. The quintessential American school setting is a public high school. And this book is not that, it takes place in the near-mythical wilds of a private boys’ school in the Northeast.
Our unnamed narrator is a senior and an aspiring writer at a school which runs an interesting program: famous authors are invited to give talks, and the senior boys are allowed to submit works to them for review. The authors pick one work, and so one boy gets an individual audience with the author. With this framework in place, we have our story: the narrator tries to earn an audience with, and recognition from, a succession of authors: Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and his hero, Ernest Hemingway. Wolff takes the opportunity to caricature and critique each author in turn, but also to explain the appeal of each through the eyes of an adolescent boy—to nauseating effect with Rand. He’s clearly having a lot of fun being clever and referential, and there’s a lot of joy in reading that. The private prep school in my spouse’s hometown was mentioned, which is one of those lovely place-setting details you get in a very personal story! This wouldn’t feel the same if it weren’t Wolff’s own younger self that he was satirizing.
And those elements go deeper, beyond midcentury authors and hero-worship. Wolff takes on Judaism deftly, starting with an offhand mention about another character and growing into a broader question about the narrator’s identity, as a child of a Jewish father raised by his Catholic mother. Wolff comes to an opinion that I see as increasingly dated—at one point, a Jewish character states that if your answer to “are you Jewish?” is “it depends,” then you’re not. Without getting too into the weeds, there’s more room now than in 1960, or even 2003, for nuance. But I liked this plot thread and I liked a lot of how Wolff described the Jewish-American experience in that era.
He also uses expulsion as a really interesting device, given the school setting. It functions as death, and so the timespan of senior year is a sort of war. Who will survive to the end? Who will be expelled, and for what infraction? We have a few options dangled over our heads, especially the zero-strike ban on smoking, but what gets the narrator in the end is the Chekov’s gun of an Honor Code violation, for plagiarism, which is the only category of infraction with real consequences for a second-semester senior: no sitting for final exams, no diploma, and no chancy of keeping your Ivy League university admission. I was struck by the risk of writing a protagonist who plagiarizes, especially in a book so much about being/becoming a writer. It’s the sort of thing which could burn goodwill. I liked that it wasn’t the end of the narrator’s life, despite the expulsion, and that we see him in fast-forward through his next few years. The plagiarism is allowed to be a youthful mistake, a lesson learned, and not personality-defining. That’s a very gracious perspective.
I did see a notable downside of the story’s devotion to (semi) autobiography, and though it ties into my fandom interests as a slasher, there are non-shipping implications as well. The novel is just not that interested in the other boys. There’s a typical boarding school cast of students and masters, and they’re well-deployed in service of the plot, but that’s mostly all! The relationships don’t really matter. Typically, a schoolboy narrator will have chemistry with a friend or rival, in part because these intense childhood platonic relationships are so definitional to that age. I can’t say that Talbot Baines Reed wanted to imply queer attraction, but in earnestly capturing the focus on those peers, he made it possible to read queerness into the characters. Wolff sets up a competitor list for the narrator, other boys who write well and are in the same student org, including the narrator’s own roommate who also harbors the secret of his Jewishness! But every boy and every master is given a safely heterosexual attraction. I think this is a result of its era—books written after the 1960s are so devastatingly aware of queerness as a possibility that they meet it with safe denials. An unmarried master, a boy without a crush on a girl—those cannot stand, not in a straight novel. And the result is a curious disinterest in the narrator really knowing or caring about anyone. Yes, I’d have liked this to be different for shipping and queer-reading reasons, but it just is a weakness for the book to not invest more in the people around the narrator.
This comes to a head in the chapters after his expulsion. Yes, plural, around three chapters in which we zoom through his adult life, culminating in a chance reunion with a former master who tells him a story about the late dean of the school. Unfortunately, most of my reaction to this choice was bafflement. I kept waiting for the connection to make sense. Why end on two characters who are not the narrator, and who the narrator has little relationship with, even less than he had with the other boys of his age? This is where that relationship development would have come in handy!
So, I think, this book is for fans of those other more well-known classic American boarding school novels, who want to keep seeing this world. It fits that genre to a tee, and it’s a fair entry for its look at Jewishness, or for asking how an author develops. I don’t quite think it matches them, though. There are probably better modern books on the subject. (And there’s definitely a better modern movie: The Holdovers [2023].)
Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann
Translated by Kenneth Burke
Gustav Aschenbach is a middle-aged widower and author who, inspired by an encounter with a stranger one day, decides to set off on a vacation. He ends up in Venice, where he becomes enthralled by a teenage Polish boy named Tadzio. This obsession grows from observing the boy at their shared hotek, to following his family through the streets of Venice, to making the decision to withhold information about a cholera outbreak in the hopes of being trapped in quarantine with the family. Through all of this, Tadzio and his true opinion of Aschenbach remain enigmatic. Aschenbach is ultimately unsuccessful, and the novel ends with death by cholera—the titular death in Venice.
Reading books in translation is always a gamble. The Burke translation on Gutenberg was reportedly Auden’s favorite, but with all due respect to Auden, I don’t know that I liked it. I of course cannot read Mann in his original German, so I don’t know how much blame to lay at his feet, but I found the language blurry. This is not a book in which much happens—it’s largely beach scenes and the occasional conversation. But I felt like the language didn’t support that well. I sometimes struggled to know what was happening, or even if something was happening, because paragraphs would stretch on without proper nouns to ground me. This is relieved somewhat in the second half as Aschenbach makes deliberate choices about his response to the cholera outbreak. I’m not asking for more events—this is a short novella—but for my tastes, some sharper or more definitive language, at least occasionally, would have been welcome.
Death in Venice is one of those books wher eI don’t find that like or dislike is a useful framework for me. It’s more about the context: how Mann fits into the context of his hera, and how read Mann contextualizes other literature. In the context of his era, Mann writes Death in Venice as a sort of flagrant reveal of Victwardian gay shorthand, smashing the veil of plausible deniability surrounding every coded reference to the Phaedrus . The Ancient Greece symbolism is aggressively heavy-handed and applied, fully and repeatedly, to Ashenbach’s physical attraction to Tadzio. Tadzio is explicitly called Eros! There’s no subtlety here, and that’s interesting to me—Death in Venice was published in German in 1912 and was translated to English by the 1920s, which feels like a transition era in my own reading. It’s a period which seems to mark the end of abundant slashy popular fiction and the beginning of openly queer literature. Nothing in totality, of course. But a release like this blows open the code, the symbolism, that a Forster might have relied on. In that sense, Death in Venice feels like a fascinating peek into that period’s shifting values.
Meanwhile, Mann unlocks a new understanding of the authors who read him. Stephen Spender’s The Temple characterizes one German through his infatuation with a Mann protagonist, and knowing how Mann embraces queerness and was known for his willingness to navigate this association, to write about queer characters or experiences, I have a fuller picture of what his writing would have meant to a gay reader in the 1920s. And while I was reading Death in Venice, I was strongly reminded of Gilbert Adair’s Love and Death on Long Island, which turns out to have been an homage! (I think that I enjoyed the ways it transforms the concept, and Adair’s prose, more.) So it’s cool to be able to mentally slot Death in Venice into the trend of novels about older men lusting after boys in the bloom of youth. It’s not my favorite genre, but it’s an important and influential part of gay lit, so I’m glad to have read one of the big names.
Hope you’ve all been having a nice winter season and enjoying a break, or time with friends or family. :)
The Loser, by Thomas Bernhard
Translated by Jack Dawson
The Loser is a stream-of-consciousness style short novel about three men: the unnamed narrator, Wertheimer, and Glenn Gould (IRL pianist Glenn Gould, 1932 - 1982). All three pen were piano students together in their youth in the world of this novel, and their lives diverged from that point—Glenn Gould off to prodigal fame and an early death by stroke; Wertheimer giving up on the piano and eventually killing himself; the narrator rejecting his musical training, becoming a writer, and attempting to document the lives of his friends.
The title comes from Gould’s nickname for Wertheimer, and reveals the ultimate focus of the novel—on Wertheimer, his relationship with his sister, and his relationship with Gould/ The three men represent different visions of the same starting point: all of them come to the Mozarteum to train as concert pianists, and to believe the narrator, all three are talented and skilled players. Gould is clearly the best, but the narrator emphasizes that he and Wertheimer would have had careers among the best performers of their generation. It’s their brush with Gould’s greatness which diverts them—the friendship is the start of a lifelong obsession, from which inadequacy and despair will stem.
The narrator tells us about this shared history in an unbroken monologue. There are no chapters or paragraph breaks. His story flits between events, often losing itself in some digression and pulling back to the primary narrative a page or two later. This is my fourth such book this year and the style was a large component of why I picked it up off the sale table. I feel like I have absorbed this into my repertoire now, if that makes sense—it’s now a comfortable sort of book to read. I have a handle on how to process it. This one is in translation from German and the translator’s note made a big deal out of Bernhard’s unusual prose—how he uses italics or capitals, and apparent contradictions in the story. I found the text not particularly unusual or jarring on those points. What stood out more were other choices, such as dialogue attribution. Well, inasmuch as there is dialogue, as the book uses no quotation marks or breaks for speakers. But the narrator relates what a person has said with the format: he said, I thought. Throughout the text: someone said, and the narrator thought. I don’t know what to make of that.
But the focus: Wertheimer. Gould occupies the first third of the novel, roughly, to lay out the friendship-turned-obsession. And slowly, through digressions, we find ourselves having pivoted fully to Wertheimer, the loser, the piano player who neither succeeded professionally nor successfully rejected the practice. Wertheimer’s inadequacy kills him: he never finds another calling in life to replace the obsession, and his life devolves as he drives away companions. His personal tragedy is, in the end, more possessing than Gould’s life, as the narrator manages a comparatively scant biography of Gould, versus this rich portrait of Wertheimer. Wertheimer, who is part alter-ego, as a doubling of Bernhard’s presence also in the narrator, and partly a fictionalization of the philosopher Wittgenstein, is the person we learn the most about. He has a subtextually incestuous relationship with his sister, until she marries and escapes him, and lives out the unaddressed trauma of being a Jew who was forced to flee his Austrian home as a child during the second world war. And so the return post-war, and the life in cities which once embraced Nazis, in a family home once occupied by a Nazi, becomes a surprising new layer over the telling of Wertheimer’s suicide. I’m describing this poorly—I’m still learning how to write about such clever, confusing books. But the effect is striking.
I think that the summary of this, much like Mrs Dalloway or Shyness and Dignity, is that such a book is a journey best undertaken when one can read for prose. Ultimately the story does not matter, and the characters are necessary for voice but often peculiarly flat in that theiir relationships exist in retrospect. There’s a weird combination of amazing focus and shallow depth of field, so that perhaps one or two characters approach real, but their sharpness compared to surrounding fuzziness makes htem unreal again. I’m prepared to say that every reader should try something like it—if only to know how else a commentary can look, outside the Austen-shaped bounds of society novels. I appreciate that I’m missing a great deal of this one. Reading it made me think, though. I’ll hold some of its ideas for a while.
Old School, by Tobias Wolff
Old School is an American boarding school novel—from 2003. Written in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye or A Separate Peace, Wolff gives us a semi-autobiographical look at the life of a New England preparatory student in 1960. I find these books quite different from their British counterparts—more cynical, for one, but also more distinctly alien, in that the narrative is positioned as remote and not an invitation into that world. The boys usually leave it, violently, through war and expulsion and running away. They don’t belong there, and neither do you. I don’t quite know why; perhaps it’s something to do with the fact that boarding schools aren’t/weren’t as central in civic and social life here. The quintessential American school setting is a public high school. And this book is not that, it takes place in the near-mythical wilds of a private boys’ school in the Northeast.
Our unnamed narrator is a senior and an aspiring writer at a school which runs an interesting program: famous authors are invited to give talks, and the senior boys are allowed to submit works to them for review. The authors pick one work, and so one boy gets an individual audience with the author. With this framework in place, we have our story: the narrator tries to earn an audience with, and recognition from, a succession of authors: Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and his hero, Ernest Hemingway. Wolff takes the opportunity to caricature and critique each author in turn, but also to explain the appeal of each through the eyes of an adolescent boy—to nauseating effect with Rand. He’s clearly having a lot of fun being clever and referential, and there’s a lot of joy in reading that. The private prep school in my spouse’s hometown was mentioned, which is one of those lovely place-setting details you get in a very personal story! This wouldn’t feel the same if it weren’t Wolff’s own younger self that he was satirizing.
And those elements go deeper, beyond midcentury authors and hero-worship. Wolff takes on Judaism deftly, starting with an offhand mention about another character and growing into a broader question about the narrator’s identity, as a child of a Jewish father raised by his Catholic mother. Wolff comes to an opinion that I see as increasingly dated—at one point, a Jewish character states that if your answer to “are you Jewish?” is “it depends,” then you’re not. Without getting too into the weeds, there’s more room now than in 1960, or even 2003, for nuance. But I liked this plot thread and I liked a lot of how Wolff described the Jewish-American experience in that era.
He also uses expulsion as a really interesting device, given the school setting. It functions as death, and so the timespan of senior year is a sort of war. Who will survive to the end? Who will be expelled, and for what infraction? We have a few options dangled over our heads, especially the zero-strike ban on smoking, but what gets the narrator in the end is the Chekov’s gun of an Honor Code violation, for plagiarism, which is the only category of infraction with real consequences for a second-semester senior: no sitting for final exams, no diploma, and no chancy of keeping your Ivy League university admission. I was struck by the risk of writing a protagonist who plagiarizes, especially in a book so much about being/becoming a writer. It’s the sort of thing which could burn goodwill. I liked that it wasn’t the end of the narrator’s life, despite the expulsion, and that we see him in fast-forward through his next few years. The plagiarism is allowed to be a youthful mistake, a lesson learned, and not personality-defining. That’s a very gracious perspective.
I did see a notable downside of the story’s devotion to (semi) autobiography, and though it ties into my fandom interests as a slasher, there are non-shipping implications as well. The novel is just not that interested in the other boys. There’s a typical boarding school cast of students and masters, and they’re well-deployed in service of the plot, but that’s mostly all! The relationships don’t really matter. Typically, a schoolboy narrator will have chemistry with a friend or rival, in part because these intense childhood platonic relationships are so definitional to that age. I can’t say that Talbot Baines Reed wanted to imply queer attraction, but in earnestly capturing the focus on those peers, he made it possible to read queerness into the characters. Wolff sets up a competitor list for the narrator, other boys who write well and are in the same student org, including the narrator’s own roommate who also harbors the secret of his Jewishness! But every boy and every master is given a safely heterosexual attraction. I think this is a result of its era—books written after the 1960s are so devastatingly aware of queerness as a possibility that they meet it with safe denials. An unmarried master, a boy without a crush on a girl—those cannot stand, not in a straight novel. And the result is a curious disinterest in the narrator really knowing or caring about anyone. Yes, I’d have liked this to be different for shipping and queer-reading reasons, but it just is a weakness for the book to not invest more in the people around the narrator.
This comes to a head in the chapters after his expulsion. Yes, plural, around three chapters in which we zoom through his adult life, culminating in a chance reunion with a former master who tells him a story about the late dean of the school. Unfortunately, most of my reaction to this choice was bafflement. I kept waiting for the connection to make sense. Why end on two characters who are not the narrator, and who the narrator has little relationship with, even less than he had with the other boys of his age? This is where that relationship development would have come in handy!
So, I think, this book is for fans of those other more well-known classic American boarding school novels, who want to keep seeing this world. It fits that genre to a tee, and it’s a fair entry for its look at Jewishness, or for asking how an author develops. I don’t quite think it matches them, though. There are probably better modern books on the subject. (And there’s definitely a better modern movie: The Holdovers [2023].)
Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann
Translated by Kenneth Burke
Gustav Aschenbach is a middle-aged widower and author who, inspired by an encounter with a stranger one day, decides to set off on a vacation. He ends up in Venice, where he becomes enthralled by a teenage Polish boy named Tadzio. This obsession grows from observing the boy at their shared hotek, to following his family through the streets of Venice, to making the decision to withhold information about a cholera outbreak in the hopes of being trapped in quarantine with the family. Through all of this, Tadzio and his true opinion of Aschenbach remain enigmatic. Aschenbach is ultimately unsuccessful, and the novel ends with death by cholera—the titular death in Venice.
Reading books in translation is always a gamble. The Burke translation on Gutenberg was reportedly Auden’s favorite, but with all due respect to Auden, I don’t know that I liked it. I of course cannot read Mann in his original German, so I don’t know how much blame to lay at his feet, but I found the language blurry. This is not a book in which much happens—it’s largely beach scenes and the occasional conversation. But I felt like the language didn’t support that well. I sometimes struggled to know what was happening, or even if something was happening, because paragraphs would stretch on without proper nouns to ground me. This is relieved somewhat in the second half as Aschenbach makes deliberate choices about his response to the cholera outbreak. I’m not asking for more events—this is a short novella—but for my tastes, some sharper or more definitive language, at least occasionally, would have been welcome.
Death in Venice is one of those books wher eI don’t find that like or dislike is a useful framework for me. It’s more about the context: how Mann fits into the context of his hera, and how read Mann contextualizes other literature. In the context of his era, Mann writes Death in Venice as a sort of flagrant reveal of Victwardian gay shorthand, smashing the veil of plausible deniability surrounding every coded reference to the Phaedrus . The Ancient Greece symbolism is aggressively heavy-handed and applied, fully and repeatedly, to Ashenbach’s physical attraction to Tadzio. Tadzio is explicitly called Eros! There’s no subtlety here, and that’s interesting to me—Death in Venice was published in German in 1912 and was translated to English by the 1920s, which feels like a transition era in my own reading. It’s a period which seems to mark the end of abundant slashy popular fiction and the beginning of openly queer literature. Nothing in totality, of course. But a release like this blows open the code, the symbolism, that a Forster might have relied on. In that sense, Death in Venice feels like a fascinating peek into that period’s shifting values.
Meanwhile, Mann unlocks a new understanding of the authors who read him. Stephen Spender’s The Temple characterizes one German through his infatuation with a Mann protagonist, and knowing how Mann embraces queerness and was known for his willingness to navigate this association, to write about queer characters or experiences, I have a fuller picture of what his writing would have meant to a gay reader in the 1920s. And while I was reading Death in Venice, I was strongly reminded of Gilbert Adair’s Love and Death on Long Island, which turns out to have been an homage! (I think that I enjoyed the ways it transforms the concept, and Adair’s prose, more.) So it’s cool to be able to mentally slot Death in Venice into the trend of novels about older men lusting after boys in the bloom of youth. It’s not my favorite genre, but it’s an important and influential part of gay lit, so I’m glad to have read one of the big names.
Thomas Bernhard
Date: 2026-01-01 09:32 pm (UTC)More Thomas Bernhard
Date: 2026-01-01 10:51 pm (UTC)Re: More Thomas Bernhard
Date: 2026-01-03 01:24 am (UTC)And I’m glad that you enjoyed my description of the book’s characters. Photography metaphors seemed the only thing to really capture how they’re written! Which speaks to the experimental and expansive approach to writing, I think. If you do reread this in the coming year, ping me about it!
no subject
Date: 2026-01-04 02:24 pm (UTC)From what I've seen of those American school novels, they're very much not in the school-story genre—I mean the genre in which books may very well have literary merit but are primarily intended as fun adventure stories rather than Serious Literature, and to which most British school novels before you get to later deconstructions like Another Country and Lord Dismiss Us belong. Hence the lack of cynicism and the general impression of inviting the reader into the story's world. This does sound like a very interesting one, too—the great seriousness and plot importance of plagiarism isn't something I've seen anywhere else, I don't think.
no subject
Date: 2026-01-04 08:20 pm (UTC)Definitely a true statement about the relative literary categories of school novels, but! I actually do have an example of a plagiarism story in the British school novel tradition: The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s does it, and probably not coincidentally, it is one of my favorites! I love how the story unfolds there, and to your point, it does feel more sophisticated than most of its peers in that era.
no subject
Date: 2026-01-05 10:02 am (UTC)