Author: Thomas Bernhard
Translator: David McLintock
Publisher: Faber
Paperback
Staff Pick!
Dan says… "Thomas Bernhard’s most incisive novel. A skewering of Viennese bourgeois society, framed around a dinner to host a famous actor, Woodcutters deals with typically intense topics: suicide, failure, alcoholism, sexuality. Written as a roman-à-clef, Woodcutters caused outrage at the time of its publication. Not only did Bernhard turn upon his long-time patrons and supporters, the controversy reached the court rooms: Woodcutters is the only book in postwar Austria to be seized from the shelves of bookshops by armed police. Gruelling, hilarious and deeply moving, read this if you want to an exquisite rant about artistic pretensions."