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In most of his fictions—including this novella—the Austrian Thomas Bernhard insults everything Austrian. In fact, Bernhard declared in his will that every one of his literary works in perpetuity must not be printed or presented within the state of Austria, or within the geographical boundaries of the present state of Austria, whatever that area may in the future be called. Yet he never made an attempt to emigrate; he lived in Austria all his life.

Bernhard was a man of contradictions, and his works--The Loser, for instance—are full of contradictions too. They are filled with solitary characters who spew forth spleen and invective, loathing the seediness of everyday life, and yet these solitaries are often bound together by some ideal which points beyond pettiness, some absolute which both inspires and degrades them. In Losers that ideal is music.

What plot there is, is simple. In 1953, the unnamed Narrator and the “loser� Wertheimer, both advanced students of piano, met at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, intending to study with Horowitz. There, one day, standing just outside a practice room, they heard Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations. Although the three become friends, the narrator and Wertheimer both knew perfection when they heard it, and from that moment their ambition to play serious piano began to die. Before the monologue that is The Loser begins, the narrator has learned that Wertheimer has committed suicide, and he begins to examine—in obsessive detail—the friendship of these three men: how both he and Wertheimer were not like Gould, and how he himself is not like Wertheimer.

If you like the bleak humor of Beckett's novels or the rants of the later Ligotti (My Work is Not Yet Done comes to mind) you will probably like this novella. But Bernhard brings a wealth of ironies all his own.

I'll end with the novella's first anti-Austrian rant, this one specifically about Salzburg:

...Salzburg, which at bottom is the sworn enemy of all art and culture, a cretinous provincial dump with stupid people and cold walls where everything without exception is eventually made cretinous....The town of Salzburg, which today is freshly painted in even its darkest corners and is even more disgusting than it was twenty-eight years ago was and is antagonistic to everything of value in a human being, and in time destroys it....The people of Salzburg have always been dreadful, like their climate, and when I enter the town today not only is my judgment confirmed, everything is even more dreadful....Glenn was charmed by the magic of this town for three days, then he saw that its magic, as they like to call it, was rotten, that basically its beauty is disgusting and that the people living in this disgusting beauty are vulgar. The climate of the lower Alps makes for emotionally disturbed people who fall victim to cretinism at a very early age and who in time become malevolent, I said.