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THOMAS BERNHARD (1931–1989) was an Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet. English translations of his works published by the University of Chicago Press include Woodcutters and Wittgenstein’s Nephew: A Friendship, both translated by David McLintock; Histrionics: Three Plays, translated by Peter Jansen and Kenneth J. Northcott; The Loser: A Novel, translated by Jack Dawson; and Yes, translated by Ewald Osers.

104 Stories

104 STORIES

Hamsun

HAMSUN

Near Oslo we met a man of about sixty who told us more about the old people’s home than we already knew from reading Hamsun’s accounts of the last year of his life, because he had been working in the home at precisely the time during which the greatest of Norwegian writers was living there. The man’s taciturnity had attracted our attention in the inn near Oslo—usually so noisy on a Friday evening—where we were staying for several nights. After we had sat down at his table and introduced ourselves, we learned that the man had originally been a philosophy student and had, among other things, spent four years studying at Göttingen. We had taken him for a Norwegian ship’s captain and had come to his table to hear some more about seafaring, not about philosophy, from which, indeed, we had fled north from Central Europe. But the man didn’t bother us with philosophy and said he had actually given up philosophy overnight and put himself at the disposal of geriatrics at the age of twenty-seven. He said he did not regret his decision. He told us his first task had been to help an old man get out of bed, make the bed for him, and then put him back into it. The old man was Hamsun. He had looked after Hamsun every day for several months, had taken him out into the garden that lay behind the old people’s home, and had gone to the village for him to buy the pencils that Hamsun used to write his last book. He was, he said, the first person to see Hamsun dead. In the nature of things, he said, he was not yet certain who Hamsun was when he pulled the sheet up over his face.

The Voice Imitator

THE VOICE IMITATOR