The Loser

Thomas Bernhard's novel imagines a relationship between the pianist Glenn Gould and two fellow students in Vladimir Horowitz's piano class at Salzburg's Mozarteum, where they met him in 1953. Hearing the young Canadian play the Goldberg Variations, they realize he is a greater pianist than even their teacher, and both abandon their own musical ambitions. The narrator, obsessive and self-mocking, gave up the piano for philosophy and an essay on Gould he never finished; his friend Wertheimer, whom Gould called the loser, later took his own life. The narrator recalls all three in a continuous first-person monologue with no paragraph breaks. Bernhard wrote it in German.

Daniel Buttner, co-founder of Lofelt, said that when he studied music his favorite book was this novel, which he named by its German title, Der Untergeher.