Douglas Robertson

A collection of six Bernhard plays, all in English for the first time.Save Yourself if You Can is a collection of six plays that span the entirety of Thomas Bernhard’s career as a dramatist. The plays collected in this long-awaited addition to Bernhard’s oeuvre in English—The Ignoramus and the Madman, The Celebrities, Immanuel Kant, The Goal Attained, Simply Complicated, and Elizabeth II—traverse somber lyricism and misanthropy to biting satire and glorious slapstick. They explore themes that will be familiar to longtime readers of Bernhardt, but here they are presented in a subtly different register, attuned to the needs of the stage.

A collection of previously untranslated stories from a master of twentieth-century Austrian literature, Thomas Bernhard. “The cold increases with the clarity,” said Thomas Bernhard while accepting a major literary prize in 1965. That clarity was the postwar realization that the West’s last remaining cultural reference points were being swept away by the ever-greater commodification of humankind. Collecting five stylistically transitional tales by Bernhard, all of which take place in sites of extreme cold, this volume extends that bleak vision of the master Austrian storyteller. In “Ungenach,” the reluctant heir of an enormous estate chooses to give away his legacy to an assortment of oddballs as he discovers the past of his older brother, who was murdered during a career in futile colonialist philanthropy. In “The Weatherproof Cape,” a lawyer tries to maintain a sense of familial solidarity with a now-dead client with the help of an unremarkable piece of clothing. “Midland in Stilfs” casts a jaundiced eye on the laughable efforts of a cosmopolitan foreigner to attain local authenticity on a moribund Alpine farmstead. In “At the Ortler,” two middle-aged brothers—one a scientist, the other an acrobat—meditate on their unusual career paths while they climb a mountain to reclaim a long-abandoned family property. And in “At the Timberline,” the unexpected arrival of a young couple in a mountain village leads to the discovery of a scandalous crime that casts a shadow on the personal life of the policeman investigating it.

Douglas Robertson has taken his father's classic book, Survive the Savage Sea, as his starting point. The Robertson family set sail from the south of England on their 43-foot schooner, LUCETTE, which was holed by killer whales and sank in the Pacific Ocean. Four adults and two children survived the next 38 days adrift, first in a rubber life raft, then crammed into a 9-foot fiberglass dinghy, before being rescued by a passing Japanese fishing vessel. This is the story of the 18-month voyage of the LUCETTE across the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal and into the Pacific, and how the family survived their shipwreck. It is a vivid account of the delights and hardships and the excitements and the dangers, experienced by the family both before and after the shipwreck. The author has drawn upon a wealth of other sources, including his own memories of a life-changing experience, to bring us this true story of adventure ? ultimately a very human and humbling tale.