My Prizes: An Accounting, Thomas Bernhard 1980

Bernhard, born in Holland in 1931, died in Austria in 1989 and is arguably the best German novelist of the 20th C.  An ‘infant terrible’, Bernhard decried the emptiness, monotony, and dehumanization of the modern industrial age, mega-state man.  A frequent critic of the Austrian state, he was the recipient of most major literary prizes and used those ceremonies, recounted in this slim volume, to excoriate the sponsors, especially the Ministry of Culture and literary associations, all of which he resigned from.  The translation is by the woman who translated one of my favorite re-read books, The Embers.