The Loser

The Loser is a novel by Thomas Bernhard, originally published in German in 1983. The Loser consists almost entirely of its (unnamed) narrator's recollections of and ruminations on his relationships with two pianist friends: one named Wertheimer, the other named Glenn Gould. Like all of Bernhard's novels since Frost (1963), The Loser is written in the form of a continuous first person interior monologue, unbroken by paragraph indentations and full of run-on sentences, obsessive repetitions, odd and unexplained uses of italics, and alienating leaps (without transition) from verb tense to verb tense.