Four naan, Wertheimer?

jdkafka

Dec 22, 2025 11:26 PM

170 pages locked in the mind of an indefatigable misanthrope. We meet him as he's about to cross the doorway of an inn, an action that takes something like 70 pages to complete because the narrator's thoughts exhaustively shuffle through the backstory taking him up to this door: in their youth, he and another "piano artist" (he notes his disgust with the word "pianist") called Wertheimer studied for a period alongside the genius Glenn Gould, with Gould's instant, absolute reduction of the pair to second-rate status so disabling to both that it permanently changed their lives' trajectories and eventuated Wertheimher's pathetic and mean-spirited suicide decades later.

A lot of the fun comes from the psychological picture painted of the three members of the triangle. Glenn Gould is like an Olympian God casually dispensing cruel judgement from on high while the narrator and Wertheimer, his acolytes, have a relationship whose nearest analogue is Mark and Jeremy from Peep Show, except they're somehow both Mark.

This also connects to the other main pleasure of this book, which is the back-and-forth, loopy motion of the acidic sentences over a number of subjects, including the narrator's hatred of "dog-do socialism" or the evil effects of the weather in various Austrian towns, not to mention his merciless estimate of his dead friend, passages that made our book club burst out laughing when we re-read them out loud:

I was always capable of everything possible, but on the whole purposely avoided using this capacity, always out of indolence, arrogance, laziness, boredom, I thought. But Wertheimer never was up to anything he attempted, nothing and double nothing, as they say. Except that he was up to being an unhappy person. In this respect it's not surprising that Wertheimer killed himself and Glenn didn't and I didn't, although Wertheimer predicted my suicide over and over, like so many others who always let me know that they knew I would kill myself.