Books › Untergeher
Untergeher
First published 1991 · 208 pages
A breathless, darkly hilarious, and devastating rant about the agony of being merely good in the presence of true genius.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like being trapped in a small room with a brilliant, bitter, and endlessly fascinating conversationalist who refuses to let you speak. The prose is a relentless, unparagraphed torrent, a musical, hypnotic cascade of repetitions and variations that pulls you into the narrator's feverish obsession. It is a claustrophobic and darkly comic exploration of what happens when ordinary ambition collides with incomparable, world-shattering genius. The atmosphere is thick with existential dread, yet the sheer velocity of the narrator's misanthropic wit makes it impossible to look away. It will delight readers who crave uncompromising, philosophical fiction and those who find a strange, cathartic comfort in the darkest, most obsessive corners of the human psyche.
- Mood
- claustrophobic
- feverish
- oppressive
- melancholic
- Tone
- obsessive
- misanthropic
- darkly comic
- relentless
- cynical
- Pace
- propulsive
- Themes
- the crushing weight of genius · artistic mediocrity · existential despair · obsessive rivalry · the futility of ambition
- The writing
- A relentless, unparagraphed torrent of musical, repetitive, and hypnotic sentences that mimic a manic fugue state.
- The arc
- A descent into the spiraling, obsessive grief of a narrator grappling with his own profound mediocrity in the shadow of absolute genius.
- Who it's for
- Readers who revel in dark, philosophical rants, obsessive narrators, and the agonizing pursuit of artistic perfection.
Content notes
- suicide
- depression
- existential dread
About the book
"...Account of an imagined relationship among three men--including the late piano virtuoso Glenn Gould, who meet in 1953 to study with Vladimir Horowitz. In the face of Gould's incomparable genius, his two fellow students renounce their musical ambition, but in very different ways."--P. [4] of Cover.
Description from Open Library.
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