"His manner of speaking, like that of all the subordinated, excluded, was awkward, like a body full of wounds, into which at any time anyone can strew salt, yet so insistent, that it is painful to listen to him. (From T̀he Carpenter')" "Prose, seven stories by Thomas Bernhard, was first published in German in 1967 and is now appearing in English for the first time. Written at the same time as Bernhard's early novels Frost, Gargoyles and The Lime Works, the stories here display the same obsessions, restlessness and mastery of language. The narrators of these stories lack the strength to do anything but listen and then write, the reader in turn becoming a captive listener, deciphering the traps laid by memory and the mere words, the never-ending words with which we try to pin it down. Words which are always close to driving the narrator crazy b̀ut yet not completely crazy'."--BOOK JACKET.