One night in the middle of winter, as deep snow covers the mountains and forests, a doctor is crossing the ridge in Austria from Traich to Föding to see a patient. He stumbles over a body in the darkness and fears it is a corpse. But it’s not a corpse at all. In fact, it’s wooden-legged Victor Halfwit, collapsed, but still very much alive. So begins this dark and comic tale by celebrated Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet Thomas Bernhard.
We discover that Halfwit, for whom the book is named, foolishly made a bet with a local mill owner that Halfwit could cover the distance between Traich and Föding in an hour or less—despite his wooden legs, the darkness of the night, the deep snow, and the brutal mid-winter cold. Thanks to the serendipitous presence of the doctor, Halfwit wins the bet and thus will be able to buy the new boots that he desired; yet he has destroyed his wooden legs in the very process of winning.
Victor Halfwit may have originally been conceived as an absurd fable for children, but Bernhard’s masterly grasp of the intersection of tragedy and comedy renders this a story for all ages.
“The feeling grows that Thomas Bernhard is the most original, concentrated novelist writing in German. His connections . . . with the great constellation of Kafka, Musil, and Broch become ever clearer.”—George Steiner, Times Literary Supplement
“What is extraordinary about Bernhard is that his relentless pessimism never seems open to ridicule; his world is so powerfully imagined that it can seem to surround you like little else in literature.”—New Yorker
