Twenty-Five Years Yesterday

Yesterday was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Thomas Bernhard's death. I suppose he's not the kind of writer whose birth one would celebrate.

Anyway, people got excited. Someone wrote on Facebook that Thomas Bernhard once took him to the zoo as a child, prompting many oohs and ahs. There were articles in the papers. The German writer Joachim Lottmann visited Bernhard's favourite places in Vienna and more or less repeated what Bernhard said about them: old brown café = good, painting of old man = good, everything else appalling. A younger Austrian writer, Alexander Schimmelbusch, had a party in Berlin to celebrate his novel Die Murau Identität, in which Bernhard didn't die after all. I didn't go and I can't really be bothered to read it. There's a review at The Complete Review.  

I don't know. I've read his early stories in Martin Chalmers' translation, coming away nonplussed, and I read and was very, very keen on Alte Meister because I appreciated the style a great deal. But as that impression fades – I read it because someone said nothing happened in it, but that wasn't the case at all – all I'm left with is a grumpy man, to whom other grumpy men look up. I come across a fair amount of people who make it their business to be grumpy about everything, and I suspect that must make it hard to be enthusiastic about anything. Like Nein Quarterly, maybe. You can't imagine his persona just going home and enjoying a slice of cake. I remember there was a tiny spark of hope in Alte Meister, something to do with art being imperfect in a good way. Or that's how I remember reading it.  

Anyway, gloomily enough, someone stole the marble memorial plate from Bernhard's grave, and according to Lottmann his half-brother says he's not going to replace it. 

Our Survey* Says: Men Will Not Admit to Reading Books by Women

So there's this, erm, dating website, which, you know, a friend of mine signed up to. And you set up a profile - I mean, my friend set up a profile - and you can include all kinds of stuff but one of the things is what books, films, music, etc. you like. And what kind of food, which I find a bit odd but maybe it's to prevent cucumber-haters falling for cucumber-lovers, because nobody wants that, do they?

Anyway, I have been thinking about the whole men-not-reading-women thing and the women-not-getting-reviewed thing (which I suspect are related phenomena), especially in the light of Matt Jakubowski's resolution to only read books by women. A cursory Monday-evening web search has not turned up any reliable statistics on the extent to which men don't read women, but I do rather like this piece on the W&N blog looking at what the reasons might be.

So while I my friend was browsing the catalogue of single, straight men in Berlin aged between 35 and 45, I my friend was focusing quite closely on what books the men listed in their profiles. For obvious reasons but also with an eye on the gender of the writers. Now I have no idea how many of the damn things I she went through but one thing became clear very, very quickly: single, straight men in Berlin aged between 35 and 45 are damn well not going to admit to reading books by women.

Here are the women writers listed by the study sample:
Sylvia Plath
Annemarie Schwarzenbach
Toni Morrison
Virginia Woolf
Angela Carter 
Ursula LeGuin (twice)
JK Rowling (twice, although the subjects actually referred to her character, but let's try not to judge)

Here are the male writers listed by the study sample:
Graham Greene 
TC Boyle
Stanislav Lem
Thomas Bernhard
Max Frisch
Philip Roth
Sven Regener
Javier Marias
Henrik Ibsen
Walter Benjamin
JD Salinger
Marcel Proust
Stefan Zweig
George Orwell
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Theodor Adorno
Jack Kerouac
Mikhail Bulgakov
Rainald Goetz
Neil Gaiman
David Foster Wallace
Chuck Palahniuk
Michel Houellebecq
Raymond Carver
Oscar Wilde
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Albert Camus
Anton Chekhov
Charles Bukowski (twice)
Hermann Hesse (twice)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (twice)
Miguel de Cervantes (twice)
Haruki Murakami (twice)
Milan Kundera (twice)
Paulo Coelho (twice)
Franz Kafka (three mentions)

Now listen, I'm aware that people don't tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth on online dating profiles. And you wouldn't want to put down some totally obscure writer because  nobody likes a clever dick. And maybe non-single men or men in other cities and other age groups or with other sexualities are all digging into Jane Austen and Judith Butler like crazy. But isn't it fascinating? Only nine out of shitloads of men admit to reading books by women!

I hope the study sample doesn't read this en masse and get upset. I mean, guys, read whatever you like, even Coelho. The solution, it seems to me, is for the women of Berlin to bombard their (straight, single) male friends and acquaintances (in Berlin, between 35 and 45) with books written by women, so that a) they read them in the first place and b) they get a tacit message that women find books by women sexy. Thank you. 

*Not strictly scientific

Update: my friend has left the dating site. She found it troubling to "rate" people out of five, especially based on a very limited self-description that tended to make everyone, herself no doubt included, seem either utterly banal and uninteresting or borderline psychiatric cases. Plus the men she liked didn't like her back, and the algorithm suggested she ought to make contact with someone who listed Atlas Shrugged as his favourite book. And don't say 'At least it's by a woman'.