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Alte Meister is the last novel Thomas Bernhard completed - although Auslöschung appeared a year later, in 1986, it was written in the early 1980s. Also because it sets up a literary monument to the author's "life person," Hedwig Stavianicek, Alte Meister stands out among Bernhard's novels. And a third feature makes it an exceptional book within the unique prose oeuvre: in no other place in the oeuvre is art, any art, so condemned as in this novel - it is, in all its genres, thoroughly flawed, incapable of giving people even the slightest thing. And in none does the praise of the other, of other people resound so unreservedly. The book ends with the sentence that has become proverbial: "The performance was appalling.