My introduction to Bernhard has been a good one. Although, to be fair, it is definitely a book that I was designed to enjoy, featuring the Tyler-catnip elements of polyphonic, schizophrenic voices, obsessive observation of one's own thought process, and digressive, layered, matryoshka-doll sentences. Bernhard's attention to rhythm in his sentences manages to make the uninterrupted paragraph quite enjoyable to read, and while there are some hitches in the translation that are possibly absent in the original, the prose styling is strong either way. The book takes a different angle on the parallels of life and music than Doctor Faustus--maybe largely because of Doctor Faustus' explicit invocation of musical details--but there are plenty of similarities, for example the characterizations of Glenn Gould and Wertheimer could be combined into a pseudo-Adrian Leverkühn. I'm left wanting to read more of Bernhard's work and dive deeper into his head; The Loser projects a captivating reflection of the author and I want to see more (while I could guess, I didn't realize how personal the book was until I read the Afterword, which filled in a lot of his biographical information).