• 28 Dec, 2025 *

"The Loser" is about failure, it’s about staring down the abyss of your own mediocrity and insignificance, sitting right next to the greatest pianist of the 20th century.

The great perversion of Bernhard is to propose that failure is not the negation, but the positive filament of the ego. You’re not stopped from being the person you really are by laziness or stupidity or bad luck. The very special mix of individual failures and their relations make you yourself. Each and every one is special, and that specialty is produced by a unique combination of failures. Failure is the constitution of your soul. You are your failures.

Encountering a genius forces an absurd shock, a rupture between man and universe. Glenn Gould is not a traditional character, but more of an event kicking two main characters into the spiral of constant repetition, obsession, self-deprecation, and reinvention. The seeds were there: hatred for the family, the society, the nation; but the moment Wertheimer hears Gould playing Goldberg Variations, unable to sit down, the absurd takes control and he has no other options but to plunge into failure.

Via the narrator Bernhard tells us that everybody is a loser, and that is enough, that attempts to catch up to genius will only deepen the trauma. I’d call this egalitarian pessimism. Genius is so unfair and so anti-meritocratic, that it’s better to accept the democratic and unifying nature of losing. There’s this saying that the middle class believes that they’re all just soon-to-be-millionaires. To take this further, we’re all soon-to-be-geniuses.

There’s an ambiguous and unresolved tension between Bernhard and the narrator. At some levels they clearly overlap, at some - diverge. The big question left unanswered: Is failure a pathology, a miasma poisoning overthinking rich kids or a part of the human condition, a death-drive tendency within us?

But failure doesn’t mean the need to stop. In fact, true failure is constant acceleration, a race to the bottom, a spiral with no exit plan. The book presents Wertheimer as the ultimate loser, someone who halted his failure, who couldn’t come up with more ways to destroy himself. The narrator finds room for even more failure, more space under the bottom to plunge into. Failure is reinventing, finding new ways to fail, never stopping; stopping is mediocrity, which is the worst sin to Bernhard. To stop is to reject the true purpose of life, which is to keep failing in more and more ways.

So the name of the book - "The Loser" - hints not just at one of the main characters, but at everybody attempting to read it. We’re all Wertheimers. The solution (besides suicide) is not pretty: either be a one in a billion genius like Gould and die or become the narrator, ranting and never stopping, following the thread down, becoming an even bigger loser.

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