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Extinction
Thomas Bernhard is one of the greatest twentieth-century writers in the German language. Extinction, his last novel, takes the form of the autobiographical testimony of Franz-Josef Murau. The intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family, Murau lives in self-exile in Rome. Obsessed and angry with his identity as an Austrian, he resolves never to return to the family estate of Wolfsegg. But when news comes of his parents' deaths, he finds himself master of Wolfsegg and must decide its fate.
Written in Bernhard's seamless style, Extinction is the ultimate proof of his extraordinary literary genius.
Written in Bernhard's seamless style, Extinction is the ultimate proof of his extraordinary literary genius.
335 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
About the author
Thomas Bernhard
281 books2,087 followersThomas Bernhard was an Austrian writer who ranks among the most distinguished German-speaking writers of the second half of the 20th century.
Although internationally he's most acclaimed because of his novels, he was also a prolific playwright. His characters are often at work on a lifetime and never-ending major project while they deal with themes such as suicide, madness and obsession, and, as Bernhard did, a love-hate relationship with Austria. His prose is tumultuous but sober at the same time, philosophic by turns, with a musical cadence and plenty of black humor.
He started publishing in the year 1963 with the novel Frost. His last published work, appearing in the year 1986, was Extinction. Some of his best-known works include The Loser (about a student's fictionalized relationship with the pianist Glenn Gould), Wittgenstein's Nephew, and Woodcutters.
Although internationally he's most acclaimed because of his novels, he was also a prolific playwright. His characters are often at work on a lifetime and never-ending major project while they deal with themes such as suicide, madness and obsession, and, as Bernhard did, a love-hate relationship with Austria. His prose is tumultuous but sober at the same time, philosophic by turns, with a musical cadence and plenty of black humor.
He started publishing in the year 1963 with the novel Frost. His last published work, appearing in the year 1986, was Extinction. Some of his best-known works include The Loser (about a student's fictionalized relationship with the pianist Glenn Gould), Wittgenstein's Nephew, and Woodcutters.
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January 10, 2024
On receiving tragic news, the protagonist starts recalling his life and the stream of his consciousness turns into the stream of vituperation against his family and against the entire world…
The narrator is just a snooty snob…
And he is an intellectual fraud…
Once again, portraying the modern world Thomas Bernhard is venomously sagacious and bitterly sardonic…
And in the end the main character turns out to be nothing but a cowardly mean hater…
And it makes me wonder how many so-called men of letters are just bloodthirsty leeches that parasitize on the body of society doing nothing but bending innocent minds.
The question of whether I had loved my parents and my brother was one that I at once fended off with the word naturally, but it remained fundamentally unanswered. For ages I had not had what is called a good relationship with either my parents or my brother but had one marked by tension and, in recent years, indifference.
The narrator is just a snooty snob…
No teacher and no judge can be trusted as far as you can throw him. Without scruple or compunction they daily destroy many of the existences that are thrown upon their mercy, being motivated by base caprice and a desire to avenge themselves for their miserable, twisted lives – and they are actually paid for doing so.
And he is an intellectual fraud…
We approach philosophy with extreme caution, I said, and we fail. Then with resolution, and we fail. Even if we approach it head-on and lay ourselves open, we fail. It’s as though we had no right to any share in philosophy, I said. Philosophy is like the air we breathe: we breathe it in, but we can’t retain it for long before breathing it out. All our lives we constantly inhale it and exhale it, but we can never retain it for that vital extra moment that would make all the difference.
Once again, portraying the modern world Thomas Bernhard is venomously sagacious and bitterly sardonic…
The majority has always brought misfortune, I thought, and even today we have the majority to thank for most of our ills. The minority and the individual are crushed by the majority because they are more in tune with the times and act accordingly.
And in the end the main character turns out to be nothing but a cowardly mean hater…
At an early age my sisters formed a conspiracy against me. They were believed, I was not; their word carried conviction, mine did not. And so I resolved to avenge myself. I locked them in the dark, airless larder, pushed them into the pond, or shoved them from behind so that they would fall full-length in their white Sunday-best dresses and get up dirty and bleeding from top to toe.
And it makes me wonder how many so-called men of letters are just bloodthirsty leeches that parasitize on the body of society doing nothing but bending innocent minds.
November 24, 2012
Thomas Bernhard : the dentist’s drill of modern literature. When you are having such an entirely miserable, entirely lonely, entirely teeth-grinding time reading a novel, when groans and hisses and yelps issue involuntarily from you as you turn the page, you know you are in the presence of a master and that this is great literature. It was just the same with Beckett (Molloy), and yes, pretty much the same with Hubert Selby (The Room) and Saramago (Blindness). In all of these great works what we have is the pure crystal stream of no concessions – these guys, they laugh at our petty bourgeois craving for furniture, wallpaper and carpets – these novels have no furniture, no wallpaper, no carpets – there’s almost no chinks of light at all, this is literature as sensory deprivation. In all of this stuff, and there’s a lot more of it which thankfully hasn’t come my way, we readers are locked inside the monologue of a monomaniac. One single voice wheedles, whines, rages, brags, retches, ululates and most of all bores into our ear, the whole time, page after page. Most of the time this is murder. On occasion when a real genius does it it’s like a frightening but shamefully exhilarating weekend in hell – that would be Blindness by Saramago. I must read more of him. These other guys, what we need to do is tazer them, shove them in a car boot, tape up their ankles and wrists and drive like a maniac into the deepest depths of the Schwartzwald (it seems appropriate) and leave them there. As you drive off you throw out a pair of scissors so they can eventually free themselves (we are not monsters) and some schwarzwalde kirschtorte soaked in LSD. Now let them write more novels. Now let the great literature begin.
I checked for other reviews of Extinction, and found this from a five star review on Amazon, so this guy is a fan :
“Page after page it challenges the reader to give up. Its almost as if Bernhard left this work as a special gift for only those who could really interpret and appreciate his art. Sticking with Extinction while Bernhard is shooing you and the collective literary world away is the greatest artistic experience one can undertake - because in the end, when you are sure you are the only one on the planet who has stuck with him to the last, he leaves you with one of his greatest surprise gifts. One which will float by silently and smash you in the face at the same time.”
Call me a lightweight but yes, when that siren voice sang to me so steadily and so very sweetly page after page “give up, give up, you know you want to, how good life can be when you aren’t reading Thomas Bernhard” – friends, I confess, I gave up. And now I smell the wallpaper and eat my furniture and life is good again.
I checked for other reviews of Extinction, and found this from a five star review on Amazon, so this guy is a fan :
“Page after page it challenges the reader to give up. Its almost as if Bernhard left this work as a special gift for only those who could really interpret and appreciate his art. Sticking with Extinction while Bernhard is shooing you and the collective literary world away is the greatest artistic experience one can undertake - because in the end, when you are sure you are the only one on the planet who has stuck with him to the last, he leaves you with one of his greatest surprise gifts. One which will float by silently and smash you in the face at the same time.”
Call me a lightweight but yes, when that siren voice sang to me so steadily and so very sweetly page after page “give up, give up, you know you want to, how good life can be when you aren’t reading Thomas Bernhard” – friends, I confess, I gave up. And now I smell the wallpaper and eat my furniture and life is good again.
January 18, 2022
In my opinion once you get used to the writing style of Thomas Bernhard and his literary challenges and peculiarities, you have to immerse yourself into his person to enjoy his literature. His cold humor and style are certainly not for everybody. This novel – his last greatest prose work – is his attempt to manage the traumatically liberated misfortune of his childhood and early years as he represents his family in the environment of the Austrian nobility and put it in all its facets and accuses.
"Wir müssen die Menschen dann beobachten, wenn Sie nicht wissen, daß sie unser Beobachtungsopfer sind."
S.318
"Wir müssen die Menschen dann beobachten, wenn Sie nicht wissen, daß sie unser Beobachtungsopfer sind."
S.318
February 3, 2019
There are days when I see the world with the eyes of Thomas Bernhard, and I feel like filling a whole novel with a long, breathless rant against the incredible stupidity, the horrific narrow-mindedness, the scary Nazi propaganda of mainstream, small town mentality in the post-World War Two Western Hemisphere, and I take a deep breath, only to choke on the poisoned air filled with the evil of selfrighteous white nationalists basking in the publicity they receive when they endorse each other against basic human rights, tolerance and peace; and when I am in the middle of one of those depressive moods, feeling my thoughts circle around the hopeless arrogance of over-privileged and entitled white men of European ancestry, across the world, I think of Extinction, and I feel some kind of relief, for after all, I know I am not alone in my failure to understand, let alone accept, the horror of everyday fascism in the midst of respectability, and I smile despite my anger because I can feel Thomas Bernhard's anger even stronger, more vocal, more eloquent and observing than mine, yet speaking for me without ever allowing himself a break to make a full stop, continuously pointing out the dangerous ignorance of traditional entitlement thinking in the prettiest of suburban gardens and in the most glamorous of local patriotic families, reminding me never to trust the shiny surface of functional life, as it hides the ugly truth by shouting loud deflecting slogans against invisible external enemies, and on days like those, when I carry the weight of our old, crumbling world on my shoulders, I understand fully why people like Thomas Bernhard had to write to survive, and why his negativity shines through each word that poured from his head through his fingers onto the pages of his novel, for to extinguish the anguish that eats your soul, you have to exorcise the pain and externalise the thoughts that tell you that you are failing as a species, and that you are letting down those venerable philosophers that said that you think, therefore you are, for while thinking, it occurs to you that all you can think of is a long thread of complete and utter rubbish, so that might well be who you are, underneath the self-righteous loud-mouthed confidence, but you still have to think, according to Thomas Bernhard, who is, unfortunately, fully human in his way of expressing the rubbish which dominates our daily thoughts:
"We must allow ourselves to think, we must dare to think, even though we fail. It is in the nature of things that we always fail, because we suddenly find it impossible to order our thoughts, because the process of thinking requires us to consider every thought there is, every possible thought. Fundamentally we have always failed, like all the others, whoever they were, even the greatest minds. At some point, they suddenly failed and their system collapsed, as is proved by their writings, which we admire because they venture farthest into failure. To think is to fail, I thought."
I read, therefore I am - a fan of Thomas Bernhard!
"We must allow ourselves to think, we must dare to think, even though we fail. It is in the nature of things that we always fail, because we suddenly find it impossible to order our thoughts, because the process of thinking requires us to consider every thought there is, every possible thought. Fundamentally we have always failed, like all the others, whoever they were, even the greatest minds. At some point, they suddenly failed and their system collapsed, as is proved by their writings, which we admire because they venture farthest into failure. To think is to fail, I thought."
I read, therefore I am - a fan of Thomas Bernhard!
October 7, 2017
Τόμας Μπέρνχαρντ,σε αφανίζει κυριολεκτικά με την εμμονή του στην γυμνή αλήθεια και στον κόσμο της περισυλλογής.
Τον αγάπησα επειδή μου δημιούργησε μια ψυχοσωματική επαφή με το συγγραφικό του σύμπαν.
Τον φοβήθηκα,επειδή κατάφερε να μου αποδείξει πως είμαστε παγιδευμένοι και κολλημένοι σε έναν θλιβερό κόσμο αμβλύνοιας και προσποίησης.
Έχουμε επίγνωση των ψευδαισθήσεων, των ενόχων, της ψευτιάς και της υποκρισίας γύρω μας, αλλά θέλουμε να μείνουνε παγιδευμένοι,απρόθυμοι και ανίκανοι να αποκοπούμε απο όλα αυτά συνειδητά.
Με ταξίδεψε ώρες πολλές μέσα στις σκέψεις και τις αποτιμήσεις του κόσμου του και εξακολουθεί να με ζαλίζει η κατάρρευση που προκαλεί με την πένα του,απλά λιτά και απέριττα.
Με έξοχο τρόπο ο «αφανισμός» καταρρίπτει συντριπτικά την πραγματικότητα και την αντίληψη με την οποία χαρακτηρίζουμε την ύπαρξη μας.
Επειδή αυτή, σίγουρα διαφέρει και αλλάζει ριζικά στα μυαλά των άλλων, όλων αυτών που αποτελούν τον μικρό οικογενειακό ή μεγαλύτερο κοινωνικό μας περίγυρο.
Ο αφηγητής και κεντρικός ήρωας του μυθιστορήματος είναι ο Αυστριακός Φραντς-Γιόζεφ Μουράου. Εγκαταλείπει την οικογένεια του και το πατρικό του σπίτι καταγγέλοντας τον αφόρητο επαρχιωτισμό, την εσωστρέφεια και την προδοσία του μισητού μικροαστισμού του Αυστριακού κράτους.
Μετά απο περιπλανήσεις και αφόρητες πνευματικές εμπειρίες μοναξιάς και εξέλιξης καταλήγει στη Ρώμη. Εκεί ηρεμεί προσωρινά και εργάζεται ως δάσκαλος με έναν δικό του οριοθετημένο κόσμο παραδοσιακού λογοτεχνικού κέντρου.
Ένα τηλεγράφημα που του γνωστοποιεί το θάνατο των γονιών του και του αδελφού του θα τον ξαναφέρει αναγκαστικά στην πατρίδα που τόσο μισεί.
Και κάπως ετσι αρχίζει η εξιστόρηση μιας ολόκληρης ζωής. Μιας ζωής γεμάτη παράπονα,θλίψη, απογοήτευση, μοναξιά, αποστασιοποίηση και ανεπιθύμητη κληρονομιά.
Η παιδική του ηλικία τον πληγώνει.
Καταντάει σχεδόν μισάνθρωπος όταν αναφέρεται στους γονείς, τα αδέλφια του, τους συγγενείς του και τους γνωστούς του.
Ρίχνει πολύ βαριές ποινές ηθικές και υπαρξιακές που κατακερματίζουν και επαναλαμβάνονται σε σημείο εμμονής.
Αυτό που φέρνει τρόμο δεν είναι πως μιλάει για θεωρητικά συμπεράσματα ή εικασίες αντικειμενικών γεγονότων, αλλά, πως πρόκειται για ιδιοσυγκρασίες πέρα για πέρα αληθινές. Τόσο αληθινές και τόσο δηλητηριώδεις που αρρωσταίνουν κάθε ευαίσθητη ψυχή.
Ρίχνει στον κόσμο και στους ανθρώπους το φρικτό φως της αλήθειας.
Με μια μαγευτική γοητεία έκφρασης ο Μπέρνχαρντ φέρνει τον αναγνώστη σε κατάσταση πλήρους αποδοχής. Οι κατηγορηματικές του δηλώσεις, η περιφρόνηση και η απέχθεια που αναδύεται απο το λόγο του σαν μελωδία θλιβερή γίνεται αδιαμφισβήτητη παραδοχή.
Καταγγέλει και σαρκάζει.
Αφορίζει την υποκρισία και τη δύναμη της εκκλησίας στο θεατρικό σανίδι της πίστης.
Τις ελλείψεις και τις ανούσιες πλευρές της εκπαίδευσης. Την κοροϊδία του κράτους και την κυριαρχία του ναζισμού κυρίως ως αντίληψη και κοσμοθεωρία.
Τον μικροαστισμό. Τη ματαιοδοξία. Την μωρολογία. Την αμορφωσιά ως επίτευγμα πλουτισμού.
Την αδι��φορία για την πνευματική εξέλιξη.
Την παιδική ηλικία και ότι τραυματικό μπορεί να επιφέρει όταν χτίζεται με ψευτιά και υποκρισία.
Την αγωνία της ενηλικίωσης.
Το απόλυτο κενό του παρελθόντος που δεν μπορούμε να το ζήσουμε ξανά παρά μόνο ως χαίνουσα τρύπα αναμνήσεων.
Παραδόσεις, κειμήλια,μνήμες,τοπία, αντιλήψεις, κρύο, βροχή, αδικία, χιόνι, αμβλύνοια και χαμέρπεια απλώνονται παντού.
Ως το τέλος αναζητάμε την εξιλέωση που δεν έρχεται ποτέ.
Μπορούμε να αποκοπούμε απο όλα αυτά ή απομένει μονάχα ο αφανισμός μετά την κατάρρευση;
Η ζωή συνεχίζεται...
Καλή ανάγνωση!!
Πολλούς ασπασμούς!!
Τον αγάπησα επειδή μου δημιούργησε μια ψυχοσωματική επαφή με το συγγραφικό του σύμπαν.
Τον φοβήθηκα,επειδή κατάφερε να μου αποδείξει πως είμαστε παγιδευμένοι και κολλημένοι σε έναν θλιβερό κόσμο αμβλύνοιας και προσποίησης.
Έχουμε επίγνωση των ψευδαισθήσεων, των ενόχων, της ψευτιάς και της υποκρισίας γύρω μας, αλλά θέλουμε να μείνουνε παγιδευμένοι,απρόθυμοι και ανίκανοι να αποκοπούμε απο όλα αυτά συνειδητά.
Με ταξίδεψε ώρες πολλές μέσα στις σκέψεις και τις αποτιμήσεις του κόσμου του και εξακολουθεί να με ζαλίζει η κατάρρευση που προκαλεί με την πένα του,απλά λιτά και απέριττα.
Με έξοχο τρόπο ο «αφανισμός» καταρρίπτει συντριπτικά την πραγματικότητα και την αντίληψη με την οποία χαρακτηρίζουμε την ύπαρξη μας.
Επειδή αυτή, σίγουρα διαφέρει και αλλάζει ριζικά στα μυαλά των άλλων, όλων αυτών που αποτελούν τον μικρό οικογενειακό ή μεγαλύτερο κοινωνικό μας περίγυρο.
Ο αφηγητής και κεντρικός ήρωας του μυθιστορήματος είναι ο Αυστριακός Φραντς-Γιόζεφ Μουράου. Εγκαταλείπει την οικογένεια του και το πατρικό του σπίτι καταγγέλοντας τον αφόρητο επαρχιωτισμό, την εσωστρέφεια και την προδοσία του μισητού μικροαστισμού του Αυστριακού κράτους.
Μετά απο περιπλανήσεις και αφόρητες πνευματικές εμπειρίες μοναξιάς και εξέλιξης καταλήγει στη Ρώμη. Εκεί ηρεμεί προσωρινά και εργάζεται ως δάσκαλος με έναν δικό του οριοθετημένο κόσμο παραδοσιακού λογοτεχνικού κέντρου.
Ένα τηλεγράφημα που του γνωστοποιεί το θάνατο των γονιών του και του αδελφού του θα τον ξαναφέρει αναγκαστικά στην πατρίδα που τόσο μισεί.
Και κάπως ετσι αρχίζει η εξιστόρηση μιας ολόκληρης ζωής. Μιας ζωής γεμάτη παράπονα,θλίψη, απογοήτευση, μοναξιά, αποστασιοποίηση και ανεπιθύμητη κληρονομιά.
Η παιδική του ηλικία τον πληγώνει.
Καταντάει σχεδόν μισάνθρωπος όταν αναφέρεται στους γονείς, τα αδέλφια του, τους συγγενείς του και τους γνωστούς του.
Ρίχνει πολύ βαριές ποινές ηθικές και υπαρξιακές που κατακερματίζουν και επαναλαμβάνονται σε σημείο εμμονής.
Αυτό που φέρνει τρόμο δεν είναι πως μιλάει για θεωρητικά συμπεράσματα ή εικασίες αντικειμενικών γεγονότων, αλλά, πως πρόκειται για ιδιοσυγκρασίες πέρα για πέρα αληθινές. Τόσο αληθινές και τόσο δηλητηριώδεις που αρρωσταίνουν κάθε ευαίσθητη ψυχή.
Ρίχνει στον κόσμο και στους ανθρώπους το φρικτό φως της αλήθειας.
Με μια μαγευτική γοητεία έκφρασης ο Μπέρνχαρντ φέρνει τον αναγνώστη σε κατάσταση πλήρους αποδοχής. Οι κατηγορηματικές του δηλώσεις, η περιφρόνηση και η απέχθεια που αναδύεται απο το λόγο του σαν μελωδία θλιβερή γίνεται αδιαμφισβήτητη παραδοχή.
Καταγγέλει και σαρκάζει.
Αφορίζει την υποκρισία και τη δύναμη της εκκλησίας στο θεατρικό σανίδι της πίστης.
Τις ελλείψεις και τις ανούσιες πλευρές της εκπαίδευσης. Την κοροϊδία του κράτους και την κυριαρχία του ναζισμού κυρίως ως αντίληψη και κοσμοθεωρία.
Τον μικροαστισμό. Τη ματαιοδοξία. Την μωρολογία. Την αμορφωσιά ως επίτευγμα πλουτισμού.
Την αδι��φορία για την πνευματική εξέλιξη.
Την παιδική ηλικία και ότι τραυματικό μπορεί να επιφέρει όταν χτίζεται με ψευτιά και υποκρισία.
Την αγωνία της ενηλικίωσης.
Το απόλυτο κενό του παρελθόντος που δεν μπορούμε να το ζήσουμε ξανά παρά μόνο ως χαίνουσα τρύπα αναμνήσεων.
Παραδόσεις, κειμήλια,μνήμες,τοπία, αντιλήψεις, κρύο, βροχή, αδικία, χιόνι, αμβλύνοια και χαμέρπεια απλώνονται παντού.
Ως το τέλος αναζητάμε την εξιλέωση που δεν έρχεται ποτέ.
Μπορούμε να αποκοπούμε απο όλα αυτά ή απομένει μονάχα ο αφανισμός μετά την κατάρρευση;
Η ζωή συνεχίζεται...
Καλή ανάγνωση!!
Πολλούς ασπασμούς!!
May 13, 2024
Could there ever be a more scathing narrator than Extinction's Franz-Josef Murau (Who I like to think of as a fictional Bernhard). Cut off from his Austrian landowning family and their estate of Wolfsegg, he now lives the intellectual life as a tutor in Rome. Rome? He could have moved to the furthest corner of Australia, and still been too close to the country he so clearly finds the most repugnance, vowing never to return home to the place, in disgust, he so constantly slams in bitter resentment. The bad news for Franz though, is that bad news is on the way. After receiving news of the death of his father, mother, and brother in a car accident, a trip back to Wolfsegg is now on the cards, unfortunately, and an unwelcome reunion with his two sisters, who he doesn't exactly hold in the highest regard.
The first half of the novel the narrator is simply standing looking out the window, and reminiscing obsessively about the stifling of the life he once had with his philistine family, of Wolfsegg, and of Austria, the place he describes as a brutal and stupid nation, a mindless, culture-less sewer spreading penetrating stench all over Europe. Rearranging a few unflattering old family photographs on his desk like Tarot cards, he unflaggingly and outrageously attacks his heritage. From his relatives crass tastes, to his miserable childhood, to his father's Nazi ties, and his mother's affair. Just as Murau's denunciation of Austria for its Nazism and Catholicism peaks in shrillness, however, his corrosive characterizations contract to the grotesque, even lampooning the likes of Robert Musil amongst others. Once he arrives back in Wolfsegg for the funeral, which sees the novel livelier in nature, his deceitful and hysterical character comes into its horrid own.
If there is one thing I loved about Bernhard from previous novels, it's his use of outrageous and uncontrollable exaggeration, when mulling over certain people, or his homeland. And here he turns the dial up to a level even I didn't expect. He also brilliantly dissects reality and perception and plays with how our own selves differ from our existence in the minds of others. Lost in the gentle musicality of Bernhard’s spiralling sentences that fragment and repeat, he whittles away at his obsessions, and it takes a bit of time to work out that these rants and conjectures are not dealing with objective fact, nor are they even the conclusions of considered arguments. They are instead simply whims of a moment.
The narrator’s prose had such a persuasive and dreamlike power, that it practically hypnotized me for the three hundred plus pages. The way the characters interlinked was masterful, and despite the narrators traits, such a realistic feeling was building up inside that had me understanding exactly where Franz-Josef was coming from. This is by far the best Bernhard I have read so far, the others were really good, but structurally this felt more like a proper novel. One that had me hooked right from the word go. Brilliant. Excruciating. Genius. Unforgettable.
The first half of the novel the narrator is simply standing looking out the window, and reminiscing obsessively about the stifling of the life he once had with his philistine family, of Wolfsegg, and of Austria, the place he describes as a brutal and stupid nation, a mindless, culture-less sewer spreading penetrating stench all over Europe. Rearranging a few unflattering old family photographs on his desk like Tarot cards, he unflaggingly and outrageously attacks his heritage. From his relatives crass tastes, to his miserable childhood, to his father's Nazi ties, and his mother's affair. Just as Murau's denunciation of Austria for its Nazism and Catholicism peaks in shrillness, however, his corrosive characterizations contract to the grotesque, even lampooning the likes of Robert Musil amongst others. Once he arrives back in Wolfsegg for the funeral, which sees the novel livelier in nature, his deceitful and hysterical character comes into its horrid own.
If there is one thing I loved about Bernhard from previous novels, it's his use of outrageous and uncontrollable exaggeration, when mulling over certain people, or his homeland. And here he turns the dial up to a level even I didn't expect. He also brilliantly dissects reality and perception and plays with how our own selves differ from our existence in the minds of others. Lost in the gentle musicality of Bernhard’s spiralling sentences that fragment and repeat, he whittles away at his obsessions, and it takes a bit of time to work out that these rants and conjectures are not dealing with objective fact, nor are they even the conclusions of considered arguments. They are instead simply whims of a moment.
The narrator’s prose had such a persuasive and dreamlike power, that it practically hypnotized me for the three hundred plus pages. The way the characters interlinked was masterful, and despite the narrators traits, such a realistic feeling was building up inside that had me understanding exactly where Franz-Josef was coming from. This is by far the best Bernhard I have read so far, the others were really good, but structurally this felt more like a proper novel. One that had me hooked right from the word go. Brilliant. Excruciating. Genius. Unforgettable.
February 22, 2019
http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/5179587...
There is nobody I have ever read who speaks to me more clearly and like-minded than Thomas Bernhard does. From the very first sentence Bernhard had me hooked on the book. I could have just said the first paragraph but there is only one in the entire book so that would have been a little bit too much tongue-in-cheek. But don’t let that stop you from reading this Extinction. A flowing single paragraph is a Bernhard trademark. At least he has proper sentences. It is so life-affirming to have the good fortune of reading a writer like this. He is an amazing talent and continues on as strongly as ever for anyone interested in examining his complete works. It is unfortunate Bernhard did not get to comment on our new technology, that he was not subjected to the cell phone culture taking over the world. It would have been so fantastic to hear and read what he would have had to say about these things, the tablets and electronic readers, Facebook, Google, and all the other muck drowning out our lives.
I loved what he said at the beginning of the book regarding leisure, or intelligent people and their idleness. It is so important to be able to be leisurely, to enjoy leisure, to just sit and think. Or not even think at all.
There are many instances when Bernhard has a character say something that totally resonates with me. It is these times when I am most pleased with the writings of Bernhard. Gilles Deleuze, the great French philosopher, once said something to the effect that it is better to be in the company of like-minded people as the ones who are not will bring you down mentally, emotionally, and even physically sometimes. So when I read the following quotation I was again pleased as it has been my pattern in life to be often attracted to those persons of bad character. Franz-Josef Murau, the book’s narrator, says, "We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death." But on the flip side, just before the funeral of his parents and brother, Murau is reflecting on the actions of his mother’s lover, the Roman priest Spadolini and how he is not honest regarding his memory of his parents, their country, and their friends. "…Before our very eyes and ears he’s transformed fools into thinkers, malevolent individuals into saints, illiterates into philosophers, low characters into models of virtue, baseness and meanness into inward and outward greatness, monsters into human beings, an appalling country into a paradise, and a stolid populace into a nation deserving of respect. Spadolini had extolled the dead in a quite impermissible manner, I thought, essentially falsifying them and selling us a fake as the genuine article."
It was surprising to me when Murau instructs his pupil Gambetti early in the fifth sentence of this book to read slowly and carefully five books, one of which is Thomas Bernhard’s Amras. Franz-Josef Murau felt the five books useful and necessary to his student in the coming weeks. By the time we get near the end of the book Bernhard’s narrator Murau is reforming his ideas to disavow the five writers mentioned on the first page and only leave Kafka as the one true writer of the bunch. Kafka being the only one who exaggerates enough. He continues by saying, "The art of exaggeration, I told Gambetti, is the art of tiding oneself over existence, of making one’s existence endurable, even possible…Those who are most successful at tiding themselves over existence have always been the great exaggerators…that exaggerated understatement is their particular version of the art of exaggeration."
Thomas Bernhard continues on in his exaggeration of minor details and supersaturates us with them to degrees only Gordon Lish could come close to measuring to. Read any book by Lish and you get the details returned and returned to you always in revision and always as he pontificates for the supersaturation needed to get to the cut of the thing, the insides, the meat and flesh of the object given. Same goes (went?) for Thomas Bernhard. Though aware and a mutual fan of Bernhard it is doubtful Lish learned his trade from him, for as far back as the early sixties Lish was already teaching this method and instructing his students how to read.
Extinction, as a whole, has much to do with photography and the undoing of humanity in such a brainless activity of staring at motion pictures. Murau’s premise is that we are paralyzed by stultification and no longer capable of thinking, that the world is in a state of permanent decline, and anyone who actually does think should kill himself now, at least before the second Millennium (and now even that is too late), as there is no future ahead that will be of any worth. Let us hope Murau got this part wrong. I happen to like photography and it has given me much to study and to write from. And for this commission the great Bernhard must be forgiven.
There is nobody I have ever read who speaks to me more clearly and like-minded than Thomas Bernhard does. From the very first sentence Bernhard had me hooked on the book. I could have just said the first paragraph but there is only one in the entire book so that would have been a little bit too much tongue-in-cheek. But don’t let that stop you from reading this Extinction. A flowing single paragraph is a Bernhard trademark. At least he has proper sentences. It is so life-affirming to have the good fortune of reading a writer like this. He is an amazing talent and continues on as strongly as ever for anyone interested in examining his complete works. It is unfortunate Bernhard did not get to comment on our new technology, that he was not subjected to the cell phone culture taking over the world. It would have been so fantastic to hear and read what he would have had to say about these things, the tablets and electronic readers, Facebook, Google, and all the other muck drowning out our lives.
I loved what he said at the beginning of the book regarding leisure, or intelligent people and their idleness. It is so important to be able to be leisurely, to enjoy leisure, to just sit and think. Or not even think at all.
There are many instances when Bernhard has a character say something that totally resonates with me. It is these times when I am most pleased with the writings of Bernhard. Gilles Deleuze, the great French philosopher, once said something to the effect that it is better to be in the company of like-minded people as the ones who are not will bring you down mentally, emotionally, and even physically sometimes. So when I read the following quotation I was again pleased as it has been my pattern in life to be often attracted to those persons of bad character. Franz-Josef Murau, the book’s narrator, says, "We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death." But on the flip side, just before the funeral of his parents and brother, Murau is reflecting on the actions of his mother’s lover, the Roman priest Spadolini and how he is not honest regarding his memory of his parents, their country, and their friends. "…Before our very eyes and ears he’s transformed fools into thinkers, malevolent individuals into saints, illiterates into philosophers, low characters into models of virtue, baseness and meanness into inward and outward greatness, monsters into human beings, an appalling country into a paradise, and a stolid populace into a nation deserving of respect. Spadolini had extolled the dead in a quite impermissible manner, I thought, essentially falsifying them and selling us a fake as the genuine article."
It was surprising to me when Murau instructs his pupil Gambetti early in the fifth sentence of this book to read slowly and carefully five books, one of which is Thomas Bernhard’s Amras. Franz-Josef Murau felt the five books useful and necessary to his student in the coming weeks. By the time we get near the end of the book Bernhard’s narrator Murau is reforming his ideas to disavow the five writers mentioned on the first page and only leave Kafka as the one true writer of the bunch. Kafka being the only one who exaggerates enough. He continues by saying, "The art of exaggeration, I told Gambetti, is the art of tiding oneself over existence, of making one’s existence endurable, even possible…Those who are most successful at tiding themselves over existence have always been the great exaggerators…that exaggerated understatement is their particular version of the art of exaggeration."
Thomas Bernhard continues on in his exaggeration of minor details and supersaturates us with them to degrees only Gordon Lish could come close to measuring to. Read any book by Lish and you get the details returned and returned to you always in revision and always as he pontificates for the supersaturation needed to get to the cut of the thing, the insides, the meat and flesh of the object given. Same goes (went?) for Thomas Bernhard. Though aware and a mutual fan of Bernhard it is doubtful Lish learned his trade from him, for as far back as the early sixties Lish was already teaching this method and instructing his students how to read.
Extinction, as a whole, has much to do with photography and the undoing of humanity in such a brainless activity of staring at motion pictures. Murau’s premise is that we are paralyzed by stultification and no longer capable of thinking, that the world is in a state of permanent decline, and anyone who actually does think should kill himself now, at least before the second Millennium (and now even that is too late), as there is no future ahead that will be of any worth. Let us hope Murau got this part wrong. I happen to like photography and it has given me much to study and to write from. And for this commission the great Bernhard must be forgiven.
March 27, 2020
Holy hell, this book was everything.
February 22, 2023
un enorme flusso di coscienza.. STUPENDO
tutto Bernhard trova casa in questo volume, gli altri suoi scritti sono solo corollari, schizzi preparatori, bozze. la tecnica del monologo bernhardiano, cominciata col principe in perturbamento che a mio avviso se la gioca col monologo di bloom, in questo romanzo trova la sua massima espressione un unico monologo di 500 pagine diviso in due parti senza un a capo.
per scrivere così senza nessuna strutturazione in capitoli paragrafi ecc. ci vuole un'enorme sapienza non occorre solo vomitare le parole sulla carta. è come la mischia del rugby (una zuffa con molte regole).
tutto Bernhard trova casa in questo volume, gli altri suoi scritti sono solo corollari, schizzi preparatori, bozze. la tecnica del monologo bernhardiano, cominciata col principe in perturbamento che a mio avviso se la gioca col monologo di bloom, in questo romanzo trova la sua massima espressione un unico monologo di 500 pagine diviso in due parti senza un a capo.
per scrivere così senza nessuna strutturazione in capitoli paragrafi ecc. ci vuole un'enorme sapienza non occorre solo vomitare le parole sulla carta. è come la mischia del rugby (una zuffa con molte regole).
June 25, 2019
Leggere Estinzione è farsi trascinare nel vortice di un desiderio di distruzione, farsi travolgere dal fiume in piena di un odio che attraversa tutte le pagine del romanzo sino alla conclusione inaspettata. Tutto inizia con un telegramma da cui il protagonista e narratore, Murau, apprende della morte dei genitori e del fratello. Notizia che lo getta nello sconforto non per la perdita subita, ma per la necessità di tornare a Wolfsegg, il paese natale da lui abbandonato per rifugiarsi a Roma e da cui era appena tornato per partecipare al matrimonio di una delle sorelle.
Il funerale si sovrappone così alle nozze, imponendogli un viaggio che lo mette di fronte a un’assunzione di responsabilità. Adesso è il padrone della tenuta, l’erede unico di ciò da cui si è allontanato per vivere libero la propria esistenza. Roma è la sua casa, tanto diversa dall’Austria disprezzata e odiata.
È un odio incontrollabile, che avvolge tutto e tutti, dai genitori, al fratello, alle sorelle, agli austriaci in generale. Un odio che lo consuma e che può essere estinto solo distruggendo, annientando.
Estinzione diventa così il resoconto necessario, l’analisi attenta e spietata degli abissi in cui i suoi non avevano mai guardato. I ricordi affiorano violenti e implacabili, ridicolizzati dalle fotografie che immortalano la sua famiglia
“La fotografia mostra solo l'istante grottesco e quello bizzarro, pensai, non mostra una persona com'è stata nel complesso per tutta la vita, la fotografia è una falsificazione infida e perversa, ogni fotografia, chiunque la scatti e chiunque essa ritragga, è un oltraggio assoluto alla dignità umana, una mostruosa falsificazione della natura, un atto meschino e disumano.”
Le incomprensioni tornano esasperate, esacerbate, insieme ai pochi momenti felici. Tornare a Wolfsegg per ritrovare l’infanzia perduta è stupido. L’infanzia è trascorsa e non torna
“L'infanzia è stata usata e consumata da me fino in fondo, pensai, svenduta per due soldi, pensai. Ho sfruttato l'infanzia fino all'ultimo. Cerchiamo dappertutto l'infanzia e dappertutto non troviamo altro che il famoso vuoto assoluto, pensai, quando entriamo in una casa in cui nell'infanzia abbiamo trascorso ore o addirittura giorni tanto felici, crediamo di guardare dentro quell'infanzia, e invece guardiamo solo dentro quel famigerato vuoto assoluto, pensai.”
Il funerale dei suoi diventa per Murau uno spettacolo di ipocrisia, ma allo stesso tempo il simbolo di quell’Estinzione da lui auspicata.
“In effetti sto scomponendo e disgregando Wolfsegg e i miei, li sto annientando, estinguendo, e nel far ciò scompongo me stesso, mi disgrego, mi anniento, mi estinguo”.
La morte, che apre il libro, ne scrive la conclusione.
Il funerale si sovrappone così alle nozze, imponendogli un viaggio che lo mette di fronte a un’assunzione di responsabilità. Adesso è il padrone della tenuta, l’erede unico di ciò da cui si è allontanato per vivere libero la propria esistenza. Roma è la sua casa, tanto diversa dall’Austria disprezzata e odiata.
È un odio incontrollabile, che avvolge tutto e tutti, dai genitori, al fratello, alle sorelle, agli austriaci in generale. Un odio che lo consuma e che può essere estinto solo distruggendo, annientando.
Estinzione diventa così il resoconto necessario, l’analisi attenta e spietata degli abissi in cui i suoi non avevano mai guardato. I ricordi affiorano violenti e implacabili, ridicolizzati dalle fotografie che immortalano la sua famiglia
“La fotografia mostra solo l'istante grottesco e quello bizzarro, pensai, non mostra una persona com'è stata nel complesso per tutta la vita, la fotografia è una falsificazione infida e perversa, ogni fotografia, chiunque la scatti e chiunque essa ritragga, è un oltraggio assoluto alla dignità umana, una mostruosa falsificazione della natura, un atto meschino e disumano.”
Le incomprensioni tornano esasperate, esacerbate, insieme ai pochi momenti felici. Tornare a Wolfsegg per ritrovare l’infanzia perduta è stupido. L’infanzia è trascorsa e non torna
“L'infanzia è stata usata e consumata da me fino in fondo, pensai, svenduta per due soldi, pensai. Ho sfruttato l'infanzia fino all'ultimo. Cerchiamo dappertutto l'infanzia e dappertutto non troviamo altro che il famoso vuoto assoluto, pensai, quando entriamo in una casa in cui nell'infanzia abbiamo trascorso ore o addirittura giorni tanto felici, crediamo di guardare dentro quell'infanzia, e invece guardiamo solo dentro quel famigerato vuoto assoluto, pensai.”
Il funerale dei suoi diventa per Murau uno spettacolo di ipocrisia, ma allo stesso tempo il simbolo di quell’Estinzione da lui auspicata.
“In effetti sto scomponendo e disgregando Wolfsegg e i miei, li sto annientando, estinguendo, e nel far ciò scompongo me stesso, mi disgrego, mi anniento, mi estinguo”.
La morte, che apre il libro, ne scrive la conclusione.
February 3, 2014
His final novel, Extinction, is, put simply, Bernhard's masterpiece..., a masterpiece among any number of masterpieces. An astonishing output.
(After starting with Concrete - which astonished me) I read Bernhard's novels chronologically, and would recommend anyone who wants to delve into his works, to read, in the following order:
The Lime Works
Correction
Concrete
The Loser -- about Glenn Gould -- and
Extinction
I found Woodcutters, Old Masters, and even Wittgenstein's Nephew to be somewhat inferior.
I have not read the others, though I do plan to read Gathering Evidence
(on the strength of William's review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)
and Frost (though this last one -- or rather this FIRST one of Bernhard's novels -- was not written in Bernhard's patented style.
(After starting with Concrete - which astonished me) I read Bernhard's novels chronologically, and would recommend anyone who wants to delve into his works, to read, in the following order:
The Lime Works
Correction
Concrete
The Loser -- about Glenn Gould -- and
Extinction
I found Woodcutters, Old Masters, and even Wittgenstein's Nephew to be somewhat inferior.
I have not read the others, though I do plan to read Gathering Evidence
(on the strength of William's review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)
and Frost (though this last one -- or rather this FIRST one of Bernhard's novels -- was not written in Bernhard's patented style.
Read
August 15, 2010The funny thing about Bernhard's style is that because you have no stopping points, no denouements, you consequently just sort of pop in and out of Bernhard-land. And what a land it is! Hey, do you know what sucks? Everything! Do you know what sucks more? Everything IN AUSTRIA! Especially your Mom! She's a child-destroying, anti-intellectual, priest-fucking Nazi HO BAG! This kind of whinging is a more grown-up, more cultivated Holden Caulfield mentality, but fuck it, I worshipped at the altar of Catcher in the Rye when I was 14, and now I discovered this, and I think it's rad too.
December 3, 2017
"Pur di provare sollievo non esitiamo a camminare sui cadaveri"
Per quasi 500 pagine seguiamo i pensieri di un uomo che, appena appresa la notizia della morte improvvisa dei genitori e del fratello, non fa altro che sputare veleno sulla propria famiglia - persone realmente abiette in effetti, con cui ha sempre avuto rapporti altamente conflittuali - e sulle proprie origini. E in definitiva, su se stesso. Uno sfacelo, per l'appunto, come recita il sottotitolo.
Lo stile di Bernhard, in questa sorta di monologo interiore (appena intervallato da azioni ed eventi, sempre vissuti attraverso lo specchio deformante del mondo interiore del protagonista), è ossessivo, esagerato, martellante, lucido e folle allo stesso tempo, tanto da raggiungere talvolta effetti comici e grotteschi che alleggeriscono la tensione di questo flusso di pensieri crudi, acidi, altamente tossici.
"Talvolta quel fanatismo dell'esagerazione, quando riesco a farne un'arte dell'esagerazione, è la sola possibilità per salvarmi dalla miseria della mia disposizione d'animo, dal mio tedio spirituale [...]
Sopportare l'esistenza [...] renderla possibile con l'esagerazione, infine con l'arte dell'esagerazione."
Bernhard sembra essere in grado di riprodurre esattamente quello stato della mente in cui dentro di noi montano l'ansia, l'acredine, la rabbia verso il mondo circostante - e in definitiva verso noi stessi. C'è tutto il campionario, qui, di quei pensieri deleteri con cui tipicamente, come si suol dire, ci si fa il "sangue amaro".
E sono tutti crudelmente veri, non c'è che dire. Nulla sfugge alla furia devastatrice di Bernhard, alla sua volontà di estinzione. Qui sta la bravura dell'autore, in questo connubio senz'altro impressionante tra lucida consapevolezza e delirio, tra comico e tragico, maestria davanti a cui mi inchino (per poi fuggire un po' spaventata).
"Se, anche soltanto nella nostra testa, osserviamo per qualche tempo una persona, per amabile che sia [...] questa da buona diventa a poco a poco cattiva, noi non lasciamo la presa finché della persona buona, amabile, non ne abbiamo fatta una cattiva, spregevole, quando ci torna comodo, perché siamo disposti a tale sopruso, così come siamo disposti a ogni sorta di sopruso, pur di salvarci per esempio da stati d'animo terribilmente tormentosi, nei quali siamo precipitati senza sapere perché. [...] Non ce la caviamo più con la lettura, non più camminando avanti e indietro, non più guardando dalla finestra, e allora dobbiamo ricorrere ai nostri più cari e intimi amici per salvarci da uno stato d'animo impietoso [...] quando uno stato d'animo così impietoso arriva a impossessarsi più o meno completamente di me, io passo in rassegna una dopo l'altra tutte le possibili persone per farle a pezzi e massacrarle nella mia testa, disintegrare ogni cosa in loro, per salvarmi, e non lasciare di loro, più o meno, il benché minimo residuo positivo, per poter finalmente tornare a respirare. Quando non erano più i miei genitori e le mie sorelle, perché non mi bastavano più [...] né Johannes e tutti gli altri, allora, con disperazione e coerenza estreme, toccava a me stesso, mi disintegravo da solo a modo mio, un modo che posso soltanto definire il più brutale in assoluto."
Consiglio, se ve la sentite di affrontarlo, una mezz'ora di meditazione zen dopo ogni sessione di lettura, per riappacificare un po' lo spirito.
"Desidero sempre con ardore la solitudine, ma quando sono solo sono il più infelice degli uomini. Non sopporto la solitudine e ne parlo in continuazione, predico la solitudine e la odio dal profondo, perché rende infelici come nessun'altra cosa, come so, e già ora comincio ad accorgermene, predico la solitudine per esempio a Gambetti e so benissimo che la solitudine è il più tremendo dei castighi [...] Soltanto un pazzo fa l'elogio della solitudine, ed essere completamente soli non significa altro, alla fine che essere completamente pazzi."
Per quasi 500 pagine seguiamo i pensieri di un uomo che, appena appresa la notizia della morte improvvisa dei genitori e del fratello, non fa altro che sputare veleno sulla propria famiglia - persone realmente abiette in effetti, con cui ha sempre avuto rapporti altamente conflittuali - e sulle proprie origini. E in definitiva, su se stesso. Uno sfacelo, per l'appunto, come recita il sottotitolo.
Lo stile di Bernhard, in questa sorta di monologo interiore (appena intervallato da azioni ed eventi, sempre vissuti attraverso lo specchio deformante del mondo interiore del protagonista), è ossessivo, esagerato, martellante, lucido e folle allo stesso tempo, tanto da raggiungere talvolta effetti comici e grotteschi che alleggeriscono la tensione di questo flusso di pensieri crudi, acidi, altamente tossici.
"Talvolta quel fanatismo dell'esagerazione, quando riesco a farne un'arte dell'esagerazione, è la sola possibilità per salvarmi dalla miseria della mia disposizione d'animo, dal mio tedio spirituale [...]
Sopportare l'esistenza [...] renderla possibile con l'esagerazione, infine con l'arte dell'esagerazione."
Bernhard sembra essere in grado di riprodurre esattamente quello stato della mente in cui dentro di noi montano l'ansia, l'acredine, la rabbia verso il mondo circostante - e in definitiva verso noi stessi. C'è tutto il campionario, qui, di quei pensieri deleteri con cui tipicamente, come si suol dire, ci si fa il "sangue amaro".
E sono tutti crudelmente veri, non c'è che dire. Nulla sfugge alla furia devastatrice di Bernhard, alla sua volontà di estinzione. Qui sta la bravura dell'autore, in questo connubio senz'altro impressionante tra lucida consapevolezza e delirio, tra comico e tragico, maestria davanti a cui mi inchino (per poi fuggire un po' spaventata).
"Se, anche soltanto nella nostra testa, osserviamo per qualche tempo una persona, per amabile che sia [...] questa da buona diventa a poco a poco cattiva, noi non lasciamo la presa finché della persona buona, amabile, non ne abbiamo fatta una cattiva, spregevole, quando ci torna comodo, perché siamo disposti a tale sopruso, così come siamo disposti a ogni sorta di sopruso, pur di salvarci per esempio da stati d'animo terribilmente tormentosi, nei quali siamo precipitati senza sapere perché. [...] Non ce la caviamo più con la lettura, non più camminando avanti e indietro, non più guardando dalla finestra, e allora dobbiamo ricorrere ai nostri più cari e intimi amici per salvarci da uno stato d'animo impietoso [...] quando uno stato d'animo così impietoso arriva a impossessarsi più o meno completamente di me, io passo in rassegna una dopo l'altra tutte le possibili persone per farle a pezzi e massacrarle nella mia testa, disintegrare ogni cosa in loro, per salvarmi, e non lasciare di loro, più o meno, il benché minimo residuo positivo, per poter finalmente tornare a respirare. Quando non erano più i miei genitori e le mie sorelle, perché non mi bastavano più [...] né Johannes e tutti gli altri, allora, con disperazione e coerenza estreme, toccava a me stesso, mi disintegravo da solo a modo mio, un modo che posso soltanto definire il più brutale in assoluto."
Consiglio, se ve la sentite di affrontarlo, una mezz'ora di meditazione zen dopo ogni sessione di lettura, per riappacificare un po' lo spirito.
"Desidero sempre con ardore la solitudine, ma quando sono solo sono il più infelice degli uomini. Non sopporto la solitudine e ne parlo in continuazione, predico la solitudine e la odio dal profondo, perché rende infelici come nessun'altra cosa, come so, e già ora comincio ad accorgermene, predico la solitudine per esempio a Gambetti e so benissimo che la solitudine è il più tremendo dei castighi [...] Soltanto un pazzo fa l'elogio della solitudine, ed essere completamente soli non significa altro, alla fine che essere completamente pazzi."
January 10, 2024
Like Correction, this one is twice as long as the average Bernhard book and therefore it does twice the damage as the average 150-page Bernhard book, damage mitigated by the introduction of self-conscious acknowledgment about the narrator's abominable pronouncements, also direct attack on Austria's Nazi past, also two sympathetic idealized characters to counterbalance all the imbeciles and insincere simulators. As always, there's nothing as good, no approach as viral, nothing as unbearable to read for more than 30-page stretches, and nothing seems as ordered and chaotic at once, organic and orchestrated at once. Interesting that I was thinking about the importance of extremism and exaggeration of approach and then toward the end there's a revealing stretch where the narrator talks about himself as a great artist of exaggeration. Not as "funny" as some of the others (Woodcutters or The Loser). Really great reading but as always glad to step out from under Bernhard's extinguishing shadow.
May 9, 2017
This was my introduction to Bernhard, and what a powerful introduction it was. I became obsessed with his obsessive, discursive writing style, the way his sentences loop back on themselves to describe something several different ways. You have to give yourself to it and stop expecting the usual plot or character mechanics of most conventional fiction, but once you do, it's an exhilarating ride.
January 19, 2021
Brisanje je kompozicija koju izvodi horda poganih demona, sitnih, ali najperfidnijih i najmalicioznijih, nadasve upornih, onih što ne smiruju dok ne posrču svu dušu čoveku, a koje je Bernhard sve do jednog izvabio, pa ih sapeo i dognao na scenu, da mu, po komandi, predu, mjauču i trepću – ko Šredingerovi mačići.
November 11, 2013
This book is 326 pages of rabid, unrelenting misanthropy that is all ONE PARAGRAPH, from the perspective of a hateful, very rich Austrian expatriate who despises his family, Austria, and everything else.
It is totally impossible for me to explain why I loved reading this, but it had an intoxicating, addictive quality and I really could not put it down. However, I wouldn't in good conscience recommend it to my worst enemy.
Looking forward to reading something else by Bernhard (suggestions, Dieter?), though I'll need to wait awhile to let these toxic levels of bile clear out of my system first.
It is totally impossible for me to explain why I loved reading this, but it had an intoxicating, addictive quality and I really could not put it down. However, I wouldn't in good conscience recommend it to my worst enemy.
Looking forward to reading something else by Bernhard (suggestions, Dieter?), though I'll need to wait awhile to let these toxic levels of bile clear out of my system first.
June 23, 2020
"Στην καμπή της χιλιετίας η σκέψη θα είναι πια κάτι αδύνατον γι' αυτήν την ανθρωπότητα, Γκαμπέτι, και η διαδικασία αποβλάκωσης, που έχει τεθεί σε κίνηση από την φωτογραφία και έχει γίνει παγκόσμια συνήθεια με τις κινούμενες εικόνες, θα φτάσει στο ζενίθ της. Να υπάρχεις σ' έναν τέτοιο κόσμο, που τον κυβερνά αποκλειστικά η αμβλύνοια, δεν θα μπορεί να είναι πια εφικτό."
- Αφανισμός, Τόμας Μπέρνχαρντ
[ Τα βάζει, δικαίως, με όλους και με όλα και το κάνει άψογα. Κορυφαίος. Νομίζω το καλύτερο του αλλά και πάλι χωρίς να μπορώ να το πω με σιγουριά. Ο Μπέρνχαρντ είναι μία κατηγορία μόνος του. ]
- Αφανισμός, Τόμας Μπέρνχαρντ
[ Τα βάζει, δικαίως, με όλους και με όλα και το κάνει άψογα. Κορυφαίος. Νομίζω το καλύτερο του αλλά και πάλι χωρίς να μπορώ να το πω με σιγουριά. Ο Μπέρνχαρντ είναι μία κατηγορία μόνος του. ]
December 16, 2020
... i mille volti della scrittura...
Il protagonista abita a Roma, lontano dall'Austria, terra natìa.
Arriva un telegramma:
i genitori ed il fratello sono morti in un incidente.
Dovrebbe esserci disperazione, tristezza, ma non è così.
Il telegramma diventa, invece, motivo per sviscerare rabbia ed odio.
Nulla ha scampo: la famiglia in primis è dichiarata morta.
Le convenzioni sono carta straccia da bruciare.
L'attaccamento ai soldi, la "recita" del lavoro, il lusso non condiviso (nella tenuta di famiglia ci sono ben 5 biblioteche che rimangono chiuse a chiave!!): non meritano che disprezzo.
Wolfseg (il villaggio dove è nato) è il fulcro dello spregio.
Ma è tutta la patria intera ad essere denigrata: la società e la cultura mitteleuropea sono da bruciare ("perchè i mitteleuropei si comportano come marionette").
Il romanzo è quindi una sorta di lungo monologo dove ricordare non serve a trattenere il passato racchiuso in un’immagine, un odore, un colore (si riferisce a Proust??) ma, al contrario, la rievocazione ha la funzione di estinguere ciò che è stato come se le parole producessero un fuoco catartico.
La scrittura stessa diventa mezzo per fare tutto a pezzetti: uno sfacelo!!
Un ottimo romanzo per riflettere.
Sconsigliato a chi cerca l'azione.
Consigliato a chi pensa che, a volte, occorre distruggere per ricostruire.
( e con questo è nato il mio amore per Bernhard)
Il protagonista abita a Roma, lontano dall'Austria, terra natìa.
Arriva un telegramma:
i genitori ed il fratello sono morti in un incidente.
Dovrebbe esserci disperazione, tristezza, ma non è così.
Il telegramma diventa, invece, motivo per sviscerare rabbia ed odio.
Nulla ha scampo: la famiglia in primis è dichiarata morta.
Le convenzioni sono carta straccia da bruciare.
L'attaccamento ai soldi, la "recita" del lavoro, il lusso non condiviso (nella tenuta di famiglia ci sono ben 5 biblioteche che rimangono chiuse a chiave!!): non meritano che disprezzo.
Wolfseg (il villaggio dove è nato) è il fulcro dello spregio.
Ma è tutta la patria intera ad essere denigrata: la società e la cultura mitteleuropea sono da bruciare ("perchè i mitteleuropei si comportano come marionette").
Il romanzo è quindi una sorta di lungo monologo dove ricordare non serve a trattenere il passato racchiuso in un’immagine, un odore, un colore (si riferisce a Proust??) ma, al contrario, la rievocazione ha la funzione di estinguere ciò che è stato come se le parole producessero un fuoco catartico.
La scrittura stessa diventa mezzo per fare tutto a pezzetti: uno sfacelo!!
Un ottimo romanzo per riflettere.
Sconsigliato a chi cerca l'azione.
Consigliato a chi pensa che, a volte, occorre distruggere per ricostruire.
( e con questo è nato il mio amore per Bernhard)
December 24, 2021
Il Bernhard da leggere a tutti i costi.
Tra i vertici assoluti.
[93/100]
Tra i vertici assoluti.
[93/100]
February 1, 2022
I guess if I read 300 pages of unstoppable rant I can allow myself a rant as well though I promise it would less that 300 pages.
Fortunately, the narrator of this masterpiece is quite self-referential. So I will let him speak for himself quite a bit:
“What a dull, stupid man! I thought as I watched him clumsily spreading butter and marmalade on his bread. But people like him can’t help it, I thought; they don’t know any better. Then I desisted from such thoughts, which suddenly seemed to me improper—not unfair but improper—and I despised myself for entertaining them. We shouldn’t watch these people and observe their every action, I told myself, because it only makes us despise ourselves.”
This neatly summarises my feelings about the narrator and the one of my problems with reading this book. Though I tried not to equate Bernhard with his creation, not always successfully. The narrator’s name is Murau.
My general experience of this book was: 1) Boredom; 2) Boredom; 3) Frustration with the novel and myself; 3) Occasional visceral disgust - in this particular order.
People with limited time might as well stop reading now as what follows would be just expansion on those points.
The narrator, effectively a single voice of this novel, thinks he is very different from the majority of the humanity, especially his family, superior in fact. This is predominately on the grounds that he always preferred books to participating in the family’s business. He has left home and have become an educated and aspired self-proclaimed philosopher. He is very honest and frank man - one cannot take it away from him. But for all these self-proclaimed moral and intellectual superiority he is quite shallow in his ideas and complains. He cannot forgive people mediocrity being very mediocre himself. And that irritated me all the way through.
His family, especially his parents is not a pleasant bunch indeed: the Austrian landowners who are former Nazi party members and sponsors. They’ve never repented on their views. On the top of it, his mother was having an affair with a catholic priest, an official from Vatican. So here there is a lot to unpack. Maybe, it would make much more interesting reading if he would do it properly. But it is not the purpose of this story. So what is the purpose? To proclaim repeatedly the burning hatred to those parents, siblings, huntsmen, writers and more or less everyone else, with the small exceptions of less hateful “simple people” and a tiny amount of friends, including the aforementioned Vatican man. But those friends are apparently kept in reserve in case he would need a fresh objects for his self-therapeutical hatred.
Any novel can be viewed through either its form or its content. If I would just have problems with the content, but enjoyed the way how the text is constructed, I would live with that. I have a strong conviction that what separate a work of literature from a letter to a friend is its attention to its form and style. But this book has frustrated me both with its form and its content.
Form
“Extinction” is the novel we read that Marau is thinking of writing. This endeavour is a type of a cathartic activity for him to “extinguish” his past. So far so good, meta-fictional and clever.
Suitably, it presents a type of stream of consciousness of this man who is very openly narcissistic and prone to general pronouncements of dubious value. I found him unlikable. Many other people would. But it is not a problem. I like the fiction of Nabokov for example where the majority of his narrators are impossible to like. But they are clever, devious and sinister. Or for example, Celine’s narrators. The imagery they bring to the text is wondrous. Or let’s take Lawrence at the end. His characters often rage, his opinions often are difficult to sympathise with. But they use the language one remembers for long. Here, the language is as flat as a pan. No single metaphor. Even when Marau tries to remember his past, it is like reading a user’s manual, the one how to hate everyone and everything. For a change, occasionally Marau becomes pathetic and feels overwhelmed by self-pity.
Another problem I’ve had, that apart from him, everyone else is silent in the novel. The people do not have any agency to defend themselves. I appreciate the format of stream of consciousness is not friendly to a dialogue. And there is no dialogue at all. But there are millions of ways how to go about it and give people some agency. However, I think it is a deliberate choice not to bother with other people speaking. Respectively, there is no second perspective or nuance whatsoever. In the best case, some characters would silently agree with our narrator, or he would make them nod and laugh. All other characters are totally silent, especially the ones he is ranting about. There are exceptions of course when he needs more evidence for his rant. And then his mother, or father are allowed to quip. But not his sisters. Never. Their silence is their weapon apparently against our narrator. But it does not sound credible as his actions point otherwise. For me, it was just a lazy cop out.
And that use of the plural personal pronoun “we”! It is used quite widely when Mr Marau feels his is saying something very profound:
“We are not content until we have turned this good and lovable person into someone wicked and worthless, if it serves our turn. We are prepared to misuse him, to misuse anyone, in order to rescue ourselves from some dreadful mood that is tormenting us, some mood we have gotten into without knowing how.”
Who are those “we”? Is he imagining himself The King Macbeth or Nicholas II? Or does that “we” intend to include a wider audience, like me for example? I am not part of that “we” for sure. Or is it supposed to be the point where I am supposed to start laughing hysterically?
I would be able to forgive Bernhard for all these stylistic choices mentioned above. Many people also seem to be either admiring or hating the absence of the paragraphs. It did not bother me that much. Though I could easily split the text into separate complete logical parts if needed. Unlike a few novels in one paragraph I’ve read before, there were no unbreaking continuity in this narrative or even the trangressiveness of Proust (who actually used paragraphs). So for me their absence was either a gimmick or laziness. But I did not mind.
The worst “crime” in my eyes was sheer repetitiveness of this text and related use of “italics”. If a triviality or pettiness would be quipped once I could handle it. But if it would be repeated ten times using a very similar set of words, that would become simply cringy and boring. Maybe the intended affect was a comic one. I am not sure. But it seriously drove me up the wall. I’ve borrowed a paragraph from the afterword by Dyer handily included in my book:
‘Something repeated ten times is the opposite of art,’ wrote Proust, while Bernhard’s art insists, again and again, on the opposite. The cognitive grip of Bernhard’s logic of insistent repetition and expansive constriction is implacable, ludicrous and highly infectious, obliging the world to conform to the distorted contours by which it is mapped.”
Thank you, Proust! And I would agree with Dyer’s statement with the exception of single word. Try to reread the above with replacing the word “infectious” with the two “irritating and boring”. And the man would be spot on.
In the first few pages, we learn 10 reasons why his brother was not as wonderful and gifted as him, 10 reasons why his sisters have mocking faces, 10 reasons why the socialists should turn in their grave if they see what is happening in the world, etc., etc. I did not need 10 reasons for something quite so trivial - one good reason would be enough for me - I would believe. I did not know his sisters so well.
And then, I noticed that every new protracted rant or let’s call it a soliloquy would start with picking a phrase and often showing it in “italics”. Then this phrase would be repeated incessantly. This is an example:
“We search everywhere for our childhood, I thought, and find only a gaping void. We go into a house where as children we spent such happy hours, such happy days, and we believe we’re revisiting our childhood, but all we find is a gaping void. Entering the Children’s Villa means nothing more or less than entering this notorious gaping void, just as going into the woods where we used to play as children would mean going into this gaping void. Wherever I was happy as a child, there now appears to be a gaping void….”
Five times in a few lines. It is like a hammer on the nail. The verbal tick. And it goes for another page totalling in 13 times of “gaping void”. All of that to express such “a profound” and terribly original thought that we cannot revisit our childhood and moreover we cannot revisit even our yesterday. I am happy that he has been finally stricken by this revelation and it is a little sad and I feel for him and myself. But I do not think it is so original it is worth repeating so many times. I am sure that some people would find it elegiac and poetic. I am not one of them unfortunately and it was just painful. But at least in this bit, he does not hate or mock anyone. I’ve developed a horror of anticipating a new phrase in italics.
Another demonstration of this and this one is sort of meta-fictional and a bit deeper. It refers to his method. The key word here is “exaggeration”.
“We’re often led to exaggerate, I said later, to such an extent that we take our exaggeration to be the only logical fact, with the result that we don’t perceive the real facts at all, only the monstrous exaggeration….On occasion I transform this fanatical faith in exaggeration into an art, when it offers the only way out of my mental misery, my spiritual malaise. I’ve cultivated the art of exaggeration to such a pitch that I can call myself the greatest exponent of the art that I know of. I know of none greater… The painter who doesn’t exaggerate is a poor painter, the musician who doesn’t exaggerate is a poor musician, and the writer who doesn’t exaggerate is a poor writer, I said…. Without the art of exaggeration we’d be condemned to an awfully tedious life, a life not worth living. And I’ve developed this art to an incredible pitch.”
That what his narrator is saying. And, in case of Bernhard himself, the “repetition” would be even more apt than exaggeration. I could appreciate all this verbiage up to the point. But please give me a hint of a subtlety!
Of course it is the question of taste. And, if it would be just a few paragraphs repeating one or two phenomena, I would not mind. But when 300 pages of this excessive verbiage was systematically being piled on me; I felt exhausted.
Content
“It was a pleasure to see butcher at work. At part or more admirable than the surgeon. “
According to Dyer’s afterward, the reader experiences “perverse pleasures”. Reading similar statements, I did not feel any pleasure perverse or otherwise. Another example, is Marau’s interest in the tabloid’s photos showing his family car accident including his dead half-decapitated mother. I guess it is supposed to be a black humour, a satire of human nature or perverse pleasure indeed. None of it I found even remotely fascinating.
I’ve picked a passage which I thought is indicative how his narrative and works. Let’s look more closely at this statement and its logic:
Mothers whelp and bring children into the world, and from then on they hold the world responsible for what has occurred and for everything that subsequently happens to their children, whereas they ought to take the responsibility themselves. The truth is, Gambetti, that mothers shirk all responsibility for the children they bring into the world. What I’m saying is true of many mothers, indeed of most mothers. But I’m quite alone in saying it! We can think such thoughts, but we mustn’t express them, Gambetti; we must keep them to ourselves and mustn’t publish them. We must choke down such thoughts in a world that would react to them with revulsion. Were I to publish a piece entitled Mothers, it would result merely in my being pronounced a liar or a fool or both. The world wouldn’t tolerate such views, because it’s accustomed to falsehood and hypocrisy, not to facts. The truth is that in this world facts are ignored, while fantastic ideals are proclaimed as facts, because that’s politically more expedient and acceptable than the opposite, Gambetti. (P149)
So, through all this verbiage, he leads us to conclude that main evidence “that in this world facts are ignored” and “it’s (the world) accustomed to falsehood and hypocrisy, not to facts”, the evidence of that is based upon the incidence that many people would not share his indeed dubious and slightly distasteful view that after a bit of a “whelping”, “mothers shirk all responsibility for the children they bring into the world”. Almost all of them apparently! Indeed, the majority of the mothers are irresponsible! This is an absolute fact! So let’s blame them, mothers, for the hypocrisy of this world and have a little laugh. So wise and so ironic! I could not stop my giggles.
So why I did not give up reading this book? I am asking myself this question. I guess a few factors. I’ve had some hope to find something really profound between all those piles of …words.
But, as soon as he was getting into something marginally interesting, and my hopes would rise, he would switch off back to banality or triviality. For example, this passage was getting somewhere: “The tragedy of the would-be writer is that he continually resorts to anything that will prevent him from writing. A tragedy, no doubt, but at the same time a comedy—a perfect, perfidious comedy.” But it did not last. He moved back to his weak heart. Marau also called Thomas Mann and Musil the writers for the lower-middle class. I guessed I could appreciate that irony, especially compared to the novel I was reading.
The reason that has actually lead me to this novel was Ingeborg Bachmann. I’ve read recently her novel Malina. It impressed me so deeply that I keep reading around it, including the authors familiar with Bachmann. Bernhard was one of them. She is featured in this novel as a minor character, Maria. And that was a gleamer of light in my misery:
“…Maria as someone who has everything permanently present in her mind and, because of her intelligence, can hold her own in any company. This is why Maria immediately becomes the focal point of any gathering, without having to say a word” and “Maria my first woman poet”. This last bit sounds slightly condensing to the other women poets, but I’ll take it from him.
What amazes me how popular the term “Bernhardian” has become. As soon as a book contains some minimal misanthropic or pessimistic element and the stream of consciousness, preferably with the lack of paragraphs or dialogue, it is guaranteed to be labeled that way. But after reading this book, it sounds terribly misleading to me. For example, just from my relatively recent experiences I’ve seen A Passage North been branded that way. And I absolutely cannot understand why. It is dealing with the interiority of a character, written as a stream of consciousness and its temporarity is limited to a few days. But if it picks up a philosophical issue it does not drive it to the ground with repetition or hate. Another example is Infinity: The Story of a Moment by Josipovici. I do not know whether it was branded with this label. But if it is the case, it would be my ideal “Bernhardian” novel. The protagonist is a misanthrope. But what he is saying is interesting, not repetitive and not banal either.
I would like to finish my "rant" using Marau’s help again to summarise for me the result of his novelistic efforts:
“What we have in mind is something tremendous, we tell ourselves; sometimes we even tell others, being too vain to keep it to ourselves, but all we are capable of is something utterly risible.”
PS
I've found the supporter of my view on this novel in Alex Christofi, the contemporary English writer:
"George Steiner wrote that “too often, notably in his later writings, Bernhard succumbed to a monotone of hate”, and Extinction has all the tonal variation of a fridge. Or to put it more politely, this may not be entry-level Bernhard."
Though he is a bit more sympathetic of Bernhard's earlier novel "Concrete". The full article named 'Whining in the void" is here:
https://alexchristofi.com/2020/01/10/...
Fortunately, the narrator of this masterpiece is quite self-referential. So I will let him speak for himself quite a bit:
“What a dull, stupid man! I thought as I watched him clumsily spreading butter and marmalade on his bread. But people like him can’t help it, I thought; they don’t know any better. Then I desisted from such thoughts, which suddenly seemed to me improper—not unfair but improper—and I despised myself for entertaining them. We shouldn’t watch these people and observe their every action, I told myself, because it only makes us despise ourselves.”
This neatly summarises my feelings about the narrator and the one of my problems with reading this book. Though I tried not to equate Bernhard with his creation, not always successfully. The narrator’s name is Murau.
My general experience of this book was: 1) Boredom; 2) Boredom; 3) Frustration with the novel and myself; 3) Occasional visceral disgust - in this particular order.
People with limited time might as well stop reading now as what follows would be just expansion on those points.
The narrator, effectively a single voice of this novel, thinks he is very different from the majority of the humanity, especially his family, superior in fact. This is predominately on the grounds that he always preferred books to participating in the family’s business. He has left home and have become an educated and aspired self-proclaimed philosopher. He is very honest and frank man - one cannot take it away from him. But for all these self-proclaimed moral and intellectual superiority he is quite shallow in his ideas and complains. He cannot forgive people mediocrity being very mediocre himself. And that irritated me all the way through.
His family, especially his parents is not a pleasant bunch indeed: the Austrian landowners who are former Nazi party members and sponsors. They’ve never repented on their views. On the top of it, his mother was having an affair with a catholic priest, an official from Vatican. So here there is a lot to unpack. Maybe, it would make much more interesting reading if he would do it properly. But it is not the purpose of this story. So what is the purpose? To proclaim repeatedly the burning hatred to those parents, siblings, huntsmen, writers and more or less everyone else, with the small exceptions of less hateful “simple people” and a tiny amount of friends, including the aforementioned Vatican man. But those friends are apparently kept in reserve in case he would need a fresh objects for his self-therapeutical hatred.
Any novel can be viewed through either its form or its content. If I would just have problems with the content, but enjoyed the way how the text is constructed, I would live with that. I have a strong conviction that what separate a work of literature from a letter to a friend is its attention to its form and style. But this book has frustrated me both with its form and its content.
Form
“Extinction” is the novel we read that Marau is thinking of writing. This endeavour is a type of a cathartic activity for him to “extinguish” his past. So far so good, meta-fictional and clever.
Suitably, it presents a type of stream of consciousness of this man who is very openly narcissistic and prone to general pronouncements of dubious value. I found him unlikable. Many other people would. But it is not a problem. I like the fiction of Nabokov for example where the majority of his narrators are impossible to like. But they are clever, devious and sinister. Or for example, Celine’s narrators. The imagery they bring to the text is wondrous. Or let’s take Lawrence at the end. His characters often rage, his opinions often are difficult to sympathise with. But they use the language one remembers for long. Here, the language is as flat as a pan. No single metaphor. Even when Marau tries to remember his past, it is like reading a user’s manual, the one how to hate everyone and everything. For a change, occasionally Marau becomes pathetic and feels overwhelmed by self-pity.
Another problem I’ve had, that apart from him, everyone else is silent in the novel. The people do not have any agency to defend themselves. I appreciate the format of stream of consciousness is not friendly to a dialogue. And there is no dialogue at all. But there are millions of ways how to go about it and give people some agency. However, I think it is a deliberate choice not to bother with other people speaking. Respectively, there is no second perspective or nuance whatsoever. In the best case, some characters would silently agree with our narrator, or he would make them nod and laugh. All other characters are totally silent, especially the ones he is ranting about. There are exceptions of course when he needs more evidence for his rant. And then his mother, or father are allowed to quip. But not his sisters. Never. Their silence is their weapon apparently against our narrator. But it does not sound credible as his actions point otherwise. For me, it was just a lazy cop out.
And that use of the plural personal pronoun “we”! It is used quite widely when Mr Marau feels his is saying something very profound:
“We are not content until we have turned this good and lovable person into someone wicked and worthless, if it serves our turn. We are prepared to misuse him, to misuse anyone, in order to rescue ourselves from some dreadful mood that is tormenting us, some mood we have gotten into without knowing how.”
Who are those “we”? Is he imagining himself The King Macbeth or Nicholas II? Or does that “we” intend to include a wider audience, like me for example? I am not part of that “we” for sure. Or is it supposed to be the point where I am supposed to start laughing hysterically?
I would be able to forgive Bernhard for all these stylistic choices mentioned above. Many people also seem to be either admiring or hating the absence of the paragraphs. It did not bother me that much. Though I could easily split the text into separate complete logical parts if needed. Unlike a few novels in one paragraph I’ve read before, there were no unbreaking continuity in this narrative or even the trangressiveness of Proust (who actually used paragraphs). So for me their absence was either a gimmick or laziness. But I did not mind.
The worst “crime” in my eyes was sheer repetitiveness of this text and related use of “italics”. If a triviality or pettiness would be quipped once I could handle it. But if it would be repeated ten times using a very similar set of words, that would become simply cringy and boring. Maybe the intended affect was a comic one. I am not sure. But it seriously drove me up the wall. I’ve borrowed a paragraph from the afterword by Dyer handily included in my book:
‘Something repeated ten times is the opposite of art,’ wrote Proust, while Bernhard’s art insists, again and again, on the opposite. The cognitive grip of Bernhard’s logic of insistent repetition and expansive constriction is implacable, ludicrous and highly infectious, obliging the world to conform to the distorted contours by which it is mapped.”
Thank you, Proust! And I would agree with Dyer’s statement with the exception of single word. Try to reread the above with replacing the word “infectious” with the two “irritating and boring”. And the man would be spot on.
In the first few pages, we learn 10 reasons why his brother was not as wonderful and gifted as him, 10 reasons why his sisters have mocking faces, 10 reasons why the socialists should turn in their grave if they see what is happening in the world, etc., etc. I did not need 10 reasons for something quite so trivial - one good reason would be enough for me - I would believe. I did not know his sisters so well.
And then, I noticed that every new protracted rant or let’s call it a soliloquy would start with picking a phrase and often showing it in “italics”. Then this phrase would be repeated incessantly. This is an example:
“We search everywhere for our childhood, I thought, and find only a gaping void. We go into a house where as children we spent such happy hours, such happy days, and we believe we’re revisiting our childhood, but all we find is a gaping void. Entering the Children’s Villa means nothing more or less than entering this notorious gaping void, just as going into the woods where we used to play as children would mean going into this gaping void. Wherever I was happy as a child, there now appears to be a gaping void….”
Five times in a few lines. It is like a hammer on the nail. The verbal tick. And it goes for another page totalling in 13 times of “gaping void”. All of that to express such “a profound” and terribly original thought that we cannot revisit our childhood and moreover we cannot revisit even our yesterday. I am happy that he has been finally stricken by this revelation and it is a little sad and I feel for him and myself. But I do not think it is so original it is worth repeating so many times. I am sure that some people would find it elegiac and poetic. I am not one of them unfortunately and it was just painful. But at least in this bit, he does not hate or mock anyone. I’ve developed a horror of anticipating a new phrase in italics.
Another demonstration of this and this one is sort of meta-fictional and a bit deeper. It refers to his method. The key word here is “exaggeration”.
“We’re often led to exaggerate, I said later, to such an extent that we take our exaggeration to be the only logical fact, with the result that we don’t perceive the real facts at all, only the monstrous exaggeration….On occasion I transform this fanatical faith in exaggeration into an art, when it offers the only way out of my mental misery, my spiritual malaise. I’ve cultivated the art of exaggeration to such a pitch that I can call myself the greatest exponent of the art that I know of. I know of none greater… The painter who doesn’t exaggerate is a poor painter, the musician who doesn’t exaggerate is a poor musician, and the writer who doesn’t exaggerate is a poor writer, I said…. Without the art of exaggeration we’d be condemned to an awfully tedious life, a life not worth living. And I’ve developed this art to an incredible pitch.”
That what his narrator is saying. And, in case of Bernhard himself, the “repetition” would be even more apt than exaggeration. I could appreciate all this verbiage up to the point. But please give me a hint of a subtlety!
Of course it is the question of taste. And, if it would be just a few paragraphs repeating one or two phenomena, I would not mind. But when 300 pages of this excessive verbiage was systematically being piled on me; I felt exhausted.
Content
“It was a pleasure to see butcher at work. At part or more admirable than the surgeon. “
According to Dyer’s afterward, the reader experiences “perverse pleasures”. Reading similar statements, I did not feel any pleasure perverse or otherwise. Another example, is Marau’s interest in the tabloid’s photos showing his family car accident including his dead half-decapitated mother. I guess it is supposed to be a black humour, a satire of human nature or perverse pleasure indeed. None of it I found even remotely fascinating.
I’ve picked a passage which I thought is indicative how his narrative and works. Let’s look more closely at this statement and its logic:
Mothers whelp and bring children into the world, and from then on they hold the world responsible for what has occurred and for everything that subsequently happens to their children, whereas they ought to take the responsibility themselves. The truth is, Gambetti, that mothers shirk all responsibility for the children they bring into the world. What I’m saying is true of many mothers, indeed of most mothers. But I’m quite alone in saying it! We can think such thoughts, but we mustn’t express them, Gambetti; we must keep them to ourselves and mustn’t publish them. We must choke down such thoughts in a world that would react to them with revulsion. Were I to publish a piece entitled Mothers, it would result merely in my being pronounced a liar or a fool or both. The world wouldn’t tolerate such views, because it’s accustomed to falsehood and hypocrisy, not to facts. The truth is that in this world facts are ignored, while fantastic ideals are proclaimed as facts, because that’s politically more expedient and acceptable than the opposite, Gambetti. (P149)
So, through all this verbiage, he leads us to conclude that main evidence “that in this world facts are ignored” and “it’s (the world) accustomed to falsehood and hypocrisy, not to facts”, the evidence of that is based upon the incidence that many people would not share his indeed dubious and slightly distasteful view that after a bit of a “whelping”, “mothers shirk all responsibility for the children they bring into the world”. Almost all of them apparently! Indeed, the majority of the mothers are irresponsible! This is an absolute fact! So let’s blame them, mothers, for the hypocrisy of this world and have a little laugh. So wise and so ironic! I could not stop my giggles.
So why I did not give up reading this book? I am asking myself this question. I guess a few factors. I’ve had some hope to find something really profound between all those piles of …words.
But, as soon as he was getting into something marginally interesting, and my hopes would rise, he would switch off back to banality or triviality. For example, this passage was getting somewhere: “The tragedy of the would-be writer is that he continually resorts to anything that will prevent him from writing. A tragedy, no doubt, but at the same time a comedy—a perfect, perfidious comedy.” But it did not last. He moved back to his weak heart. Marau also called Thomas Mann and Musil the writers for the lower-middle class. I guessed I could appreciate that irony, especially compared to the novel I was reading.
The reason that has actually lead me to this novel was Ingeborg Bachmann. I’ve read recently her novel Malina. It impressed me so deeply that I keep reading around it, including the authors familiar with Bachmann. Bernhard was one of them. She is featured in this novel as a minor character, Maria. And that was a gleamer of light in my misery:
“…Maria as someone who has everything permanently present in her mind and, because of her intelligence, can hold her own in any company. This is why Maria immediately becomes the focal point of any gathering, without having to say a word” and “Maria my first woman poet”. This last bit sounds slightly condensing to the other women poets, but I’ll take it from him.
What amazes me how popular the term “Bernhardian” has become. As soon as a book contains some minimal misanthropic or pessimistic element and the stream of consciousness, preferably with the lack of paragraphs or dialogue, it is guaranteed to be labeled that way. But after reading this book, it sounds terribly misleading to me. For example, just from my relatively recent experiences I’ve seen A Passage North been branded that way. And I absolutely cannot understand why. It is dealing with the interiority of a character, written as a stream of consciousness and its temporarity is limited to a few days. But if it picks up a philosophical issue it does not drive it to the ground with repetition or hate. Another example is Infinity: The Story of a Moment by Josipovici. I do not know whether it was branded with this label. But if it is the case, it would be my ideal “Bernhardian” novel. The protagonist is a misanthrope. But what he is saying is interesting, not repetitive and not banal either.
I would like to finish my "rant" using Marau’s help again to summarise for me the result of his novelistic efforts:
“What we have in mind is something tremendous, we tell ourselves; sometimes we even tell others, being too vain to keep it to ourselves, but all we are capable of is something utterly risible.”
PS
I've found the supporter of my view on this novel in Alex Christofi, the contemporary English writer:
"George Steiner wrote that “too often, notably in his later writings, Bernhard succumbed to a monotone of hate”, and Extinction has all the tonal variation of a fridge. Or to put it more politely, this may not be entry-level Bernhard."
Though he is a bit more sympathetic of Bernhard's earlier novel "Concrete". The full article named 'Whining in the void" is here:
https://alexchristofi.com/2020/01/10/...
August 17, 2020
But one day, I said, I'll set about recording all these things about Wolfsegg that obsess me and give me no peace... The fact is, Gambetti, that I've often started work on it, only to be defeated by the first sentence... The only thing I have fixed in my head is the title, Extinction, for the sole purpose of my account will be to extinguish what it describes, to extinguish everything that Wolfsegg means to me, everything that Wolfsegg is...
As is the way with Bernhard's novels, Extinction is a monologue, this one being divided into two parts and just two paragraphs across its 300-plus pages. "A must-read for everybody" opines Karl-Ove Knausgaard from the front cover. That judgement is about as sound as naming a six-volume autofictional project after Mein Kampf, Karl-Ove.
Our narrator-hero is Franz-Josef Murau, the second son of a landowning Austrian family, living in Rome and acting as German teacher to a younger man, Gambetti, to whom most of his recollected thoughts are addressed in the first part of the book ('The Telegram'). The text is supposedly Murau's memoir. He is both abominable and humane. It gives nothing away to say that in the second part ('The Will') he returns home to Austria, following the death in an accident of his parents and brother (announced in the telegram - remember those?), there to do battle with his two dreadful sisters. He is to assume the burden of Wolfsegg. But he has no wish to live the life of a farmer, preferring that of the mind. The resolution when it comes is a surprise.
After a fashion, Extinction is a great house novel. The house in question shares its name with the local village of Wolfsegg. And what a splendid name that is in English translation: a wolf's egg - now what would that be like? Murau describes the property in loving detail. But this is Bernhard and so what we get mostly is coruscating social critique. In his final work, Bernhard gives a metafictional nod to his technique. Murau tells us:
I wore Gambetti down with my tirade, which I delivered in an intolerably loud voice as we walked the full length of the flaminia...
Indeed, Thomas.
Not only is this a great house novel, in a way it's a Gothic one to boot - ghastly deaths, grotesque characters, an austere and permanently cold manor house. Then there are the two sisters, all but indistinguishable one from the other. I'm put in mind of Cora and Clarice in the Gormenghast trilogy. And Murau? He's Titus and Steerpike, combined in one person. Things turn sinister with the revelation that Murau's parents gave shelter after the war to two Nazis in the children's villa on the estate.
Much of the diatribe concerns Murau's condemnation of his parents and his upbringing. Is this autobiographical? Certainly not in the literal sense. Murau comes from a wealthy and traditional nuclear family with three siblings. Bernhard was raised by a single mother. His disreputable father had nothing to do with him. I say 'raised' - in fact, his mother sent him to live with his grandparents and then - via a spell in Nazi Germany and forced participation in the Hitler Youth - to a series of cruel boarding schools. Bernhard's childhood was also an unhappy one, then, and he too felt 'abandoned' by his parents. Can we read this as autobiographical allegory?
It's not just Wolfsegg that Murau wishes to destroy.
When I take Wolfsegg and my family apart, when I dissect, annihilate and extinguish them, I am actually taking myself apart, dissecting, annihilating and extinguishing myself.
How much of this cantankerousness is a provocative pose? A fair amount, one assumes. "Vöcklabruck - revolting. Gmunden - revolting" Murau says of towns not that far distant from Wolfsegg am Hausruck. And yet Bernhard lived in Gmunden for many years when he might easily have afforded to relocate to Rome or Lisbon as his narrator did. Here are those revolting locations, thanks to Wikipedia, in all their hideousness:
Returning to the title, there are further resonances. All three surviving siblings are childless and in their forties. Upon their deaths, there's a very real prospect that the family line will become extinct, ending its centuries-long association with Wolfsegg. Murau too dwells upon the imminence of his personal extinction. As it turns out, the title is most intimately tied to the resolution.
Is Extinction Bernhard's masterpiece? I suspect it might be.
As is the way with Bernhard's novels, Extinction is a monologue, this one being divided into two parts and just two paragraphs across its 300-plus pages. "A must-read for everybody" opines Karl-Ove Knausgaard from the front cover. That judgement is about as sound as naming a six-volume autofictional project after Mein Kampf, Karl-Ove.
Our narrator-hero is Franz-Josef Murau, the second son of a landowning Austrian family, living in Rome and acting as German teacher to a younger man, Gambetti, to whom most of his recollected thoughts are addressed in the first part of the book ('The Telegram'). The text is supposedly Murau's memoir. He is both abominable and humane. It gives nothing away to say that in the second part ('The Will') he returns home to Austria, following the death in an accident of his parents and brother (announced in the telegram - remember those?), there to do battle with his two dreadful sisters. He is to assume the burden of Wolfsegg. But he has no wish to live the life of a farmer, preferring that of the mind. The resolution when it comes is a surprise.
After a fashion, Extinction is a great house novel. The house in question shares its name with the local village of Wolfsegg. And what a splendid name that is in English translation: a wolf's egg - now what would that be like? Murau describes the property in loving detail. But this is Bernhard and so what we get mostly is coruscating social critique. In his final work, Bernhard gives a metafictional nod to his technique. Murau tells us:
I wore Gambetti down with my tirade, which I delivered in an intolerably loud voice as we walked the full length of the flaminia...
Indeed, Thomas.
Not only is this a great house novel, in a way it's a Gothic one to boot - ghastly deaths, grotesque characters, an austere and permanently cold manor house. Then there are the two sisters, all but indistinguishable one from the other. I'm put in mind of Cora and Clarice in the Gormenghast trilogy. And Murau? He's Titus and Steerpike, combined in one person. Things turn sinister with the revelation that Murau's parents gave shelter after the war to two Nazis in the children's villa on the estate.
Much of the diatribe concerns Murau's condemnation of his parents and his upbringing. Is this autobiographical? Certainly not in the literal sense. Murau comes from a wealthy and traditional nuclear family with three siblings. Bernhard was raised by a single mother. His disreputable father had nothing to do with him. I say 'raised' - in fact, his mother sent him to live with his grandparents and then - via a spell in Nazi Germany and forced participation in the Hitler Youth - to a series of cruel boarding schools. Bernhard's childhood was also an unhappy one, then, and he too felt 'abandoned' by his parents. Can we read this as autobiographical allegory?
It's not just Wolfsegg that Murau wishes to destroy.
When I take Wolfsegg and my family apart, when I dissect, annihilate and extinguish them, I am actually taking myself apart, dissecting, annihilating and extinguishing myself.
How much of this cantankerousness is a provocative pose? A fair amount, one assumes. "Vöcklabruck - revolting. Gmunden - revolting" Murau says of towns not that far distant from Wolfsegg am Hausruck. And yet Bernhard lived in Gmunden for many years when he might easily have afforded to relocate to Rome or Lisbon as his narrator did. Here are those revolting locations, thanks to Wikipedia, in all their hideousness:
Returning to the title, there are further resonances. All three surviving siblings are childless and in their forties. Upon their deaths, there's a very real prospect that the family line will become extinct, ending its centuries-long association with Wolfsegg. Murau too dwells upon the imminence of his personal extinction. As it turns out, the title is most intimately tied to the resolution.
Is Extinction Bernhard's masterpiece? I suspect it might be.
October 22, 2016
Ovo je delo koje bi svako trebalo da pročita nekad, posebno kad vam se učini da ste besni na svaki koren u sebi i svaku kategoriju pripadnosti porodici, ljudima, prijateljima, odnosima, institucijama, državi, zemlji, konvencijama pristojnosti i međuljudskih odnosa, jer "Brisanje: raspad" je upravo to - jedno veliko brisanje identiteta u sumanutom naletu pripovedačevog besa, ali ubrzo ćete shvatiti da jednostavna mržnja nikad nije jednostavna, i da bes prema malograđanstvu neminovno onog koji ga usmerava čini malograđaninom. Otkrivajući sve niskosti svoje porodice koja je prepolovljena jer su roditelji i prvi naslednik poginuli u saobraćajnoj nesreći, pripovedač, našavši se u neočekivanom položaju naslednika ogromnog imanja, sav svoj bes usmerava na austrijsku sredinu i na niskost duha svih koji tamo žive (tu je i sad već čuvena suprotnost između baštovana (stvaralaca) i lovaca (uništitelja)), ali uskoro otkriva sve više osobina koje mrzi i u sebi, da bi ih potom još više prezreo i jače napao. Čitava ovo delo je jedan ep o mržnji prema nametnutom identitetu i otkrivanje kako i brisanje identiteta, čak i formalno (poklanjanje imanja), ne uništava taj identitet, već ga možda dovodi i u veću zavisnost od sredine nego ranije. Takođe, ovo je i divno delo o zamkama interpretacije jer pripovedač odlazi u krajnosti (mnogo puta ponavlja da je on umetnik preterivanja) poput skidanja pred sestrom da bi joj pokazao kako muškarac izgleda, i sve to dan pre pogreba - sva njegova karakterizacija drugih likova vrlo je problematična jer je dominantno obojena mržnjom i besom, i čak i kad nam se čini da mu je neki lik drag, on mu vrlo brzo pronalazi neoprostive mane, ali čitalac uviđa, u trenucima kad se prenose razgovori, da te mane možda i nisu realne, nisu toliko velike i razarajuće, već su samo jedna učitava pretnja po identitet pripovedača koju on neprestano nastoji da satre.
Ovo bih preporučila svakom ko ima snage, emotivne i svakakve druge, da izdrži intenzitet Bernhardovog pripovedanja, napetost njegovih rečenica kao i ogromnu injekciju mržnje - meni se u nekim trenucima činilo da postajem toliko besna na sve oko sebe zbog ovog dela da počinjem da vidim sve kroz prizmu opovrgavanja svake vrednosti i svakog međuljudskog odnosa. Stoga, pažljivo birajte trenutak kad ćete da mrzite sve oko sebe.
Ovo bih preporučila svakom ko ima snage, emotivne i svakakve druge, da izdrži intenzitet Bernhardovog pripovedanja, napetost njegovih rečenica kao i ogromnu injekciju mržnje - meni se u nekim trenucima činilo da postajem toliko besna na sve oko sebe zbog ovog dela da počinjem da vidim sve kroz prizmu opovrgavanja svake vrednosti i svakog međuljudskog odnosa. Stoga, pažljivo birajte trenutak kad ćete da mrzite sve oko sebe.
July 27, 2018
Đọc "Diệt vong" mà chỉ thấy nhân vật chính "chửi tất cả mọi thứ" thì tức là thấy cây mà chẳng thấy rừng. Murau, nhân vật chính - và qua đó là tác giả - chửi gần như mọi thứ không phải vì ông thù ghét toàn thế giới. Ông thù ghét một phần thế giới, (cái phần mà, tiếc thay, là phần lớn) đang ngày càng xuống cấp, vô vị, giả tạo, vô sinh khí, phản tiến hóa. Bên cạnh đó, có một số ít những người mà ông yêu: những thợ làm vườn; nàng Maria, thi sĩ đồng hương Áo của ông; cậu Georg người thầy tinh thần của ông; anh họ Alexander của ông - số ít những người Áo khả dĩ có thể làm nước Áo "phục sinh" sau khi tất cả những gì không xứng đáng tiếp tục tồn tại phải bị hủy diệt. Về thực chất, Murau yêu thế giới, yêu sự sống và những phép màu hãy còn chưa hoàn thành của sự sống, yêu nhiều hơn hầu hết chúng ta.
Và dù sao đi nữa, tuy tôi đánh giá cao "Diệt vong" nhưng với tôi cuốn này không phải cuốn hay nhất trong bốn cuốn của Bernhard mà tôi đã đọc. Trong bốn cuốn ấy, cuốn mà với tôi đáng gọi là kiệt tác là "Correction". Ở đó, mối bận tâm chính của Bernhard không phải là hiện trạng băng hoại của nước Áo và thế giới nói chung, mà là nỗi ám ảnh của con người trong việc làm ra một cái đẹp hoàn hảo, toàn bích, một cái đẹp mà về thực chất mang tính hủy diệt nhiều hơn tạo dựng. Ở khía cạnh này, với tôi, Bernhard có phần gần với Mishima (và, hiển nhiên, Mishima không phải típ nhà văn "chửi tất cả mọi thứ"), hoặc gần với Krasznahorkai trong "Seiobo there below" (tạm dịch: "Tây Vương Mẫu giáng hạ", một trong số ít những kiệt tác vô tiền khoáng hậu của văn chương hiện đại thế giới).
Và dù sao đi nữa, tuy tôi đánh giá cao "Diệt vong" nhưng với tôi cuốn này không phải cuốn hay nhất trong bốn cuốn của Bernhard mà tôi đã đọc. Trong bốn cuốn ấy, cuốn mà với tôi đáng gọi là kiệt tác là "Correction". Ở đó, mối bận tâm chính của Bernhard không phải là hiện trạng băng hoại của nước Áo và thế giới nói chung, mà là nỗi ám ảnh của con người trong việc làm ra một cái đẹp hoàn hảo, toàn bích, một cái đẹp mà về thực chất mang tính hủy diệt nhiều hơn tạo dựng. Ở khía cạnh này, với tôi, Bernhard có phần gần với Mishima (và, hiển nhiên, Mishima không phải típ nhà văn "chửi tất cả mọi thứ"), hoặc gần với Krasznahorkai trong "Seiobo there below" (tạm dịch: "Tây Vương Mẫu giáng hạ", một trong số ít những kiệt tác vô tiền khoáng hậu của văn chương hiện đại thế giới).
December 14, 2019
Ένας ολοκληρωτικός πόλεμος σε όλα τα μέτωπα... Οικογένεια, θρησκεία, κράτος, εθνικοσοσιαλισμός, μπαίνουν στο στόχαστρο αυτού του ευφυούς συγγραφέα, μέχρι τελικής πτώσης, μέχρι αφανισμού.
Ένα υπαρξιακό σκιαγράφημα, τόσο αριστοτεχνικά δοσμένο...
Ένα υπαρξιακό σκιαγράφημα, τόσο αριστοτεχνικά δοσμένο...
November 2, 2022
"immediatamente ebbi orrore di quel pensiero, ed ebbi orrore profondo di me stesso, e sarei stato felice di non averlo pensato, ma [..] non ero più riuscito a trattenerlo"
Due lunghissimi capitoli. Due lunghissimi flussi di coscienza: il telegramma e il testamento.
Un uomo, Murau, riceve il telegramma che nessuno vorrebbe ricevere. La morte, in un tragico incidente, di entrambi i genitori e del fratello. E la rappresentazione di tutti i pensieri pensati da quest'uomo di fronte alla fatale notizia. I più impietosi, i più grotteschi, i più impensabili e sicuramente i più politicamente scorretti.
"Noi odiamo infatti solo quando e perché siamo in torto. È diventata per me un'abitudine pensare (e dire!) in continuazione, mia madre è disgustosa, le mie sorelle lo sono altrettanto, e in più sono stupide, mio padre è debole, mio fratello è un povero idiota, tutti loro sono degli imbecilli. Quest'abitudine è un'arma, che in sostanza è infamia, con cui probabilmente si vuole soltanto placare una coscienza sporca"
Quest' uomo, in una stanza solo, con un telegramma in mano e con le peggiori foto, da lui conservate con disegno, dei defunti genitori, del fratello e delle beffarde sorelle, beffardamente sopravvissute alla sciagura.
A seguire il funerale. La massima rappresentazione e messinscena in cui si ricordano i defunti non per quello che erano ma per come sarebbe conveniente fossero stati.
"Di certi defunti, che da vivi tutti trovavano disgustosi e ripugnanti, mi è capitato spesso di sentir parlare, d'improvviso, come se nella loro vita non fossero mai stati disgustosi o ripugnanti. Queste mancanze di gusto le ho sempre trovate imbarazzanti. La morte di un uomo non lo trasforma in un altro, non fa di lui un carattere migliore, non fa di lui un genio se è stato un imbecille, o un santo se da vivo era un mostro."
Uno swap del pensiero. Un flusso continuo di pensieri pensati e/o condivisi con quel pover uomo di Gambetti che, come il lettore, si è sorbito (con un sorriso amarissimo) le esagerazioni, le iperboli, i [cattivi] pensieri del narratore. Che ha come unico obiettivo l'estinzione dei veri peccati degli uomini dal destino estinti.
"L'unica cosa che io abbia già definitivamente in testa, avevo detto a Gambetti, è il titolo Estinzione, perché il mio resoconto è lì solo per estinguere ciò che in esso viene descritto, per estinguere tutto ciò che intendo con Wolfsegg, e tutto ciò che Wolfsegg è, tutto, Gambetti, mi capisca, veramente ed effettivamente tutto."
Un epilogo che pur sorprendendo non potrebbe essere altrimenti. E dopo tanti pensieri estenuanti e ossessivi , finalmente un fatto. Liberatorio. Definitivo. Estinguente.
Deo gratias.
Due lunghissimi capitoli. Due lunghissimi flussi di coscienza: il telegramma e il testamento.
Un uomo, Murau, riceve il telegramma che nessuno vorrebbe ricevere. La morte, in un tragico incidente, di entrambi i genitori e del fratello. E la rappresentazione di tutti i pensieri pensati da quest'uomo di fronte alla fatale notizia. I più impietosi, i più grotteschi, i più impensabili e sicuramente i più politicamente scorretti.
"Noi odiamo infatti solo quando e perché siamo in torto. È diventata per me un'abitudine pensare (e dire!) in continuazione, mia madre è disgustosa, le mie sorelle lo sono altrettanto, e in più sono stupide, mio padre è debole, mio fratello è un povero idiota, tutti loro sono degli imbecilli. Quest'abitudine è un'arma, che in sostanza è infamia, con cui probabilmente si vuole soltanto placare una coscienza sporca"
Quest' uomo, in una stanza solo, con un telegramma in mano e con le peggiori foto, da lui conservate con disegno, dei defunti genitori, del fratello e delle beffarde sorelle, beffardamente sopravvissute alla sciagura.
A seguire il funerale. La massima rappresentazione e messinscena in cui si ricordano i defunti non per quello che erano ma per come sarebbe conveniente fossero stati.
"Di certi defunti, che da vivi tutti trovavano disgustosi e ripugnanti, mi è capitato spesso di sentir parlare, d'improvviso, come se nella loro vita non fossero mai stati disgustosi o ripugnanti. Queste mancanze di gusto le ho sempre trovate imbarazzanti. La morte di un uomo non lo trasforma in un altro, non fa di lui un carattere migliore, non fa di lui un genio se è stato un imbecille, o un santo se da vivo era un mostro."
Uno swap del pensiero. Un flusso continuo di pensieri pensati e/o condivisi con quel pover uomo di Gambetti che, come il lettore, si è sorbito (con un sorriso amarissimo) le esagerazioni, le iperboli, i [cattivi] pensieri del narratore. Che ha come unico obiettivo l'estinzione dei veri peccati degli uomini dal destino estinti.
"L'unica cosa che io abbia già definitivamente in testa, avevo detto a Gambetti, è il titolo Estinzione, perché il mio resoconto è lì solo per estinguere ciò che in esso viene descritto, per estinguere tutto ciò che intendo con Wolfsegg, e tutto ciò che Wolfsegg è, tutto, Gambetti, mi capisca, veramente ed effettivamente tutto."
Un epilogo che pur sorprendendo non potrebbe essere altrimenti. E dopo tanti pensieri estenuanti e ossessivi , finalmente un fatto. Liberatorio. Definitivo. Estinguente.
Deo gratias.
July 27, 2018
- Sự kết hợp giữa một lâu đài tăm tối kiểu Kafka với triết lý giết sạch, đốt sạch của Nietzsche.
- Ờ thì như mọi người vẫn gọi Bernhard, tức là Thánh Chửi =)) Chửi tuốt, từ tổ quốc, quê nhà, bố mẹ, anh chị em, tôn giáo, nhiếp ảnh gia, thợ săn, luật sư, bác sĩ, phóng viên,... chửi đến Goethe và sau cùng là chửi bản thân. Nhưng đồng thời cũng là người rất biết trước biết sau, vẫn chấp nhận cái mình chửi có khi lại là cái đúng đắn nhất. Tóm lại, như một vòng tròn bát quái, xới tung từ bên này qua bên kia, biến tốt thành xấu, xấu thành tốt, rồi công nhận cả hai. Riêng phần chửi bản thân mình thấy chưa thỏa đáng lắm. Truyện hai phần, giống như truyện ông soi gương của Chekhov í. Tức là phần hai bị lột mặt. Nhưng Bernhard lột chưa thật lắm. Nhưng sau rốt vẫn phải nói, trên tư cách một người ti toe cầm bút, và nghĩ là với cả những tay kì cựu đi, thì chửi được như Bernhard là quá khó. Ai mà dám chửi lộn phèo hết cả như thế :-ss
- Cũng giống như Nietzsche, Diệt vong chủ trương xóa sạch để xây cái mới. Nhưng rốt cuộc, nó giống như câu: "Ước mơ sau này của tôi là trở thành một loser". Nhưng đó là một ước mơ quá khó. Luôn có phản đề, dư âm. Và sau rốt, Bernhard chẳng diệt được gì, trừ bản thân mình.
- Đây có lẽ quả là một vụ Diệt vong cá nhân của tác giả thật. Mình tìm hiểu tiểu sử tác giả thì thấy nó tương đồng với sách theo cách rất phi logic của Bernhard. Ví dụ, ngoài đời, ông bị bố hoàn toàn bỏ rơi, mẹ nuôi, khốn khó, ông nội là người thầy yêu mến chỉ đường nghệ thuật và tên là Johannes, tự tử, chán đời, sống ở Áo... Đúng thôi, Bernhard diệt vong bằng cách xáo trộn mọi thứ lên.
- Vì từng nhắc tới Bernhard qua Linda Lê nên bây giờ nói thế này: đọc Diệt vong xong có cảm giác Linda Lê đọc Bernhard rồi gạch đầu dòng những đặc trưng của Bernhard, biến nó thành dàn ý rồi sau đó tự viết ra sách của mình. Trước vẫn nói dù chỉ 3* Linda Lê thôi nhưng sẽ còn tìm đọc cô vì bị hút. Nhưng bh, sau khi đọc Bernhard, dù có lúc cũng chán đến độ quẳng sách đi ăn, nhưng vẫn thấy là thôi, chả cần đọc Linda Lê làm gì khi mà đã có Bernhard, một phiên bản cao cấp hơn nhiều.
- Ừ thì chắc chắn sẽ đọc tiếp Bernhard (mong Tao Đàn tai qua nạn khỏi). Đánh 4*, thậm chí 4.5 vì nó quả thật mới trong tiểu thuyết (không nói tới triết. Nhưng triết luôn né tránh được chi tiết thực tại), đọc xong cũng có cảm giác boải hoải. Thích tính phi logic của Bernhard, kiểu thù thợ săn nhưng coi mổ xẻ là nghệ thuật, và thích nhất là kiểu bới đi bới lại một vấn đề rồi lạc luôn trong đấy. Đến đây thì thấy mùi Kafka nồng quá nhỉ =)) Vô cùng tò mò xem trong những cuốn khác, ông còn chửi như thế nào =)) Cũng như xem ông í say đắm với đời đến như thế nào. Vì Bernhard ấy hả, lúc nào cũng chỉ có hai thái cực, cực yêu và cực ghét (có những thứ vừa cực yêu vừa cực ghét).
- Ờ thì như mọi người vẫn gọi Bernhard, tức là Thánh Chửi =)) Chửi tuốt, từ tổ quốc, quê nhà, bố mẹ, anh chị em, tôn giáo, nhiếp ảnh gia, thợ săn, luật sư, bác sĩ, phóng viên,... chửi đến Goethe và sau cùng là chửi bản thân. Nhưng đồng thời cũng là người rất biết trước biết sau, vẫn chấp nhận cái mình chửi có khi lại là cái đúng đắn nhất. Tóm lại, như một vòng tròn bát quái, xới tung từ bên này qua bên kia, biến tốt thành xấu, xấu thành tốt, rồi công nhận cả hai. Riêng phần chửi bản thân mình thấy chưa thỏa đáng lắm. Truyện hai phần, giống như truyện ông soi gương của Chekhov í. Tức là phần hai bị lột mặt. Nhưng Bernhard lột chưa thật lắm. Nhưng sau rốt vẫn phải nói, trên tư cách một người ti toe cầm bút, và nghĩ là với cả những tay kì cựu đi, thì chửi được như Bernhard là quá khó. Ai mà dám chửi lộn phèo hết cả như thế :-ss
- Cũng giống như Nietzsche, Diệt vong chủ trương xóa sạch để xây cái mới. Nhưng rốt cuộc, nó giống như câu: "Ước mơ sau này của tôi là trở thành một loser". Nhưng đó là một ước mơ quá khó. Luôn có phản đề, dư âm. Và sau rốt, Bernhard chẳng diệt được gì, trừ bản thân mình.
- Đây có lẽ quả là một vụ Diệt vong cá nhân của tác giả thật. Mình tìm hiểu tiểu sử tác giả thì thấy nó tương đồng với sách theo cách rất phi logic của Bernhard. Ví dụ, ngoài đời, ông bị bố hoàn toàn bỏ rơi, mẹ nuôi, khốn khó, ông nội là người thầy yêu mến chỉ đường nghệ thuật và tên là Johannes, tự tử, chán đời, sống ở Áo... Đúng thôi, Bernhard diệt vong bằng cách xáo trộn mọi thứ lên.
- Vì từng nhắc tới Bernhard qua Linda Lê nên bây giờ nói thế này: đọc Diệt vong xong có cảm giác Linda Lê đọc Bernhard rồi gạch đầu dòng những đặc trưng của Bernhard, biến nó thành dàn ý rồi sau đó tự viết ra sách của mình. Trước vẫn nói dù chỉ 3* Linda Lê thôi nhưng sẽ còn tìm đọc cô vì bị hút. Nhưng bh, sau khi đọc Bernhard, dù có lúc cũng chán đến độ quẳng sách đi ăn, nhưng vẫn thấy là thôi, chả cần đọc Linda Lê làm gì khi mà đã có Bernhard, một phiên bản cao cấp hơn nhiều.
- Ừ thì chắc chắn sẽ đọc tiếp Bernhard (mong Tao Đàn tai qua nạn khỏi). Đánh 4*, thậm chí 4.5 vì nó quả thật mới trong tiểu thuyết (không nói tới triết. Nhưng triết luôn né tránh được chi tiết thực tại), đọc xong cũng có cảm giác boải hoải. Thích tính phi logic của Bernhard, kiểu thù thợ săn nhưng coi mổ xẻ là nghệ thuật, và thích nhất là kiểu bới đi bới lại một vấn đề rồi lạc luôn trong đấy. Đến đây thì thấy mùi Kafka nồng quá nhỉ =)) Vô cùng tò mò xem trong những cuốn khác, ông còn chửi như thế nào =)) Cũng như xem ông í say đắm với đời đến như thế nào. Vì Bernhard ấy hả, lúc nào cũng chỉ có hai thái cực, cực yêu và cực ghét (có những thứ vừa cực yêu vừa cực ghét).
June 8, 2015
After reading this, I have the sneaking suspicion that Thomas Bernhard doesn't really like Austria.
January 2, 2022
Ich fühle, wie der Tod mich beständig in seinen Klauen hat. Wie ich mich auch verhalte, er ist überall da. (Michel de Montaigne)Mit diesem Motto Montaignes beginnt der größte, mit Abstand umfangreichste und als letzter veröffentlichte Roman Thomas Bernhards. Geschrieben hat er ihn schon 1981/82, sein Erscheinen aber - sehr zum Missfallen seines Verlegers Unseld - bis 1986 verzögert. Im Bewusstsein seiner schweren Krankheit und eines nahen Todes hat Bernhard die “Auslöschung” wohl ganz wörtlich als sein literarisches Vermächtnis gesehen. Es ist nicht nur sein Opus Magnum, sondern auch eine Gesamtschau seines Lebens und seines Lebenswerks. Eine radikale Abrechnung, mit der er seiner eigenen Auslöschung befreit entgegensehen konnte.
Auslöschung werde ich diesen Bericht nennen, hatte ich zu Gambetti gesagt, denn ich lösche in diesem Bericht tatsächlich alles aus, alles, das ich in diesem Bericht aufschreibe, wird ausgelöscht, meine ganze Familie wird in ihm ausgelöscht, ihre Zeit wird darin ausgelöscht, Wolfsegg wird ausgelöscht in meinem Bericht auf meine Weise, Gambetti.
Es schreibt dies nicht Bernhard, sondern sein Protagonist Franz Josef Murau, den man trotz offensichtlicher Relationen auf keinen Fall mit Bernhard verwechseln sollte. Schloß Wolfsegg ist ein recht bescheidenes Schloß im Hausruck, Oberösterreich, auch dieses sollte man nicht mit dem riesigen, herrschaftlichen Anwesen verwechseln, das Bernhard als Herkunft und Familienerbe Muraus entwirft.
Wolfsegg steht für den Mief der Lodenmantelgesellschaft, für die katholische Verlogenheit, für die opportunistische Anbiederung an den Nationalsozialismus, für die unerträgliche Geistesschwäche des österreichischen, ja des ganzen deutschsprachigen Volks. Es ist die Bühne für den Dualismus von Gärtnern und Jägern, Kultivierung und Zerstörung, Leben und Tod. Fünf Bibliotheken gibt es in Wolfsegg, doch diese wurden vor der Neugier des kleinen Franz Josef Murau von den Eltern versperrt.
Murau ist nach Rom geflüchtet, dem Zentrum von Kultur und Geist, dem metaphorischen Gegenpol zur muffigen Enge der Hirschhornknöpfe und Lodenmäntel. Dort unterrichtet er seinen einzigen Schüler Gambetti in deutscher Literatur und er trifft sich mit der Lyrikerin Maria, eine Huldigung Bernhards an Ingeborg Bachmann. Doch seine Herkunft holt ihn mit einem Telegramm ein, das er von seinen Schwestern erhält: Eltern und Bruder bei Unfall verstorben. Nun ist er der Alleinerbe. In der ersten Hälfte des Romans, am Nachmittag der Todesnachricht, sitzt Murau an seinem Schreibtisch über alten Fotos seiner Familie, steht sinnend am Fenster mit Blick auf die Piazza Minerva. Gedanken und Erinnerungen bedrängen ihn, seine Eltern, seine Geschwister, seine Kindheit. Er hasst seine Familie und er liebt sie zugleich. Im zweiten Teil sehen wir ihn in beim Begräbnis in Wolfsegg. Das Begräbnis selbst ist der dramatische Höhepunkt des Buchs, das absolute katholische Welttheater.
“Auslöschung” ist inhaltlich um ein Vielfaches komplexer als alle anderen Werke Bernhards. Unmöglich, hier alle Aspekte, die mir wesentlich erschienen, auch nur ungefähr abzustecken. Ein Aspekt, der mir besonders wichtig erscheint, ist die Selbstbezüglichkeit. Autoreflexion zieht sich wie ein roter Faden durch das Werk und ist auf mehreren Ebenen sichtbar, inhaltlich, formal, stilistisch.
Erstmals erscheint nach den Künstlern und Wissenschaftlern der früheren Romane mit Franz Josef Murau ein Literaturgelehrter als Hauptfigur, und Literatur ist als Thema allgegenwärtig. Die explizite Erwähnung von nicht weniger als 49 Autoren und 22 Werken zusammen mit unzähligen allgemeinen Anspielungen, Zitaten und Parodien dürfen wohl als Selbstverortung Bernhards in der deutschen und europäischen Literaturgeschichte gelesen werden.
Von Spadolini war ich dann merkwürdigerweise auf Goethe gekommen: [...] Auf Goethe, den philosophischen Kleinbürger, auf Goethe, den Lebensopportunisten, von welchem Maria immer gesagt hat, daß er die Welt nicht auf den Kopf gestellt, sondern den Kopf in den deutschen Schrebergarten gesteckt hat. Auf Goethe, den Gesteinsnumerierer, den Sterndeuter, den philosophischen Daumenlutscher der Deutschen, der ihre Seelenmarmelade abgefüllt hat in ihre Haushaltsgläser für alle Fälle und alle Zwecke. [...] Dabei ist dieses Weltwunder nur ein philiströser philosophischer Schrebergärtner. Gambetti hatte laut aufgelacht, als ich ihm erklärte, was ein Schrebergarten ist. Das hatte er nicht gewußt. Insgesamt, habe ich zu Gambetti gesagt, ist das Goethesche Werk ein philiströser philosophischer Schrebergarten.
Muraus Schüler Gambetti dient als Medium, er ist wie ein Spiegel für diese Reflexionen. Gleich zu Beginn erinnert sich Murau, wie er Gambetti fünf Bücher gab, mit dem Auftrag, sie auf das aufmerksamste und mit der in seinem Falle gebotenen Langsamkeit zu studieren: Siebenkäs von Jean Paul, Der Prozess von Franz Kafka, Amras von Thomas Bernhard, Die Portugiesin von Musil und Esch oder die Anarchie von Broch.
Jean Paul und der Siebenkäs wird später noch oft erwähnt und Bernhard sah sich wohl als Seelenverwandter Jean Pauls. Eine gründliche Lektüre des Siebenkäs würde wahrscheinlich einiges über Bernhard offenbaren. Ich kenne leider nur die berühmte Passage, die “Rede des toten Christus vom Weltgebäude herab, daß kein Gott sei”, die zugleich ihren Zweck beinhaltet: Das Ziel dieser Dichtung ist die Entschuldigung ihrer Kühnheit. Das passt schon sehr gut auf Bernhard, aber auch der Bericht Muraus hat einen rekursiven Zweck, nämlich die Auslöschung des Geschriebenen.
Dass sich in dem fünfteiligen Kanon auch die frühe Erzählung Amras (1964) befindet, ist ein Verweis auf Bernhards eigene Anfänge und zugleich ein Hinweis darauf, dass “Auslöschung” vor dem Hintergrund seines Gesamtwerks gelesen werden muss. Wer die anderen Schriften Bernhards kennt, wird auch zahlreiche Motive aus Korrektur, Beton, Ein Kind usw. wiedererkennen, die hier variiert oder weitergesponnen werden.
Reflektiert wird auch das sprachliche Selbstverständnis, die stilistische und formale Werkzeugkiste Bernhards. Besonders gelungen fand ich die Passagen, in denen sich Murau über die Kunst der Übertreibung auslässt, inklusive einer kleinen rekursiven Schleife, ein wirklich köstlicher Blick in den Spiegel:
Meine Übertreibungskunst habe ich soweit geschult, dass ich mich ohne weiteres den größten Übertreibungskünstler, der mir bekannt ist, nennen kann. [...] Aber auch dieser Satz ist natürlich wieder eine Übertreibung, denke ich jetzt, während ich ihn aufschreibe, und Kennzeichen meiner Übertreibungskunst.
An anderer Stelle wird die Idee weitergesponnen und führt dann zu einem weiteren, ganz wesentlichen Charakteristikum, dem - zuweilen bitterbösen - Humor:
Und ich habe meine Übertreibungskunst in eine unglaubliche Höhe entwickelt, hatte ich zu Gambetti gesagt. Um etwas begreiflich zu machen, müssen wir übertreiben, hatte ich zu ihm gesagt, nur die Übertreibung macht anschaulich, auch die Gefahr, daß wir zum Narren erklärt werden, stört uns in höherem Alter nicht mehr. Es gibt nichts Besseres, als in höherem Alter zum Narren ernannt zu sein. Das höchste Glück, das ich kenne, hatte ich zu Gambetti gesagt, ist das des Altersnarren, der gänzlich unabhängig seinem Narrentum nachgehen kann.
In den Gesprächen mit Gambetti bricht dieser immer wieder in schallendes Gelächter aus, und Murau kann nicht anders als unvermittelt einzufallen. Alles was gesagt wurde, und ist es noch so tiefschürfend, wird augenblicklich der Lächerlichkeit preisgegeben. Der grantige Misanthrop, als der Bernhard immer bezeichnet wird, ist eben nur eine Seite seines Wesens. Die andere ist der Narr, der sich über alles lustig macht und der unter seiner Schellenkappe auch das Ungeheuerlichste ungestraft aussprechen kann. So lässt Bernhard Muraus Mutter auf entsetzliche Weise zu Tode kommen, sodass der Zustand der Leiche eine öffentliche Aufbahrung dem Anblick der Trauernden unzumutbar macht, der Sargdeckel wird schon im Voraus fest verschraubt. Trotzdem versucht Murau immer wieder vergeblich, den Deckel zu öffnen. Eine makabere Komik, vor allem wenn man von Bernhards schwieriger Beziehung zu seiner eigenen Mutter weiß. Ohne den Schalk, der überall zwischen den Zeilen lauert, wären Bernhards Texte über weite Strecken unbekömmlich. Im Grunde war er ein rechter Schelm und angesichts seiner gesundheitsbedingten Nähe zum Tod ist das schon bemerkenswert.
Gegen Ende des Buchs wird der Narr nochmals ganz offen vorgeführt. Nach dem Begräbnis begegnet der splitternackte Murau seiner Schwester am Gang zum Badezimmer. Er streckt der schockierten und erstarrten Amalia die Zunge heraus. Die Szene amüsiert ihn selbst so, dass er seine Posse im Badezimmer weiterführt:
Ich pinselte mein Gesicht ein und sah mich im Spiegel als Spaßmacher, der sich gleich selbst die Zunge herausstreckt und dem dieses Zungeherausstrecken solchen Spaß machte, daß er es gleich mehrere Male, sozusagen sich selbst zum Spaß, wiederholte.
Eigentlich würde dieses Bild als perfekte Kurzbeschreibung für das ganze Buch genügen: Thomas Bernhard, das Gesicht voll mit Rasierschaum, zeigt sich selbst die Zunge. Somit wären meine obigen Ausführungen fast obsolet ...
Nach ursprünglicher Abneigung bin ich mit jedem Roman mehr zum überzeugten Bernhardianer mutiert. Seine musikalische Schreibweise ist in der Literatur einzigartig und unverwechselbar. Es ist jedesmal wieder ein großes Erlebnis, Thomas Bernhard zu lesen.
May 2, 2022
Aluciné con esta novela. Obra maestra. No puedo decir menos. La crítica a la sociedad austriaca de la post Segunda Guerra Mundial es feroz. El protagonista está obligado a volver a su lugar de origen porque sus padres y hermano han fallecido. Lo esperan sus hermanas para ver lo que debe hacerse con las propiedades que heredan. El narrador detesta ese lugar y odia a su familia. La narración va exponiendo las causas de ese sentimiento. Son varias las aristas que se abordan, relacionadas con la impunidad que se les otorgó a nacionalsocialistas, críticas sin anestesia al Estado pseudosocialista austriaco, a la Iglesia Católica y a una decadencia cultural y espiriual que el narrador observa sin mucha esperanza, con un pesimismo feroz. Narrada con una perspectiva irónica y punzante, con un estilo narrativo que provoca una especie de lectura en trance. Novela inteligente, magistralmente narrada y con una visión crítica altamente efectiva y sugerente que también motiva a reflexionar en la propia sociedad. Maravillosa lectura de una novela excepcional.
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