The Unrelenting Novels of Thomas Bernhard

Bernhard often gets pigeonholed as a hater, which he is, but in fact his body of work hits more kinds of notes, styles, and forms than most could ever

An edit of this post was originally published at Vice on April 17, 2013. Below is the full and uncut version.

During the fifty-eight years of his life, Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) composed more than 60 titles works of fiction, theater, poetry, and nonfiction, including at least 29 books currently available in English translation. He is considered by many to be the greatest author in the German language since World War II. Characterized often by a seething loathing of social decor, patriotism, and ego, and fed by years spent suffering from Tuberculosis and a gathering madness that would eventually lead him to spend two years in a sanatorium, his work is across the board some of the blackest, most bare-teethed realist writing available. Over the past several years, Vintage has been reissuing his novels as a series, leading me finally to fill in the gaps on my reading of his most notable translated work.

Frost (1963)

Written in a plain, almost diary-like catalog of days, Frost follows a young doctor taking up the company of a dying and reclusive painter in order to report on him to his mentor. Even this early on in his career, Bernhard is sharp in how well he can use a simple narrative of the daily activity of human company as a showroom for his black philosophies, ranging from critical to insane. As they talk and walk around the town and go about their business, the painter, pretty much at what you could call the end of his rope, diatribes and casts his ideas on every inch of the surrounding world, creating a seemingly simple but unrelenting sprawl of criticism and shittalk. The ideas accumulate and grow in on one another until by the end it is difficult to know the real from the unreal, the manic from the ill. Not one of my favorites of Bernhard’s but compelling in how it sets up the style he will grow only more intense about with each subsequent work.

Representative Sentence: “Terminal illnesses are like exotic landscapes.”

Gargoyles (1967)

This was the first book of Bernhard’s to be translated into English, and so subsequently the one that began his rise to fame. It’s a rather strange symbiotic sort of texture here: the book begins by following a doctor on his rounds in a small town, treating odd characters who are sick or confined, while exhibiting to his son, who is along for the day, all that can go wrong. After a small strange tour of homes, they end up at the castle of a Prince, who then essentially takes over the voice of the book with endless ranting, essentially about the mind of men: their foolishness, their delusions, their egoism, their lack of spirit or intellect, their exhaustion. Throughout the 100-page rant, a tension that could only be found in the likes of Bernhard develops, riding the weird gap between the bizarre and tedious prince and the nearly silent father and son, climaxing not with plot but with a sublimely monotonic and almost pummeled sort of feeling, again one that future Bernhard will bend only even harder onto the reader.

Representative Sentence: “Sometimes the actual existence and the pretended existence of a person merge in a way that is fatal for him.”

The Lime Works (1970)

Kind of a distinct turn from the mostly socially concerned matters of Bernhard’s work, The Lime Works sets itself up in perhaps the more bizarre, bordering on surreal, of all his novels. At its center the story of a man who buys an old stone labyrinth and moves into it to live with his crippled wife. He intends to use this isolation to write a masterwork on human hearing, in research for which he forces his wife to take part in a series of strange experiments. But even in captivity he blames his wife’s presence for his inability to do his work, culminating in an insane mesmeric ranting about the nature of creation and concentration at the end of which, taking place at the book’s beginning, he shoots his wife twice in the head. The result is perhaps the most twisted of Bernhard’s maniacal creations, and the first to appear as a single unending paragraph, the format of the majority of his work.

Representative Sentence: “It was possible to have anything in your head, and in fact everybody did have everything in his head, but on paper almost nobody had anything.”

Correction (1975)

This was the first Bernhard novel I read, and it’s still my favorite. Coming off the bizarre enclosure of The Lime Works, Correction goes even deeper into the black. Here’s its so unrelenting as to be a kind of wonder of desolation, of frustration, though in a way that in being so blunt and fucked it feels only more and more near. The overlying idea here is the presence of a cone, built by a man named Roithamer for his sister to live in the middle of a forest, which upon entering, she dies. The narrator is left to go through Roithamer’s plans and papers for the cone’s construction and the unblinking rhetoric of the surrounding world’s corruption, darkness, destruction, to the point that even the identify of the speaker and the suicided Roithamer begin to blur together, in a voice. If not necessarily the easiest introduction to Bernhard’s body, it’s one of the most densely deathly books around.

Representative Sentence: “Had the idea of building the Cone not surfaced, he would still be in England today, but his life had to turn out as it has, in fact, turned out, the idea of the Cone brought his life to a new high-point, the highest possible in fact, I now said, the six years he spent on the Cone were undoubtedly the high-point of Roithamer’s life, certainly the perfecting of the Cone was.”

Concrete (1982)

Concrete is interesting in that it is a monologue delivered by a man who meant to write another book instead. He is driven into a kind of endless paranoia by the presence of his sister, who may appear at any moment and interrupt his work, he knows. The book then instead of thinking about his topic, music, floods forth with anxiety over being unable to ever become what he wants, to do what he wants, as he realizes has always been the case, in all things, at the price of his entire life. It’s a refreshingly short, infuriatingly honest to the point of pathetic account of being human among humans, in constant conflict, terrified.

Representative Sentence: “All our lives we’ve been looking for something, in the end for everything imaginable, and never finding it, always wanting to achieve everything and not succeeding, or else achieving it and losing it at the selfsame moment.”

The Loser (1983)

The Loser is again unique among Bernhard’s plot structures in that it incurs a close relationship between three men: the pianist Glenn Gould and two of his former classmates. The book is narrated by the one of the pair of classmates who after witnessing Gould’s genius in school had given up, moved on that he would never be as great as his classmates; the other student, recognizing the same thing, killed himself. Many speculate that Bernhard, having been obsessed with music as a student, only to have to give it up partially as a result of his tuberculosis, based at least the spirit of the mesh of contemplation of genius, failure, and methods of handling obscurity on his own most personal struggles. Perhaps the most immediately accessible and oddly moving of Bernhard’s whole career.

Representative Sentence: “When I get up I’m revolted by myself and everything I have to do.”

Woodcutters (1984)

Intentionally or not, Woodcutters is probably Benhard’s funniest book, if funny in the way of being a total social dick. Basically, the narrator goes to a party he doesn’t want to go to thrown by people he doesn’t really like and sits in a wingchair waiting to eat dinner while thinking hateful things about the others at the party. He mentally shits on them for acting tasteful when they have no taste, acting cultured when they worship shit, begging for social praise by throwing a party for a pompous actor who shows up several hours late. All of this one the day of the funeral of one of their old friends, a woman who has just committed suicide. The scene builds again in Bernhard’s monologue of hate both of those around him and himself into a social spectacle of egoism and flaunting and pretension, when the guest of honor finally arrives. The novel is particularly odd in how it draws you into the social spectacle both hating the speaker and the spoken of, engrossed in the weird ways people try to go about being people in one another’s eyes.

Representative Sentence: “At Kilb he made himself look vulgar and ridiculous by screaming This food’s abominable, in the same way, it now occurred to me, as he’s made himself look vulgar and ridiculous hundreds and thousands of times in my presence.”

Extinction (1986)

Bernhard’s last and longest novel might in the end be my favorite of all, if for wholly different reasons than Correction. Much of the last years of Bernhard’s work fixated on the social hells of ridiculous social climbers and shitty artists, and this is the most intensely and unrelentling critical in this way, to the point of rather directly acknowledging there’s no one who isn’t fucked. Written as an autobiographical account of the son of a wealthy family who has just received word his parents and brother have been killed in a car accident, he somewhat reservedly returns home to oversee the mass funeral. What follows is a massive and unflagging criticism of every element of the town where he grew up, Wolfsegg, from his family’s shoddy treatment of employees, a massive library held in disdain, and most significantly, his parents’ Nazi ties. There’s something hypnotic about Bernhard’s monolithic paragraph-style, and the flood of formal language he uses to pull apart the character of anything he sees, including the narrator himself. Subtle in its implications, and not so subtle in its disdain, Extinction is about as pointed of an anti-social firestorm as could be imagined.

Representative Sentence: “My sisters had gleefully recited to me the names of all who had announced that they would attend the funeral, and the list was headed by the Gaulteiters, the SS officers, and the members of the Blood Order.”