My favorite magazine -- The New Yorker -- has finally honored my favorite author -- Thomas Bernhard -- in a grandiose article by Ruth Franklin, “The Art of Extinction.” The Austrian novelist, playwright, and poet is widely acclaimed as one of the most provocative postwar writers in Europe but is little known in the US. Long before like-minded French enfant terrible Michael Hollebeueq, Bernhard established himself as a notoriously misogynistic hermit, an “Uebertreibungskuenstler,” an “exaggeration artist” and manic perfectionist who lacked faith in human relationships and only believed in the power of language to describe the shortcomings of an otherwise unbearably imperfect existence that was doomed by mental and physical diseases and an ever-present undercurrent of callous nihilism. Franklin describes Bernhard’s style, obsessively precise in its redundancy, as “linguistic sadism”: “Not only do his novels, pushing every idea to its extreme, require a similarly extreme form; he also took pleasure in prose that is hyperbolic, over the top, even joyful in its own insanity.”
I’ve adored Bernhard since I was a teenager. I liked reading about Bernhard as much as I liked reading him because it was hard to make it through a novel from beginning to end without losing your mind; pushing you closer to the edge and sometimes even beyond was Bernhard’s program. His short stories, poems, and dramas are more accessible although not easier to digest. Throughout his writing, there is a hidden tenderness, a pompous musicality, and a bleak sense of humor that can be hilarious.
At the end, though, for Bernhard, the glass remained less than half empty. In 1988, he died by assisted suicide, after long suffering from lung ailments. He remained a provocateur beyond his death: In his last will, he forbade the publication, production, and recitation of his works in his native Austria for 70 years. One final laugh, one final correction.
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