"Extinction" is the story of Franz-Josef Murau, a wealthy Austrian gentleman living in Rome as a private tutor in German literature. His tastes run to the esoteric and philosophical, and his relationship with his student, Gambetti, is intellectually mutual. He has just returned to Rome from the wedding of his younger sister, Caecilia, to an "obese wine cork manufacturer," held at the family estate in Austria, called Wolfsegg. At the wedding were his parents, older brother Johannes, and his other younger sister, Amelia.

He receives a telegram in Rome: "Parents and Johannes killed in accident." For the first half of this 320-page book (each half being one unbroken paragraph!), he describes his life, and his narration becomes a deep reflection on his childhood and life to date. He delivers a marvelous psychological portrait of himself, as well as the family members who have just died, and his long-dead Uncle Georg, whom he remembers with great fondness. He hates his family deeply, and the feeling is mutual. He is a philosopher, they are down to earth. He is an aesthete, but they are simple folks. He is a scholar, but they are hunters and farmers, despite their fantastic wealth and their prosperous family estate. Only Uncle George understood him, artistic, free-spirited, and educated. Franz-Josef reflects passionately on his current situation, and tells us many stories of himself and his family.

For the second half of the book, he describes the funeral at Wolfsegg. Lacking parents and older siblings, he is now the master of the estate. His sisters look to him for leadership. He must now decide what to do with the estate. Will he move back to Wolfsegg in Austria, a land he loves, but an estate he hates? Will he pass it to his sisters and remain in Rome, a city he cherishes more than any other? Bernhard will stun the reader with the beauty of the resolution, but will do it in his own literary fashion.

During the story, we learn Franz-Josef disdains Catholicism and National Socialism (i.e., Nazism) in equal parts. His mother had been having an affair with a Catholic Archbishop in Rome, a relationship which was supposedly secret, but which all her children seem to know of. The Archbishop is a close family friend, and will certainly visit the estate for the funeral. His father had many Nazi friends, unbelievably still openly Nazi all these years after the war. He tells us of the fun times he enjoyed playing at his estate's Children's Villa, and how disappointed he was when it was shuttered. He vows to open and restore it when he is master. He tells us of the five libraries---five!---scattered about the estate, similarly shuttered up, collecting dust despite a half-dozen generations' worth of valuable books stored within. He tells us childhood stories of his parents, his brother, and his sister, all disdainful, and heaps contempt upon his brother-in-law, whose name he cannot even bring himself to utter, in generous proportions. At one point, he bathes in his father's bath, and wears some of his clothes. Is this a metaphor for his feelings? We learn that he blames his father only for being such a simple man, but hates his mother passionately, for dragging his father into the mud.

We struggle with the idea that this is an unreliable narrator, and we are only hearing one side of a two-sided story, but unlike Italo Svevo's masterpiece, "Confessions of Zeno", it is clear that despite this narrator's one-sided story, there is no reason to disbelieve him. He is as critical of himself as of others, and he demonstrates the pettiness and crudeness of his family in many different ways. We trust him, not only because he is self-critical, but because despite his self-confidence, he is not a fool. We also learn some untoward truths about his family, and a few hidden secrets, which cannot be dismissed, even from the most unreliable narrator. His angst comes from a simple sentiment, expressed early on: "I can't abolish my family just because I want to." He struggles to resolve the question of extinction: Must he extinguish himself to satisfy his family? Must his family be extinguished to satisfy himself?

Finally, after a rollicking narration of heartfelt emotions and deeply-help philosophies, Bernhard's narrator demonstrates how he chooses to reconcile his thoughts and feelings, his inheritance and his sisters, his legacy and his future, and all the elements demonstrated through the length of the novel braid together like a jewel. Bernhard's prose is difficult for those unfamiliar with experimental or cutting-edge literature, but actually not very difficult once one tries. Curious readers will greatly enjoy engaging their mind with this book. If they wish to sample a smaller work before digging into this one, Bernhard's "Yes" is another masterpiece of style and depth. Both are rewarding, brilliant works from a literary master.

There is great joy to be had from this wonderful book. Its first joy is its prose - sparkling in its clarity, musical, effortless - which carries one along on a journey through the thoughts and feelings of Viennese 48 year old Franz-Joseph Murau. Intellectual resident of Rome, alienated by choice from his Austrian family, friend to Archbishop Spadolini(who is also his mother's lover!), he receives a telegram that his father, mother and brother have died in a car accident making him at one stroke inheritor of the family's wealthy estate. He is now MASTER OF WOLFSEGG. The first half of the novel THE TELEGRAM concerns his recollections of childhood and relationships and events that shaped his life. Example: " At first we always tell ourselves that our parents naturally love us, but suddenly we realise that, equally naturally, they hate us for some reason - that is to say, we appear to them as I appeared to mine, as a child that didn't conform with their notion of what a child should be, a child that had gone wrong. They had not reckoned with my eyes which probably saw everything I was not meant to see when I opened them. First, I looked in DISBELIEF, as they say, when I stared at them, and finally, one day I SAW THROUGH THEM, and they never forgave me, could NOT forgive me.(p 76)" The second half of the novel THE WILL concerns his attendance at the estate where he oversees the funeral and greets and reflects upon the range of visitors paying their respects.

Example: "In ROME I often lay on my bed, unable to stop thinking of how our nation was guilty of thousands, tens of thousands, of such heinous crimes, yet remained silent about them. The fact that it keeps quiet about these thousands and tens of thousands of crimes is the greatest crime of all, I told my sisters. It's this silence that's so sinister, I said. It's that nation's silence that's so terrible, even more terrible than the crimes themselves.(p 231)" This bare outline of the two parts cannot prepare you, dear reader, for the experiences of this novel. It is as if one becomes privy as another Viennese Mr Freud did, to the real secrets of the heart of an individual, an individual nevertheless, shaped by the world in which he was born but determined to realise some truths about that world. WE are privy then to the feelings, equivocations, doubts, fears, guilt and searching. It is a revalatory experience, scaldingly honest, which provides one man's analysis of 20th Century Austrian culture, including National Socialism, the class system, religion, architecture, cuisine et al. Sometimes mocking, sometimes self excoriating, sometimes savagely funny, we travel with Mr Murau through his thoughts and feelings at this turning point in his history. In the end, Mr Murau makes a stunning act of redemption which concludes his statement and rounds off this wonderful work of literature on a joyous note. Please accompany, or perhaps follow,this novel with a large dose of HAYDN. Most modern novels pale into the ordinary compared to this work.

This was his latest novel to appear in English. It is masterfully constructed,elegantly disturbing and satisfyingly challenging.

Bernhard brings you uncomfortably inside his body, as he squirms through an evening with "friends"
After the first page the book becomes repetitive, and after 20 pages you want to scream. But there is so much subversive intelligence and humor to the ravings of this self-loating old man, that you can't put this book down. Part of the success of the work undoubtedly is how closely it describes real people, the blowhards that were part of Bernhard's circle in contemporary Vienna. He is unsparing of them, and the narrative of the book is driven by Bernhard's petty and loving appreciation of the failures of artistic aspiration.

Woodcutters is definitely my favourite novel by Thomas Bernhard. It is Thomas Bernhard at his best. He got sued by former friends of his when he published the book so as in many of his books the narrator is very close to or maybe even identical with Thomas Bernhard himself.

Basically, the book consists of two parts. In the first part, the narrator sits in a chair and watches his hosts plus their other guests waiting for an actor to have dinner. The narrator had bumped into his hosts whom he hadn't seen for many years and they had invited him to join their dinner. A mutual friend of them had just committed suicide so he had felt obliged to join them - much to his regret. The second part describes the actual dinner. However, most of the book consists of what the narrator is thinking about his former friends, about friendships in general and about relationships between people. This nearly endless rant evolves around every possible aspect and like a surgeon Bernhard cuts deep into what everybody takes for granted and lays open treachery, lies, and hypocrisy (If you believe in family values and in a good world, this book might disturb you quite a bit!). As I mentioned before, old friends of Bernhard's sued him when the book was published because it was too obvious he was actually referring to them - and he was showing them in a way nobody would possibly want to be shown. This is not to say that Bernhard is necessarily a misanthrop. Quite surprisingly, when the narrator leaves the dinner table abruptly, he runs back home "through Vienna the city I loved like no other city" - quite a surprise after his Vienna-bashing. To me, Thomas Bernhard always was a deeply disturbed person who hated the world because it wasn't as nice as he wanted to believe it was.

I first read about Thomas Bernhard in a tribute to and general review of his works in believe it or not Details magazine, back in the days when it was slightly more intellectual, and less hairspray and BS. I was very intrigued by what the reviewer said about his writing style, which used little punctuation and basically no paragraph indentations. I was also turned on by the fact that he was originally trained as a musician (as I am), and apparently constructed his writing in a parallel fashion to the structures of music. The review below is excellent, but it refers to Bernhard's novel Gargoyles (and maybe should have one of those italicized Amazon messages saying this refers to a different book by the author), which in my opinion was a little harder to get into, but is still a fascinating book, as the reviewer relates very well. The plot of Woodcutters revolves around a musician who has experienced the suicide of a very close friend. The entire book takes place from the corner of a room where the musician sits at a party, and we are allowed into his mind as he relates the unfolding of what turns out to be a fairly disastrous evening among people he has learned to despise over the time since the death of his friend. The people at the party are all artists and musicians as well, and for those of you who have spent some time in the arts community you will relate to some of the observations the narrator makes about these folks (you will enjoy it even if you aren't an artist, though). The book is dark, cynical, and funny. I can't imagine there would be anyone who couldn't relate to a few things in this novel in this day and age. Highly recommended.

"Yes" is the story of a man who lives in rural Austria, a scientist with an overactive imagination, and a psychologically oversensitive nature. His friend, a real-estate agent, sells a highly undesirable plot of land to a Swiss couple, a man retiring from a successful career as a power-station architect, and his female companion, a middle-aged Persian woman. The narrator strikes a friendship with the woman, and finds her his intellectual equal, or at least his emotional one. He wonders why this couple has chosen that horrible plot of land (which his friend had never previously been able to sell), and why they are building an ugly home on it.

He begins to suspect the retiring architect does not treat his female companion with as much respect as she deserves. He retreats into his home for a time, trying to get away from the world, in a fit of general agitation and anxiety, but eventually returns to his friends' company, and deepens his friendship with the Persian woman, who seems to be growing apart from her companion. The novel ends with an emotional shock, summarizing the story's happenings, and explaining it in highly dramatic terms.

This novel is unequivocally brilliant. Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) does not employ a style easy to understand at first, but it is worth every ounce of energy invested. For example, he has written this short novel with no paragraph breaks whatsoever. (The book is 135 pages long, but the type is larger than usual and the pages shorter than usual.)

Bernhard writes in an overflowing, fulsome style, not unlike Samuel Beckett, full of language, full of description, incessant, and captivating. This is exactly his strategy: he is trying to capture the reader by forcing them to expend so much energy following his text, his narrative, his story, and his unusual style, that the final words of the story will hit the reader like a ton of bricks. This is Bernhard's signature, and this novel is a fantastic example.

Any reader should try this novel who is interested in an inventive, experimental novel, but one which does not veer too far from normal story-telling. Berhard's novels, for all their roller-coaster style, are actually quite conventional, and "Yes" is a great introduction to his literary work. His vocabulary is sharp, his characters are well spun, his occasional insights are spectacular, and his stories are intruiguing. This novel is highly recommended for anyone wishing to sharpen their mind, find a new adventure after having enjoyed Beckett's works, or introduce themself to one of the finest writers of the 20th century.

This novel was my first exposure to Thomas Bernhard and I have to admit I was initially put off by its style. Some of the sentences went on for a page and half, using only commas as punctuation. After the first page or two I began to enjoy it. The plot is very simple. The narrator is a scientist who has retired to the Austrian countryside to conduct his research on antibodies. At first he believes that the isolation will benefit his studies but gradually, he works less and less, due to the great depression that comes over him. He begins to cut off all relations with the outside world, keeping only a token connection with his friend, Moritz. When he comes to recognize that his mind can only be stimulated by socializing with other people it is too late. He cannot free himself of his terrible loneliness. It's been so long since he has communicated with a human being he doesn't know where to start. All this changes when a Swiss engineer and a Persian woman show up at Moritz's house to buy a plot of land to build a home on. Talking with the woman, the narrator finds new life, but tragically, it will be shortlived.

This is a great novel. I have never seen the mindset of isolation and the depression that follows better portrayed. The style of the piece lends itself to a breathless reading. You don't notice that periods are scarce after a while. It has an exquisite flow to it. All the characters are nicely done. The translation is excellent. I really have nothing negative to say about it.

I have long been a fan of Bernhard, and this is one of my favorites. It appears to be less ambitious than his "masterpieces," but this untrue. I find it to be one of his most intimate, intelligent, comical and most brutal pieces of work. It is incredibly concise and as readable as "Wittgenstein's Nephew." It contains everything one desires of Bernhard, due in part to the fine translation, stripped down to the to the bone. Something is always lost in translation, but an excellent ear and eye has been at work here. It is a poetic masterpiece with blinding light, brialliant language, and a twisted satori. Aside from the politcal, moral, social and philosophical criticism that is Bernhard's trademark, there is a unbelievable consecration between the author and reader that takes place and demands that "you must change your life." If you allow it to happen you will be left with nothing but an eyelash and a sock, but you will find that the author with all his vitriol,sarcasm,and "so black it's blue" humor, has still preserved what is best in the human heart, and damn, he tells a good story.

Thomas Bernhard must have been the bane of the Austrian cultural world during his lifetime. His favorite style is an endless, run-on paragraph, seething with rage and pain at every turn. If you don't catch that these crabby narrators are constantly undermining their own credibility, you might not see how funny these books are. Old Masters involves an old musicologist, who spends every other day in front of the same painting in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. This 150-page assault on Western art and music (few are spared: Mahler, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and especially Bruckner are given real tongue-lashings, and at one point he implies the painting he always looks at is a forgery) might annoy you, until you realize that, as flawed as these great works might be, they're all we have to keep us going day to day. Life without these Old Masters would be unbearable. The narrator is slow to admit this, but when the admission comes, it's heart-breaking. For someone to complain this vigorously about the limits of Austrian art and culture, he must have loved his homeland very dearly indeed. You won't be disappointed in this one.

This a book about two grumpy old men. " ..he does not like solar radiation. He avoids the sun, there is nothing he shuns more than the sun. 'I hate the sun, you know that I hate the sun more than anything in the world,' he says. What he likes best are foggy days, on foggy days he leaves the house very early in the morning, actually takes a walk, which he does not normally do, for basically he hates walking. I hate walking, he says,it seems so pointless to me. I walk, and while I am walking I keep thinking how I hate walking, I have no other thoughts at the time, I cannot understand that there are people who are able to think of something other than that walking is pointless and useless, he says." If you cannot find this very funny then this book is not for you. In 156 pages there are no paragraphs, or chapters. But there is excellent prose and conversations on philosophy of life, art, suicide, class, Catholicism, nationalism, culture......life. Very funny and perhaps sad too, but in the end strangely exhilarating. A wonderful read.

Yes,it is enjoyable and considering the dark and disturbing contexts of his other novels it is indeed a comedy.Yet it is seriously constructed and top quality novella.

This early work captures much of the mood, but not exactly the style that will be prevalent in Bernhard's later work. Written as what can best be described as one long prose poem, the storyline is drawn in fragments of conversation, emotion, images, etc. and can be hard to follow at times. However, what's distilled here is an atmosphere of clausterphobia and approaching madness that is definitely Bernhard's forte. I found it to be incredibly lyrical and poignant, and this piece has remained my favorite even after reading several of his more mature works. Maybe because of the dog (read the book!).

His earliest but already matured prose/A thin(143 pages)book made up of one towering sentence/Dis- turbing plot,problematic hero but gripping tale/ challenging but satisfying masterpiece...

This brand new bio balances scurillous with serious, and carefully explains background. It's a good intro.

Honegger successfully locates Bernhard in his milieu, the Viennese theater and Austria as a national scandal. Tina Brown in Talk recently wrote about British "genial malice", whereby they can carp at Tony Blair *because* he made a good speech. Bernhard went further: he was more like Eminem today than anyone in the US now.

a "you can't jail me, so try to sue me!" writer.

Honegger reveals lots of new stuff, especially about Bernhard's relationships and the high regard given Bernhard by Austrian aristocracy. Her points about Bernhard's laboring successfully to be an aristocrat hit the mark.

Honegger also notes his Mallorca interviews with Justine Fleischmann. Let's hope they're translated soon.

We need to read more German writers who say writers are worse than dogs because no one trains them where to pee.

The USA with its cargo cults of celebrities and public officials is becoming more like Austria in its public celebrations every day, with interminable strife about being more crude or more subtle played out daily in the press, dishonestly of course. A book on Bernhard and the reaction to pollution that nurtured him can't be more timely.

This book arrived today and I have just read the first half. This is a terrific and, I believe, important book on Bernhard and his art. Honegger is a very subtle reader of Bernhard. What is most appealing is the way she connects Bernhard's writing with his own personal history and the history of Austria. With this work readers of the English-language translations of Bernhard's work now have a first-rate guide to this talented genius.

Peter Filkins has never ever written a review that did not carry some outrageous assertion refuted by the content of the books by the author that he is supposed to have read

I'm pleased that this book is finally in print by a serious publisher. These are amazingly everyday stories, like we hear on the 11:00 news. A bus of school children goes off the road and into a ravine. What event years later would make a town recall this event?Two men look through a telescope over a glacier. One of them drops dead, and the other one lives after having looked through the same lens.On and one, these 104 short stories work on you, as the language grows more complex and compelling.

Endlich wird auch einmal die Gottesfrage untersucht im Werk von Thomas Bernhard!

If you're not sure whether you want to buy this book or not, why don't you get down to your local library or mega-bookshop and take a look-see for yourself, instead of reading the blather of dunderheads like those whose reviews disgrace the rest of this page?

Even my friend Paul whom I work with, whom has won piano competitions, and played all over the town,including The Whitney, and knew what it was like to be a virtuoso, and whom after 42 years of playing the piano still has a desire to play, even though now he sells pianos more than he plays, and I who also sell pianos, and know them very, very well, though can't play them as well as Paul, but knows just as well what makes them good, and also what makes a good book, believes this book to be a new book. And what I mean by a new book is that this book has never before been written, except for maybe other books written by the author, but with different characters. That this book is not a sad book, even though it may seem as such, just as my friend Paul is not a sad man even though he may seem as such, and I, who may be the most sad of all, although one may think me to be the least sad when compared to my freind Paul, or even this book, I thought.

thomas bernhard is a genius writer,a master no velist and"the loser" is my choice for the fiction book of the century...

The main character has the worst case of writer's block you will probably ever read about -- the book is a great gift for friends who are working on their dissertations or any large project: it offers, as it were, an example of what NOT to do (of course your friend has to have a sense of humor)!

Thomas Bernhard's "Concrete" is a concentrated, excessive and disturbing stream-of-consciousness monologue by Rudolf, a reclusive, wealthy Viennese music critic who lives alone in a large country house. Rudolf suffers from sarcoidosis, a disease not described in the narrative, which is characterized by inflammation of the lymph nodes, lungs, liver, eyes, skin, and other tissues. Physically miserable and obsessively fearful of death, he also is a man paralyzed by his misanthropic, conflicted, exhaustingly relentless thoughts. Trapped in his own mind, Rudolf is a literary creation directly descended from Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Beckett.

Rudolf has been working for ten years on a biography of Mendelssohn, yet has failed to write even the first line of his work. "I had been planning it for ten years and had repeatedly failed to bring it to fruition, but now had resolved to begin writing it on the twenty-seventh of January at precisely four o'clock in the morning, after the departure of my sister." It is an intention to begin writing that recurs again and again throughout Rudolf's narrative, an intention to begin writing at a specific time in a specific location after the completion of specific preparatory tasks. And in each instance, Rudolf fails to begin, a sign of procrastination bred by obsession or of extreme writer's block or of extreme mental imbalance.

When Rudolf's sister leaves the house, he still cannot begin to write. Despite her departure, her aura remains: "Although she had gone, I still felt the presence of my sister in every part of the house. It would be impossible to imagine a person more hostile to anything intellectual than my sister. The very thought of her robs me of my capacity for any intellectual activity, and she has always stifled at birth any intellectual projects I have had . . . There's no defense against a person like my sister, who is at once so strong and so anti-intellectual; she comes and annihilates whatever has taken shape in one's mind as a result of exerting, indeed of over-exerting one's memory for months on end, whatever it is, even the most trifling sketch on the most trifling subject."

This theme, Rudolf's hatred for his older, worldly sister, runs throughout his narrative, the sister becoming one among many reasons (or excuses) for Rudolf's intellectual paralysis, his inability to write, even his inability to function in day-to-day life.

But it is not merely his sister that Rudolf despises. He also despises Vienna, the city where he once lived (and where his sister continues to live). "Vienna has become a proletarian city through and through, for which no decent person can have anything but scorn and contempt."

A complete recluse, his mental world bordering on solipsistic isolation, Rudolf no longer has any interest in social life of any kind. "To think that I once not only loved parties," he reflects, "but actually gave them and was capable of enjoying them!" Now he sees no reason or need for the company of others, for the people Rudolf spent years trying to "put right" but who only regarded him as a "fool" for his efforts. As Rudolf thinks, in a long, discursive interior response to his sister's claim that his desolate, morgue-like house, "is crying out for society":

"There comes a time when we actually think about these people, and then suddenly we hate them, and so we get rid of them, or they get rid of us; because we see them so clearly all at once, we have to withdraw from their company or they from ours. For years I believed that I couldn't be alone, that I needed all these people, but in fact I don't: I've got on perfectly well without them."

Rudolf is isolated in his own mind, a man who cannot accept the imperfections of others and of the world, but also cannot accept his own imperfections. And it is perhaps this, more than anything else, which explains his inability to get along in the world, his inability even to write the first sentence of his Mendelssohn biography. "Once, twenty-five years ago, I managed to complete something on Webern in Vienna, but as soon as I completed it I burned it, because it hadn't turned out properly." As Rudolf says, near the end of his short, but exhausting, narrative:

"I've actually been observing myself for years, if not for decades; my life now consists of self-observation and self-contemplation, which naturally leads to self-condemnation, self-rejection and self-mockery. For years I have lived in this state of self-condemnation, self-abnegation and self-mockery, in which ultimately I always have to take refuge in order to save myself."

"Concrete" leaves the reader exhausted from Rudolf's excessive and relentless narrative, giving truth to the remarkable power of Bernhard's literary imagination and narrative voice. It is a stunning literary achievement, perhaps the best work of one of Austria's greatest twentieth century authors.

A terminally ill writer has spent the last ten years trying to write the FIRST SENTENCE of his masterpiece, and, failing that, spends this book-length monologue venting his outrage at everything and everyone--including himself--he holds responsible for his plight. This is one of the best examples of the stream of consciousness technique I've ever come across; despite the absence of chapters or paragraph breaks, the prose is extremely readable. It's a bitterly funny book (the rant about how domesticated dogs are destroying the world is the most hilarious thing I've read in some time), but it's the genuinely unsettling finale that puts this book into the top tier of modern novels. An absolutely first-rate book; don't let Bernhard's reputation as a difficult "experimental" writer scare you away from it.