Well, here we are again in the land of obsessive compulsive disorder, suicidal rage and death panic. It's like Bernhard has one channel and one channel only: sturm und drang, but without the post-Enlightenment restraint. How didRichard Hugoput it: "hatred of the various grays / the mountain sends...." Bernhard's satirical narrators are against everything: especially mountains, in this case the Alps, nature, people, society, art,any and all institutions, the church, the state, you name it. No culture, usually Austrian, can have a single redemptive aspect in its favor. One might think: 'Oh, the mountain air is great! I love to hike. Might take in a movie later.' For Bernhard's characters, there can be no such trivial daily existence. If we do hear about it, it's acidly deprecated. Death is inevitable; birth was never asked for. Oneis simply hurled into the "existence machine" by one's parents, probably drunk at the time. How dare they subject one to life and death! They should be put up against a wall and shot! If there's humor in Bernhard, it's of the gallows variety. Whistling in the graveyard. Bernhard's novels are voice novels, not surprising for a playwright, his other literary stronghold. They are almost entirely interior monologues with little or no description. Almost always one ranting narrator, pent up, unloads as if from a stage. This can be entertaining, but the cumulative effect is gloom. You can't get intimate with Bernhard as you would, say, with Styron. That's how consuming his negativity is. Like a horrific spectacle from which one cannotavert one's eyes. Bernhard may be a complete original, I'm not sure, but take heed. His art is dark, blackened by madness, numbing like opium.
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