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elusiveness, and proof of nothing else. Another is the
one major relationship outside his family. It was with a
woman 39 years older than himself. She was a widow
who befriended Bernhard when he was a young writer.
She provided a home and material support when he
was struggling. He called her his “Lebensmench”
(Lifeperson); a word he invented. Understandably,
Honegger doesn’t have much to give us on the details
of this partnership. All windows are opaque. The same
is true, more or less, for other areas of his life. Indeed,
Bernhard is a phantom in his own biography.
J.J. Long takes a firmer route by concentrating on
the novels. Bernhard, he says, was “a writer of considerable
diversity, profoundly concerned with the
problems and potential of storytelling.” Originally
a doctoral thesis, The Novels of Thomas Bernhard:
Form And Its Function uses the technical language of
Narrative Theory to understand the unique qualities
of Bernhard’s writing. Reading it requires a high level
of patience and concentration. Moreover, it leaves
the lengthy quotations in German untranslated. This
is regrettable as those most likely to be drawn to the
book – Germanless Bernhard fans – will be hampered.
Presumably the costs involved are prohibitive. Still,
even monolinguists can gain a good deal from what’s
left. Whereas Honegger bizarrely accuses Bernhard of
being a solipsist – someone for whom the world is
merely a projection of their own mind – Long stresses
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the ‘narrative strategies’ and ‘hermeneutic sequences’
employed to undermine such narrow interpretations
of Bernhard’s monological prose.
For example, he writes that the reflective form of
the great, valedictory novel Extinction allows “an
excavation of the past even as it moves forward into
the future.” The novel’s narrator fires at familiar targets
– particularly the repression of the Nazi past – even as
he himself succumbs to the same temptation to repress
the facts of his own life in order to resist the impending
extinction of the title. Indeed, the targets are not only
familiar but familial. Long shows how most of Bernhard’s
novels – like his memoir – are concerned with
“transgenerational transmission” (that is, inheritance).
The narrator’s family consists of ex-Nazi parents, both
sad and monstrous people, whom he loves and hates in
equal measure, as well as grotesque siblings who have
not resisted the legacy of repression. As the eldest, the
narrator inherits the family’s country estate in darkest
Austria when the parents are killed in a car crash. As he
also feels that he has not got long to live, he decides he
must return from his sunny life in Rome to redeem the
legacy. We don’t get to find out how he does this until
the final page. As he goes forward to do this, he reflects
on why it is required.
Yet the reason why the narrator’s predicament compels
our attention, and gives us pleasure, is his spirited
unwillingness to complete the task. He is forever delay-
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