I have no idea how to rate this book. I suspect that after some time mulling it over, I will end up changing it but for now I have selected the middle position of 3*.

This stream of consciousness novel was fairly easy for me to read (unlike Ulysses!). However I found that I just couldn't make up my mind about the main character, the one whose thoughts I was reading. At times he seemed insightful but a few sentences later he would seem repugnantly self-centered. Then he would take the wind out of the sails of my dislike by admitting his flaws! ( )

If the fire in the spirit of Bernhard's Murau syncs up to the embers of one's own burning unease with the world, I think "Extinction" can be pure catharsis. Having previously been crushed by "The Loser" and its neurotic musings on impostor-syndrome, I can say firmly say that this book solidifies Bernhard as a voice of reassurance for the distraught inner-monologue of the jaded, hungry mind. ( )

Bernhard - Extinction

perhaps his most thematically direct work, though the narrator is a bit too self-aware. reminds me of his Correction, except a bit less brilliant (no dialectical turn) and with a different kind of humor (if not better). not essential reading, but i enjoyed it.

nazis in ther childrens villa

"And my parents in the second photo don’t make a good impression either, only a pathetic, ridiculous, comic impression as they board the Dover train at Victoria Station in London. No luggage, just their Burberry umbrellas on their arms, and my father in his thirties knickerbockers, which he bought before the war in Vienna, at Habig’s elegant store in the Kärntnerstrasse. He went around in them throughout the Nazi period. For as far back as I can remember I’ve seen him wearing these knickerbockers, I told myself. Even when he’s wearing something quite different I still see him in these knickerbockers from Habig’s, constantly saying Heil Hitler. "

"No, this won’t be my office, I thought. I won’t let myself be tyrannized by the three-ring binders. Millions are tyrannized by three-ring binders and never escape their tyranny, I thought. For the last century the whole of Europe has let itself be tyrannized by three-ring binders, and the tyranny is increasingly oppressive. Soon the whole of Europe will be not only tyrannized but destroyed by them. I once told Gambetti that it was above all the Germans who had let themselves be tyrannized by three-ring binders. Even their literature is subject to their tyranny, I told him. Every German book written in this century is a product of this tyranny. German literature has been tyrannized and almost destroyed by three-ring binders, I said."
"Even Thomas Mann and Musil, in every line they wrote, let themselves be dominated by three-ring binders. [...] For at least a hundred years we’ve had nothing but what I would call binder literature,"

" It’s as though the greatest actor of the age had come to some unknown and quite insignificant small town to give an arch-Catholic performance of Hamlet, I thought."

too self-aware " No one has carried the art of exaggeration to such extremes, I told Gambetti, and if I were suddenly asked to say what I really was, secretly, I’d have to say that I was the greatest artist I knew in the field of exaggeration. Gambetti again burst into his characteristic laughter, which promptly infected me, so that that afternoon on the Pincio we both laughed more than ever before. But of course this too is an exaggeration, I realize as I come to write it down—a typical instance of my art of exaggeration. The art of exaggeration, I told Gambetti, is the art of tiding oneself over existence, of making one’s existence endurable, even possible. The older I get, the more I resort to this art, I told Gambetti. Those who are most successful at tiding themselves over existence have always been the great exaggerators. " ( )

Bernhard's narrator in this novel, Franz-Josef Murau, Austrian exile in Rome, shares a lot of attributes with his creator. He's given to long, and often hilarious and self-contradictory diatribes, in particular against the "Catholic-National-Socialist" culture of Austria, against his family, against many aspects of the modern world, against aristocrats, against the ill-bred, against philistines, and against people who have an exaggerated devotion to "culture". He receives an urgent telegram on the opening page of the novel and doesn't start thinking about what to do in response until about 300 pages in, at the very end of the first part. In the second half of the book he also has one fundamental problem to resolve, and he deals with it in a couple of lines on the last page, after another 300 pages or so of talking about other things. As always in a Thomas Bernhard novel, it's not about the plot.

What it is about, as the title suggests, is a Schopenhauer-inspired project to deal with — extinguish — the bad stuff in Murau's head by expressing it all. This is a novel that will aims for self-destruction, or at least the annihilation of the narrator. Murau is out to free himself from the shadow of his unloving, aristocratic parents (killed, together with Murau's elder brother, in a car accident just before the opening of the novel) with their unpleasant Nazi and Catholic connections, from the philistine, money-centred atmosphere at Wolfsegg Castle, from his outdoorsy brother, from his snooty sisters, one of whom has just married a Weinflaschenstöpselfabrikant (wine bottle stopper manufacturer — Bernhard clearly loves this superb German word, and uses it with increasing degrees of irony every time the unfortunate brother-in-law is mentioned) from Baden, and from Austria in general.

Of course, Bernhard doesn't want us to take it all completely at face value: we are shown that Murau has picked up much more of his family's snobbish attitudes than he is aware of, and particularly when he starts to realise that he has inherited Wolfsegg, he starts to act in some very country-landowner-like ways towards his sisters and the estate workers. We also have to decide for ourselves whether Murau's mother was really having an affair with the super-suave Vatican diplomat Archbishop Spadolini, or whether this is another bit of paranoia on his part.

As usual with Bernhard, there's at least a suspicion that he's put some of his friends and enemies into the book. Murau's Rome friend and critic, the eccentric poet Maria, is obviously based on Ingeborg Bachmann (who died some ten years before this was written); I'm sure there are some more characters who would be recognisable to readers in the know. And of course the whole topic of the Austrian upper classes closing ranks to protect former Nazis was very current in 1985-86 because of the Kurt Waldheim scandal.

Basically, this is six hundred pages of top-quality sardonic Bernhard prose. We don't have to like anyone in the book, or even take a particular interest in the fate of Wolfsegg, but we can sit back and enjoy it all from a safe distance.

(My 2000th LT review) ( )

Frans-Josef, teacher, learns of his parents' and brother's death by letter from his sisters in Austria. He has been in Italy, teaching Gambetti how thought is structured by language, using Schopenhauer read in both German and Italian as an example.
"Uncle Georg...introduced me to literature and opened it up as an Infinite Paradise"
References to Johann Peter Hebel Calendar Stories, Jean Paul's Siebenkäs, Lessing's Nathan, Schiller's Robbers, and Goethe's Faust. Frans-Josef, like the protagonist in Frost alienates himself from his family, often thinking of them using negative thoughts, and strives to be a better person than them, but actually his attitudes about them seem to reflect his own character more than he would like to admit. ( )