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PARTISAN REVIEW
Bernhard's Last Novel
EXTINCTION. By Thomas Bernhard. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.00.
For all but two pages of the first part of Austrian writer Thomas
Bernhard's last novel,
Extinction,
Franz Josef Murau, the forty-eight year–
old narrator, either sits at his desk or stands at the window of his palatial
apartment in Rome. He is poised in the midst of a magnificent view of
the deserted Piazza Minerva, a telegram on his desk that has just informed
him of his parents' and brothers' sudden death in a car accident near their
ancestral castle W olfsegg in Upper Austria, and three old photographs he
has pulled out of a drawer, showing his brother, his parents, and his two
sisters. In Bernhard's customary, monomaniacal mise-en-scene, Murau's
sudden confrontation with death triggers torrents of overwrought remi–
niscences about growing up in the quasi-aristocratic milieu of Austria's
landed gentry, savage ruminations about family relationships, Austrian
culture and its perversion, and the intimate connection between national
socialism and Catholicism, most of it recalled as Murau's words to Gam–
betti, his pupil of fifteen years.
It is not easy to reconstruct even the short actual timeline of the three
hours the narrator sits at his desk, let alone the chronology of the events
covered by his mind reeling back and forth through scenarios remem–
bered, imagined, or dreamed: impressions of his family members;
commentaries on politics, literature, and philosophy delivered for the
most part in long outrageous riffs. Most of his consummate solo perform–
ances are for the benefit of Gambetti, to whom he is supposed to be
teaching German literature. Murau is actually engaged in nurturing his
own inborn and highly cultured propensity for anarchy, revolution, and a
philosophically validated destruction of the world.
It
is up to the reader to
pick up the clues, to separate the strands of incensed rhetoric to get be–
yond the corpses to the real motif.
Readers of Bernhard know him as the obsessive purveyor of unre–
lenting anguish, doom, and decay, delivered with a sarcasm that can be
fully appreciated only by equally angst-, doom-, and decay-ridden fellow
Austrians and some voyeuristic Germans. Yet
Extinction's
story is about
love, albeit veiled in layers of sublimation, some exquisitely decadent in
the vintage Viennese tradition, some deeply moving, some outrageously
obvious, and much of it quite adolescent, if not to say infantile.
Murau's relationship with his pupil suggests many resemblances to
Ludwig Wittgenstein's intense involvements with his students throughout
his life, fueled and tortured by Platonic ideals of perfection. For Murau,
