'Extinction' by Thomas Bernhard

In the first of the two relentless paragraphs which make up this claustrophobic masterpiece, the narrator, having just received a telegram informing him of the deaths of his parents and brother in an accident, stands at his window in Rome and attempts to retain his footing amid a great rush of (negative) memories of his estranged wealthy Austrian family and their property at Wolfsegg, and, more particularly, of the things he has told his pupil Gambetti about his estranged family and their property at Wolfsegg before he learned of the deaths. In the second half of the book he tells of his return to Wolfsegg, the preparations for the funeral, his relationship with his sisters, and the funeral itself, attended, as feared, by several ex-Nazis, and by his mother’s nauseatingly brilliant lover, a papal nuncio, who naturally assumes centre stage (in the narrator’s eyes at least). In the same way that the beautiful Children’s Villa at Wolfsegg was repurposed by his parents as a hideaway for Nazis after the war, symbolically robbing the narrator of his childhood, harm cannot be undone merely by its rejection, and the narrator's unremitting diatribes, devastating in their execution yet subtle in their implications, against absolutely everything represented by his family (sometimes  with  hints of an achingly suppressed ambivalence) and by the indelibly “Catholic and National Socialist” Austrian society, demonstrates that his attempts to free himself from what is despicable have not freed him but maimed him, and that words, whether as thought, speech or literature, are at best a feeble act of avoidance. “When I take Wolfsegg and my family apart, when I dissect, annihilate and extinguish them, I am actually taking myself apart, dissecting, annihilating and extinguishing myself. I have to admit that this idea of self-dissection and self-annihilation appeals to me, I told Gambetti. I’ll spend my life dissecting and extinguishing myself, Gambetti, and if I’m not mistaken I’ll succeed in this self-dissection and self-extinction. I actually do nothing but dissect and extinguish myself.”

(January 2014)