'The Lime Works' by Thomas Bernhard

The sublimely cantankerous and ostensibly misanthropic novels of Thomas Bernhard are not nearly as well known in English as they deserve to be. With their indirect narratives, looping structure, claustrophobic pacing and delectably excoriating sentences, Bernhard presents his characters’ psychological ruin as evidence of the ultimately ludicrous and harmful nature of all human thought and aspiration. After a while, though, you begin to realise there is even something strangely compassionate in these attempts to exhaust misery in words, and the books can be very funny, too. The Loser is my favourite of Bernhard’s novels; Correction the most devastating. I have just read The Lime Works, in which, by amassing hearsay from various, often conflicting, sources, an insurance salesman recounts the fate of a man who withdraws into isolation (which he also inflicts upon his crippled wife) in order to research and write a book on the sense of hearing. Due to incapacitating perfectionism coupled with a fatal atrophy of his mental and physical resources, he, of course, never even begins to write, and instead both slowly and quickly destroys both his wife and himself.  Better-known in English than Bernhard are writers who have been influenced by him: W.G. Sebald and the Tim Parks of Destiny spring to mind.

(April 2013)