By Thomas Bernhard (1986)
So, finally forced myself to finish Extinction at the weekend. I did not get on with this at all – the whole book felt like an exercise in trying the reader’s patience. It turns out that two continuous paragraphs of hundreds of pages each, consisting entirely of the same criticisms of bourgeois Austria repeated again and again, in really very basic and graceless style – can become tiresome pretty quickly.
I don’t think I’ve read anything as simultaneously affected and leaden.
I don’t understand the plaudits at all – I get the sense there’s some significant mystification there of what is a really a very basic technique.
Like, so basic I’m pretty sure some of our machine learning folks could write a Bernhard generator without much trouble. All you’d need to do is (i) complain a lot in a (ii) superior monologue and (iii) constantly exaggerate and (iv) call everything “base”. Apparently Bernhard’s entire body of work uses exactly the same device. I don’t think I’ve read anything as simultaneously affected and leaden.*
* and I’ve read The Fountainhead