Thomas Bernhard

Eric Ormsby, writing in the New Criterion on Austria's controversial Thomas Bernhard, sounds a little like Bernhard himself at times:

While living in Prague I formed the habit of spending the afternoons at the Goethe Institute on the right bank of the Vltava; there, in a palatial nineteenth-century building, I could browse through the entire range of German and Austrian literature and there too, one day, I came across Bernhard’s last novel, aptly entitled Extinction (Auslöschung). From the first elephantine yet nimble sentences I was spellbound. Not long after I began to read Bernhard’s autobiography, arguably his masterpiece, and from the first sentence I knew that I had come across a “kindred spirit.”