Anyone else a Thomas Bernhard fan?

Allthough i'm not really a Thomas Bernhard fan, i just started reading "Extinction" and i already know, that i'm not gonna finish it. Bernhards writing style is brilliant in my opinion and i do enjoy a lot of his thoughts, but reading hundreds of pages of his endless tirades can be very tideous. Furthermore it doesn't help, that there is actually no real plot in "Extinction", but avid Bernhard readers are probably used to that.

I do prefer his shorter stories and his autobiographical works. My favourite Bernhard story so far is "The Cap" (from the short story collection "Prose"). Unlike most of his other stuff, this one actually has a punchline and some kind of positive message at the end, but that's probably not what Thomas Ligotti devotees are looking for. But there are also a lot of interesting thoughts on madness in it.

My next Bernhard book will be "Wood Cutters", as it is supposed to be one of his best and most humorous works. It's also much shorter than "Extinction".
 
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Hanswurst said:
Allthough i'm not really a Thomas Bernhard fan, i just started reading "Extinction" and i already know, that i'm not gonna finish it. Bernhards writing style is brilliant in my opinion and i do enjoy a lot of his thoughts, but reading hundreds of pages of his endless tirades can be very tideous. Furthermore it doesn't help, that there is actually no real plot in "Extinction", but avid Bernhard readers are probably used to that.

I do prefer his shorter stories and his autobiographical works. My favourite Bernhard story so far is "The Cap" (from the short story collection "Prose"). Unlike most of his other stuff, this one actually has a punchline and some kind of positive message at the end, but that's probably not what Thomas Ligotti devotees are looking for. But there are also a lot of interesting thoughts on madness in it.
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Extinction ends with a perfect punch-line (and, really, by implication a positive message of a sort!). But I think one would have to have read the previous 300-odd pages to get the full import of it.

Spoiler
It is, centrally, an anti-antisemitic novel.
 
Yesterday I read Thomas Bernhard's "Concrete" in two translations - in English and in Russian. He made such a strong impression on me and caused such negative associations that I dreamed about him this morning. In the near future I will try to read the rest of Bernhard's works that I managed to get hold of.
 
Sashock Strashock said:
Yesterday I read Thomas Bernhard's "Concrete" in two translations - in English and in Russian. He made such a strong impression on me and caused such negative associations that I dreamed about him this morning. In the near future I will try to read the rest of Bernhard's works that I managed to get hold of.
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I've read The Loser this month and was thinking about reading Frost next. But recently I've seen Concrete in so many favorite books lists that maybe I should go for it instead.
 
I both adore and detest Bernhard in equal measure, an emotional response that he would doubtless be pleased with.

I can safely say that he shaped who I am and who I was. When I first picked up The Loser in 2015 it took my breath away. It was one the first times that I saw some of my deepest and darkest feelings reflected in a book, and the prose itself was a thing of wonder, a continually evolving monster of a paragraph that achieved an exhaustive beauty despite focusing on the mire of the mind and the futility of living, along with frequent moments where I had to put the book down due to laughing so much. I immediately became obsessed and that obsession lasted throughout my early-mid 20's. I'm not sure if this will make sense, but he was one of the only authors outside of Ligotti who I thought wasn't trying to hold my hand and present me with a false picture of the world. I appreciate any author who can do that.

At the same time, I have grown to dislike the impact his works have had on writing since. There are so many people (and I direct this at myself, for the most part) who mostly seem to ape his writing style whilst not understanding why he used these techniques to begin with and as a result it ends up with barely a fraction of the original power. I have read quite a few "Bernhardian" novels and they have not stuck with me anywhere near as much as his works have. Likewise, I also tried to write fiction that came out Bernhardian and it was excerable. I also find that his novels are frequently repitious in both theme and scope, to the point where I once tried to binge read several of his books in one week but grew so bored by the constant repetition that I ended up putting it down and picking up Gogol instead.

Oddly enough, despite his reputation as a cankerous and life denying pessimist I have found that his work frequently puts me in good humour. Now that, he would probably be less pleased with.
 
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