In this last of his novels, Bernhard uses repetition to achieve a cathartic effect while delivering himself of a parthian shot at the very language without which his own literary achievements would have been inconceivable.
There’s something utopian in this novel, underscored by the ending, where Wolfsegg’s entire estate is donated to the Jewish community of Vienna. It’s a radical and destructive utopia, a utopia that annihilates Murau himself, and which is at any rate overwhelmed by resentment and hate for his birthplace.[3] But Bernhard wouldn’t be Bernhard if such a denigration, so relentless and ruthless, didn’t mutate in a vertiginous cascade of words with compulsive musical pitches of extraordinary beauty (and beautifully rendered by translator David McLintock) – a melodic aria whose lightness sharply contrasts with the gloomy character of Murau’s proclamations. It’s this very rhythm – an inexorable, spiralling mechanism of hyperboles and superlatives – which confers to the narrative the specific "vis comica" so characteristic of Bernhard’s work. Exaggeration changes into grotesque, tragedy into comedy. And often within the text, one hears a long liberating laughter. "Everything is ridiculous when one thinks of death," Bernhard wrote, and very few other contemporary authors have demonstrated how thin the line is that separates the tragic from the comic.
