Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard (1984)

Sitting in the wing chair. The phrase returns again and again through this novel, a compulsion the narrator cannot suppress, because he never once stands up: across an entire Viennese dinner party he stays fixed in a dark corner, watching former friends he has spent years despising arrange themselves to receive a famous Burgtheater actor. The occasion is grief. Joana, a dancer from their old circle, has hanged herself that morning, and the mourners honour her the only way they know how, by performing. Bernhard delivers it in one unbroken churn of prose, contempt circling back on itself, gathering force with each repetition until the rhythm becomes its own ugly, hypnotic music. Then the cruelty turns inward, because the man cataloguing every fraud in the room cannot say why he keeps returning to these people, why he is still here at all. By the time he rises and resolves to set it all down, the novel has folded him into its own verdict: the obsessive attention he wields against them is the very thing it is made of.