Extract

While the others were crowding round the actor, who had sunk into the wing chair, I retreated into the darkest corner of the anteroom.

A man sits in a wing chair at a Viennese dinner party, silently eviscerating every guest in the room, the hosts, the celebrated actor they are all waiting for, and the entire cultural apparatus of postwar Austria. Bernhard's narrator spirals through the evening in one unbroken torrent of repetition and rage, circling back to the same phrases, the same accusations, the same dead friend whose funeral that morning has occasioned this gathering. The novel was so savage that its targets recognized themselves and had it briefly banned in Austria. Yet beneath the fury is grief so total it can only express itself as contempt. The comedy is merciless. The sorrow is bottomless. The sentences never stop and never let go.