Correction - Thomas Bernhard

... and then other people come along and proceed to edit such fragments, shreds of ideas that have been abandoned and left lying around, thinking they must edit and publish them, no matter where, publicize them, all these publications are criminal acts every single time, perhaps the greatest crime there is...

A challenging and at times maddening read. Benhard writes books that are utterly serious, but because of the insistent tone of the narrators, they make for some funny conversation. From what I've read, his novels all share pessimistic narrators obsessed with death, genius, and the profound stupidity of society.

As far as plot goes, Correction is told by an unnamed narrator who has been given stewardship of his friend Roithamer's "legacy," namely an unfinished manuscript, after Roithamer commits suicide. The manuscript describes several things: descriptions of Roithamer's plans for a perfect cone, which he builds in the exact center of a forest, as a home for his sister; descriptions of Roithamer's privileged yet torturous youth (his mother is a piece of work); and finally descriptions of revising and correcting everything he has written about both the cone and his youth.


In the beginning of the story, the narrator arrives at the place where most of Roithammer's work has taken place, which is a garret in a house of one of their mutual friends, Hoeller. All of the story essentially takes place in this garret, or, as it is referred to, the "thought chamber." From there, it basically consists of two parts; the first, in which the narrator considers and reconsiders the seemingly monumental task of dealing with Roithamer's manuscript; the second, the narrator reading from the manuscript. The only break in the book is the separation between the two halves. Otherwise it consists of an uninterrupted stream of sentences.

The cone is of paramount importance, since it informs the structure of the book. The epigraph is as follows:

A body needs at least three points of support, not in a straight line, to fix its position, so Roithamer.

This applies to the cone, but also to the structure of Roithamer's mental processes (for example, he has a manuscript, a correction of the manuscript, and a correction of the correction of the manuscript), the relationships between characters (Roithamer, his sister, his mother; narrator, Hoeller, Roithamer, etc), locations, etc.

I'm not sure if I'd suggest Correction as an intro to Bernhard. I started off with Frost, then moved on to Yes and The Loser. Naturally, this is what I think anyone who reads Bernhard should do, too! But, more seriously, Yes was less impressive than Frost (which, amazingly, was Bernhard's first novel), and The Loser is fantastic. I'd definitely recommend The Loser first.


As an addendum, let me note that the character of Roithamer is in part modeled on Wittgenstein, and some of the ideas (or all?) are meant to be explorations of Wittgenstein's writings/philosophy. Or so I've heard. Not knowing anything about Wittgenstein, I really couldn't tell you. But maybe that would be of interest to some.