Walking: A Novella

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“The feeling grows that Thomas Bernhard is now the most original, concentrated novelist writing in German,” wrote George Steiner while the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard was still alive. Now, more than two decades after his death, it has become increasingly clear that Bernhard was one of the strongest voices of twentieth-century European fiction, on an equal standing with writers such as Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Robert Musil. Possessed of an eccentric syntax and an incomparably rhythmical prose style, Bernhard’s best-known works function as irony-ridden monologues and screeds against his native Austria. They submerge readers deep within a maddened or evasive or sophistic voice and hold them there, not allowing them to come to the textual surface for air. Bernhard’s sense of these voices is impeccable and unrelenting. Their habitual patterns of expression are so strong that to read Bernhard is to feel as if you have been possessed, as if the thoughts of others are worming their way into your skull and changing the way you parse and categorize the world. As the sentences stack up and logic begins a relentless and darkly comic spin, you are in danger of being crowded out of your own head. This is a dilemma shared by Bernhard’s characters as well: “Since my thinking had actually been Roithamer’s thinking, during all that time I had simply not been in existence, I’d been nothing, extinguished by Roithamer’s thinking.”

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