Bernhard has been, and remains, one of the most important writers in my life. After leaving university and moving to London, I met a friend who shaped the course of my life more than I can say. Bernhard numbered among the countless things he introduced me to, as did a group of other people, writers, critics, bloggers, and students, who had found ways to articulate that shifting darkness that literature had and reading activated. Bernhard acted like a gateway for this way of thinking about literature, of trying to think what I had previously felt. In his work, Bernhard takes the promise and failure of literature and turns it into self-immolating obsession. Writing’s frozen infinite is not a hexagonal library but pain in the chest, a tightness in the lungs. Its bleak humour and fulminating recursion reveal their propulsive force in Bernhard like nowhere else. The unraveling of reality by the most quotidian events is taken to a pitch nothing short of daemonic. Bernhard takes the humiliation and shame of being human and winds it into the sensation of totalisation and collapse that unites everything from a single breath to the movement of life as such. The Cheap-Eaters is not Bernhard’s greatest book, what prevents it from being so is the same thing that makes it exemplary for including on a list such as this: it is the work where Bernhard’s style is most present, where even his own techniques of construction appear to get caught in the machine of their unfolding. By turning the tools of the writer against himself, making a success of his failure, a failure of his success, it stands as the ideal introduction.
Die Billigesser first published by Edition Suhrkamp, 1980; English translation, Spurl Editions, 2021
A Personal Anthology 