This is about infinity and the fatalistic thought that all the abilities of one's own appearance... until one day the first idea comes and then the second idea, the third, the fourth idea... idea after idea... finally hundreds, thousands, again thousands of ideas: there are painters, journalists, prison guards and prisoners, policemen, philosophers... Inheritance order, cow, himself, minister, chauffeur, do you understand... until finally nothing is certain anymore... that's what it's about... In the end, a person only has his own characteristic states, but not nature... how quickly everything flows into emptiness and then it becomes, for example, a passive state, an incompetent state, madness, an outcast, finally achieved harmony with one's own boredom... And everything is always just an opinion," he said, "no deeper, but also no less deep than the greatest error.

Frost, the first published novel by Bernhard, begins with the statement "Eine Famulatur besteht ja nicht nur aus..." And indeed, in the subsequent course, it mainly focuses on these other, "außerfleischlichen" things that also play a role in medicine at times. However, the whole book is also a special case in Bernhard's novel works. In his later books, Bernhard never wrote so structurally (on the macro level), so materially, so humanly, so banally, and yet so much storytelling. The fact that the book still fits perfectly into his work is partly due to the already overly mature language security here, but also because the book means a bridge between his earlier poems and the novels (which come from a completely different world).

The book is also full of contradictions and disharmonies that more or less unrestrainedly flow from the thought world of the sick painter Strauch (whose illness we "naturally" do not learn until the end) into the thought world of the intern who pursues his observational work with great meticulousness and equal failure. The idea that medicine is actually a philosophy that can/wants to deal so extravagantly with "außerfleischlichen" aspects already belongs to the fictional world of the novel. The thoughts and sometimes wonderfully senseless sayings of the painter are carefully noted down, reflected upon, and largely accepted without contradiction by the intern. At the beginning, he still tries to oppose his very different life to it, but soon gives that up too.

The intern is obviously also far too much of a literary person for this given task, but with the model of the "lyrical I," one quickly gets into a dead/empty end without an exit in Frost. The by far most believable aspect of the book is the anti-idyll of village life. Bernhard was never as close to banal descriptions as here: who goes to bed with whom, what does the engineer of a power plant say, etc. etc. Weng becomes the counter-village to all the sugary descriptions from folk literature. It was surely a great pleasure for Bernhard to describe all this "differently" than was usual. This "other truth" is also great in its shamelessness, although it is thus also banal and forms a strong contrast to the shining spiritual world of the painter, just a necessary "background," no more.

Despite all these contradictions and formal errors that almost tear the text apart, Bernhard's poetic power, which is still strongly palpable in this book, holds everything together. Individual words, aphoristic fragments, and descriptions (yes, there are still those in Frost!), which oppose each other; the unbelievable interest of the intern in the painter... Bernhard is here basically still a very sensitive "poet," far from being the hard-forged prose author he later became. Over long stretches, I had the feeling of reading a poem that knows or allows no boundaries.

Just because of all these gaps, errors, stiffnesses, stupidities, highly pathetic exaggeration of scientific nonsense... but all of which is held together by masterful language and remains "playfully" readable almost everywhere, it deserves a full rating of 5 stars. Frost must look exactly like this and cannot be written differently. The form is perfect, the story is coherent.

In any writing of Bernhard, no matter how slight, one finds Bernhard and all that his work represents. The ways in which he materializes himself are already the subject of punctuation and are determined, to a large extent, by the very chronology of the writer. But the fact is that even in "Helada", still deprived of that characteristic style by which the author is known and recognized, we find the Bernhardian motifs. And it is crude, it is brilliant, it is dense and dark... a darkness, however, crystalline. Some may denounce that apparent trait of comfort that at first sight implies always writing about the same theme, from the same perspective or about any other aspect that one wants to address. In my opinion, in this case, such criticism would be refuted, not by the writing itself, but by the art of writing that begins and ends with Bernhard, radically, as radical as the contemplation of the solid ground and the abyss that would await us if we were at the very edge of a cliff. In short, as radical as the author himself. It is like the musician who, after years of orthodox interpretation, is able to find his place and can somehow already express it in an art that, although not unique, is at least distinctive, and which reaches ever higher levels of refinement.

So the musician, so Bernhard. Since it is his first novel, it is more than evident that this is not where we will find such stylistic purification. This is not the Bernhard of the interminably subordinated sentences, nor the one of the hostility towards the dots and dashes, nor the one of the repetitive, obsessive musicality for which we remember his art today. Even so, despite (or precisely because of) being written, stylistically speaking, in a conventional key (taking into account the degree of convention that can reside in Bernhard), it makes for a heavier reading than any of his other works. Nevertheless, in the book there are abundant brilliant thoughts (those that can be deciphered, of course) and a somewhat more descriptive directionality than I had read in the Austrian author until then.

"The world is a gradual diminution of light." This profound statement seems to capture the essence of our existence in a rather melancholic way.

As we journey through life, we often witness the fading of hope, the dimming of dreams, and the loss of that initial sparkle that once illuminated our path.

The passage of time brings with it a series of challenges and setbacks that can slowly erode the bright light within us.

However, it is important to remember that even in the face of this gradual diminution of light, there are still pockets of brightness and moments of inspiration that can reignite our inner flame.

We must learn to cherish these fleeting moments and use them as a source of strength to keep moving forward.

Perhaps, by doing so, we can resist the encroaching darkness and find a way to keep the light burning within us, no matter how faint it may seem.

After all, it is this light that gives meaning and purpose to our lives and allows us to continue our journey with hope and determination.

[1963] Although I don't think it's the most polished of Bernhard's works due to a matter of rhythm or vocabulary, I don't know, perhaps because it's his first novel. And although at times I thought wearily something like "no, not this time, no! I who have only received the task of observing! How can he charm me again with a man who needed to write the same thing over and over again, now in the form of a painter who doesn't paint but only talks. What kind of curse is this and why, being apparently the most accessible one that even starts with chapters and has many and different paragraphs, it is probably the most desolate of a desolate work…

And then I imagine him impeccably dressed, polishing his shoes on the Prado promenade. And forgive me, but I think Bernhard's sense of humor was simply gigantic and there isn't a single paragraph in it that isn't a delight to try to think to the limits of one's own thoughts and leave you a multitude of clues in the process.

“The question is to know to what extent it is possible to penetrate into the disproportion of his brother,” as the first letter to the assistant Strauch well says.

Reading Frost gives the impression of being in a state of entrapment. It's as if one is pinned between walls or stuck in a mountain crevice. This is not only due to the imagery imposed on the reader by Bernhard but also because of the very nature of the text itself. The rhythm is unwavering, offering no stable ground to rest upon or an opportunity to catch one's breath. Wherever you look, you are confronted with these sentences, unyielding and methodical, as if chiseled from rock. Words pile up on top of each other, forming new ones that, when repeated, line up like thick walls. This is mirrored in the town of Weng, which is trapped in a hollow among the mountains, oppressive and confining.

Trapped there with us is the painter Strauch, along with our unnamed narrator, a medical intern working for the painter's estranged brother. The intern has been dispatched to Weng on a secret mission to assess and report back on Strauch's health to the worried yet emotionally distant brother. And Strauch proves to be quite a character. The world he inhabits is self-centered, with all roads leading back to himself. He is, without a doubt, completely insufferable. He yearns for the pure, the good, and the untouched, but instead, he consciously immerses himself in suffering, managing to be self-indulgent by denying himself any indulgences. If there's anything that gets Strauch excited, it's his perception of himself as a bitter, eccentric man, suffering his way through life. "I'm quite reconciled to the fact that everything about me is diseased. In the grip of illness," he says, and I'm fairly certain that he's not just reconciled but relishes the thought of it, wallowing in it. This idea of his own misery has taken such deep root in Strauch that it has pushed him far beyond the bounds of reality.

Bernhard's approach to shaping dialogues is novel to me. The only way for us to access Strauch is through the intern. When narrating, the intern sometimes presents the painter's words in quotes, while at other times, he retells them, making it difficult to distinguish the intern's thoughts from those that emerge from Strauch's mouth. The impressionable narrator increasingly becomes a mouthpiece for the painter's chaotic mind, and it seems that we primarily get to learn a great deal about Strauch. His ramblings are at times poetic and enjoyable to read, and on occasion, they are genuinely interesting, but mostly they are just that: ramblings, aimless and erratic. Strauch has only one thing in mind, and that is his own inevitable end. All this turmoil teaches us a lot about him, but it can be frustrating to read, feeling a bit like slogging through endless marshes. It占据了书中很大一部分篇幅, and I early on made the mistake of attempting to search for meaning in what he says. It's exhausting, but this search for something real and substantial in Strauch's great mire is so alluring, and that is the very real trap that threatens to engulf the intern. Because what does looking for substance in that which means nothing do to the observer?

And with that question, Strauch fades from his position as our main character. His thoughts and fears占据了 Frost的很大一部分, but it all ultimately has to be conveyed to us through, and colored by, the hands of the intern. He, who has scarcely mentioned his own life as an aside and was only meant to act as a messenger, suddenly turns inward at some point. He begins to take shape. Has he ever truly observed himself before? Unlike Strauch, the intern has a family, work, and even friends, yet he still seems alienated, completely disconnected from his own self. He is a man who has always simply let things happen to him while passively accepting it all, but since coming to Weng, he can't sleep at night.

In the presence of the painter, the intern's passiveness gives way to another, less subconscious form. Strauch thinks himself into passivity; he is stuck, frozen in place, "dominated by himself," as the intern puts it. He is disgusted by instincts and what he perceives as the feral, bestial aspects of life that he does not partake in. But while it's tempting to conclude that the painter is responsible for the intern's newly discovered self, we've seen these things before. It has been present in Frost from the very first page, the dislike of humanity and all that is alive and breathing. It has been present in the intern. Something has been lying dormant in his chest, and it has finally received enough nourishment to break free.

Bernhard intrigues me. There are several passages in Frost that become tiresome to read and don't seem to contribute much, but his writing style is remarkable, and he carves out a very claustrophobic form that, in my opinion, sustains the entire book. The fact that this is only the first one he wrote only makes me more curious to see how he would develop over time.

(I switched between two different translations while reading this one: the English one by Michael Hofmann and a Swedish one by Jan Erik Bornlid. They differed enough that I had a hard time settling on one of them, but I eventually ended up reading the Swedish edition. This translation is very intense, the words hit harder and come across as a lot more emotionally effective, but it's also somewhat more muddled than the one by Hofmann. It's difficult to determine how good a translation is without being able to read the original, but I definitely felt like reading Bornlid's version felt closer to being trapped in a frozen mountain crevice.)

How to write about a book that delves into the profound difficulties of writing itself, the ineffability of thinking and feeling, and the mystery of a life that seems impossible to explain through writing? How to pen down a book that is deliberately provocative, capable of making you feel as if someone is boring a hole in your head while you stand naked in the freezing snow, looking up at the black sky, and yet, making you like it? How to contain the uncontainable?

Can we ever truly know, understand, interpret, or observe an inner life? Can the story of an inner life be told in words in a meaningful way? Can I possibly convey the experience of reading this book? Can I put it into words? I can only attempt to piece together the notes I took while reading into some semblance of coherence.

It has been almost a year since I began this book, and I have read it twice (taking notes the second time around). During this time, I also read several other works simultaneously: Shakespeare's Hamlet and Macbeth; Kafka's Metamorphosis and The Trial; T S Eliot's The Waste Land and his introduction to Pascal's Pensées; Ionesco's Rhinocéros; DeFoe's "The Apparition of Mrs. Veal"; and Kermode's The Genesis of Secrecy. [0]

It was while reading that last book, during my second reading of this particular work, that something clicked. The mysterious nature of parables, the unknowability of stories. In a sense, this entire book is a series of parables, told, retold, and overheard within the typical Bernhardian web of direct and indirect discourse. We are not meant to grasp all of the meaning; we are outsiders, much like in Kafka's parable of the man who desires to enter the Law [1]. And note that no one has a name, not even the narrator, as is the case in a parable: the innkeeper's wife, the engineer, the skinner. Only the painter is given a name (G. Strauch), though he is usually referred to simply as "the painter". The Gospel according to G. Strauch?

All of this is laid out for us on the very first page of the book: "A medical traineeship isn't just about watching complicated intestinal operations, [etc...], it also has to come to terms with extracorporeal realities and possibilities. The task entrusted to me of observing the painter Strauch forces me to think about these types of realities and possibilities. To explore the inexplorable. To uncover it...Like a conspiracy is uncovered."[2] What exactly is this extracorporeal stuff? Not the soul, according to the narrator, who does not (yet?) believe in the soul. Might we catch a glimpse of it within this book? And perhaps, just perhaps, could it be that everything emerges from this non-corporal, "non-cellular" stuff (and not the other way around)?

So, right from the first page, on the "first day" of this diary of a medical student assigned to observe a "crazy" painter, we know that we are about to embark on an exploration of something that cannot be explored, we are going to plunge deep into the "non-cellular", and we will not come out unscathed. In fact, we might even become "infected".

We could say that this book is a diary of a medical student observing a slow suicide and attempting to understand it, but that would not do justice to this remarkable work. There is so much happening here, so many stories and ideas (I am tempted to say everything) that it would be impossible to write about them all. There are numerous doors that might lead to understanding, not all of which are openable, enterable, or even visible (yet), but for some doors, we might discover a key that allows us to open it and peek inside. There is the Pascal key (the painter carries around and reads Pensées) - thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, thoughts that illuminate, thoughts that drive you mad (the narrator describes the painter as both a Political man and a Dreamer, while Eliot speaks of Pascal as both a Mathematician and a Spiritualist). There is the Kafka key, which is perhaps more like a light (ironically) showing the way: the narrator "concludes" on page 347 that the painter was alone like a fly is alone, "a fly that in the winter finds itself inside the room of someone who lives in a big city, a fly followed and chased..., and finally crushed against a wall when those in the room think they're being persecuted by the fly, irritated..." [3]

Can we ever fully understand a work of literature? Probably not, and I will not attempt to do so here, that's for sure. But I will mention my favorite story in the book, my favorite parable. And that is the Story of the Vagabond, on page 262. In fact, I would recommend going to your favorite bookstore right now and opening up this book to that story. Especially if you think Literature isn't real, or that it must contain some "idea" of "authenticity". Therein you will find the perfect parable on the meaning of Art.

[0] You'll notice that all of these books (except the Ionesco and Kermode) are in the public domain and freely available on gutenberg.org. Unfortunately, the English translations of the Kafka books are rather poor. I look forward to rereading them in the Italian Adelphi editions.

[1] Interestingly, the narrator lies to the painter, telling him that he is studying Law so that he does not realize he is being observed. (This lying troubles the narrator.) Also, the painter mentions that a nephew of his was a judge and then went insane (page 17).

[2] My translation from the Italian translation. I omitted a lot, but this is a powerful opening. Also, I deliberately chose "traineeship" over "internship" for its EU-English feel :-)

And speaking of translation, the English title, while the same as the original German ("Frost"), seems rather unfortunate. I don't know the connotations of that word in German, but in the Italian translation "Gelo" implies a bitter cold that freezes everything over, something that stops you in your tracks, something that takes over everything and makes you numb. In English, "frost" is almost nice; it's that coating of ice you might see on vegetation after a freezing cold night, it's Frosty the Snowman, it's what you put on cakes, it's definitely not what Bernhard had in mind.

[3] My translation from the Italian translation. Another key might be Henry James, as the narrator is reading one of his books. But we never find out which one (there are a few clues, but I haven't read Henry James, so I can't even hazard a guess). Yet another key might be Robert Walser, whose Life of a Poet I have just started reading in a French translation. But it would perhaps be a key in the negative: where Robert Walser sees beauty and beauty in ugliness on his daily walks, the Painter just sees ugliness. Oh, and did I mention that Walser died while walking in the snow?

This book is indeed a difficult one to get through.

Even as an enthusiastic admirer of Bernhard's style, I was unable to finish it with the same speed and vigor as his other works like Der Untergeher or the 300+ page novel Holzfällen. It's his first novel.

I believe he refined his style considerably in his later works. They are more filled with humor, offer more variety, and at the same time, are more concise and impactful.

Of course, the themes largely remain the same: Pessimism, black humor, a dislike of Austria and all things Austrian, anti-Catholicism, anti-naziism, etc.

This book doesn't yet have the same intense anti-catholic and anti-nazi (for Bernhard, they are strongly connected, and for good reason) sentiments, but they are already emerging at certain points.

I don't think I'll read this in its entirety again, but I might pick out some remarkable passages as there are surely many.

I must admit that there were numerous occasions when I had to force myself to continue, especially towards the end. This made me deduct another point, bringing it down to 3 stars.

Because that "forcing through" had nothing to do with the material being dense, but rather it was dense and tiresome at times.

Towards the end, many of the intellectual ravings of the mad painter Strauch become so convoluted and nonsensical that they are annoying to sift through and my mind just shut off. (When will this end?)

Then a great sentence would pull me out of that passive state and engage me again.

There were also passages that were a bit hackneyed or simply unoriginal. The takes on communism, the Lord's Prayer, etc. were quite uninteresting.

This book is too long for its own good. 6 - 7/10

"Many ideas turn into lifelong disfigurements."

This statement holds a certain degree of truth. Ideas have the power to shape our lives in profound ways. Sometimes, an idea that seems promising at first can lead to unexpected consequences that have a lasting impact on our physical or mental well-being.

For example, a person may have the idea of pursuing a particular career path without fully considering the potential drawbacks. This could result in years of dissatisfaction and a sense of being trapped in a job that doesn't fulfill them.

Similarly, an idea about a relationship or a lifestyle choice may seem appealing initially, but it could lead to heartbreak, disappointment, or other forms of emotional pain.

It's important to carefully consider the implications of our ideas before acting on them. We should weigh the pros and cons, seek advice from others, and be prepared to adapt and change if necessary.

By being more thoughtful and intentional about our ideas, we can reduce the likelihood of them turning into lifelong disfigurements and instead use them to create a more fulfilling and meaningful life.

**Expanded Article**

A sudden gust of wind from a malevolent direction has cast down the painter Strauch in the Salzburgian Weng. There, he endures the hellish torments of his terminal illness.

The painter's brother, an assistant doctor in the Schwarzach hospital, has tasked a student during his internship with observing Strauch. In 27 diary-like recordings, the intern, as the narrator, writes down his observations and thus sketches an astonishing psychological profile of the painter against the backdrop of an ice-cold and dark mountain landscape with its impulse-driven inhabitants.

Strauch suffers from insomnia, headaches, foot pain, physical pain in the soul. Strauch's incurable illness is life itself, a psychosomatic illness that inevitably leads to death. The world is transient, perishable, and meaningless, the result of a lifetime of suffering. Birth already包含 old age, decay, illness, and death.

Have you not noticed that people inhabit cemeteries? That big cities are large cemeteries? Small towns smaller cemeteries? Villages even smaller ones? That the bed is a coffin? Clothes are shrouds? Everything is practice for death? The whole existence is an eternal trial of embalming and burial.

Strauch indulges in world explanations, self-accusations, bitterly sarcastic comments on the life of the villagers, but also on politics, religion, art... Humanity is only capable of destruction, shamelessness, and stupidity. The whole world is a single annoyance to him.

Restlessness and dissatisfaction determine his days and nights. His existence is a single dilemma. He is the personified contradiction: inside and outside, subject and object. He seeks solitude and cannot bear it alone. He seeks company and cannot stand people.

From the crowd, a pathological desire spreads to one to want to belong to it, to have to belong to it, you know... The disgust of belonging to it, the same disgust of not belonging to it. Sometimes it is one disgust, sometimes it is the other...

In his coat pocket is an edition of Pascal's \\n  Pensées\\n. If one leafs through Pascal's writings, one finds astonishingly many similarities with Strauch's mental world. Do those reviewers who, due to their irritation, interpret the painter Strauch as a pathological case, see it the same way with Pascal?

[Blaise Pascal - Gedanken, Bremen 1777]

Meanwhile, the student racks his brains about the nature of the painter and is increasingly drawn into his thoughts. He writes about Strauch:

He constantly senses danger. It is clear that he constantly feels threatened. He is constantly on the lookout, as the world, as it seems to him, surrounds him. And what is the organism? What is the opposite? Mind and body? Mind minus body? Body without a soul? What then? Under the surface? Above the surface? And at the underside?

In the relationship between the intern and the painter, the background becomes clearer: The artist and the doctor, heart and mind, chaos and order - what does life mean? The mind in this piece of bloody flesh, in this mess of the brain? The doctor and scientist cannot explain life. Not everything is measurable and weighable. There follow impressive scenes in the slaughterhouse, in the old people's home, a fire and a funeral, the death of a woodcutter. It is precisely in death that the mystery of life becomes visible.

Through the primacy of reason and utility, the unity of mind and body has been destroyed. The human being is thrown back onto his mere impulses. Salvation is made impossible. The "heaven is nailed down." This is the painter Strauch's view of the world. The world becomes a cold, deadly place.

"The frost devours everything," said the painter, "trees, people, the livestock and what is in the trees and in the people and in the livestock." People would die in the middle of a sentence that they had started but could not finish. In the middle of a cry for help. The stars then flashed like nails with which the heaven was nailed down.

An excerpt from Thomas Bernhard's speech at the awarding of the Bremen Literature Prize in 1965, which he received for "Frost," shows this clearly:

With clarity, the cold increases. This clarity and this cold will henceforth prevail. The science of nature will be a higher clarity and a much grimmer cold than we can imagine.

All of Thomas Bernhard's novels are for me a single coherent Gesamtkunstwerk. With each novel that I read, a new part is added and the impression is completed. This first published novel, the cornerstone of this work of art, has surprised and deeply impressed me with its unrestrained and still unpolished force.

The external form is still untypical, strongly structured with paragraphs and short sentences. Even though, as usual, there is no overarching plot, there are still traditional narrative elements such as inner stories or descriptions. The language, however, is already astonishingly advanced for a debut. Bernhard's original formulations, his neologisms, his maliciousness, his sarcasm, and the grotesque ideas are simply a great pleasure. The long monologues, which are so to speak reproduced from second hand by the observer alternately in direct and indirect speech, are already very familiar.

I must here absolutely emphasize the comic aspect. Darkness and ice-coldness are seamlessly mixed with wit and mischief. Thomas Bernhard was a great scamp and without the often grim, often already absurd humor, his works would not be half as valuable to me.

And what really makes Bernhard - and next to him the very great literary works - is that language and content combine to form an independent unity and become a sense object similar to music, existing for itself alone, completely directly and without intellectual effort, audible and tangible. And in the end, the language also becomes the object of the novel retrospectively, for example when the intern says:

He simply pushes his perishability in the form of sentences into me.

or: What kind of language is that, Strauch's language? [..] a word transfusion into the world that terrifies everything, "a ruthless process against stupidity"

and later Strauch:

"It is this billions of years old, stupidly exploiting tourism of the cold that penetrates my brain, the invasion of the frost... There is no longer a keyword 'secret' today, there is no longer that, everything is only a great annoyance of the cold. I see the cold, I can write it down, I can dictate it, it kills me..."

"Helada" by Thomas Bernhard is a profound and complex novel that delves into the themes of influence, isolation, and the human condition.

The story follows a medical student who is sent by her supervisor, a surgeon named Strauch, to a desolate and glacial place called Weng.

There, she is tasked with befriending Strauch's brother, a painter who has hidden himself away.

The student, posing as a law student and a reader of Henry James, easily establishes contact with the painter.

As the days pass, the student becomes increasingly influenced by the painter's tortured state of mind.

The painter, Strauch, is a man in despair, fleeing from his own madness and the dreams that haunt him.

His monologues,看似毫无意义, gradually take root in the student's mind, and she begins to find meaning in them.

Strauch's existential musings are both insightful and disturbing, deconstructing life and revealing its mortality and solitude.

The novel is narrated in daily episodes, with the student as the witness and listener to Strauch's confessions.

The setting of Weng, a place frozen in time and populated by ignorant and backward people, adds to the sense of desolation and isolation.

Beneath the surface of Bernhard's negative portrayal of his country, there is a dark and grotesque humor that hints at a hidden tenderness.

The way the student's mind becomes intertwined with Strauch's is both fascinating and disturbing, making "Helada" a dense and thought-provoking novel that is well worth the read.

https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2023...

Surely one of the best books read recently. I place it in a position with "The Book of Disquiet" by Pessoa, "Steppenwolf" by Hesse and "Abaddon the Exterminator" by Sabato - my favorite books. First of all, I was struck by the naturalness with which Bernhard describes the landscapes and the setting, and how easily he uses words to paint exactly the images in which you can place yourself, as if you, as a reader, were right there, hidden in the shade, watching this coming and going of the two protagonists. During the reading, I placed myself in so many states and temporal spaces from my own existence that, many times, I had the impression that I was reading a book that had been dedicated only to me, or especially to me. Certain states and scenes made me think even of a film directed by Tarkovsky. Or, at least, that's how I associated them. Maybe he would have been among the only ones who could have captured the essence of Bernhard's writing in "Cold".