Even more hopeless than Cioran.

Eugene Ionesco, another renowned figure, seems to embody a level of hopelessness that surpasses even that of Cioran. Ionesco's works are filled with荒诞 (absurd) and disconcerting scenarios that depict a world devoid of meaning and purpose. His plays often present characters who are trapped in a web of confusion and futility, unable to break free from the constraints of their existence.

In Ionesco's view, human life is a tragicomedy, a never-ending cycle of absurdity and despair. The characters in his plays engage in senseless dialogues and actions, as if they are puppets controlled by an unseen force. This sense of hopelessness is further enhanced by the use of symbolism and exaggeration, which serve to emphasize the futility of human endeavors.

While Cioran's pessimism is profound and unyielding, Ionesco takes it a step further by presenting a world that is not only bleak but also incomprehensible. His works challenge our perception of reality and force us to confront the harsh truth that life may indeed be without meaning or purpose.

This work is the darkest of all the Bernhards I have read so far, and it is also the one most influenced by Kafka.

The atmosphere it creates is one of profound gloom and mystery. The characters seem to be trapped in a web of their own making, unable to break free.

The language is spare and precise, yet it manages to convey a sense of overwhelming despair.

It is as if Bernhard is using Kafka's techniques to explore even deeper levels of human consciousness and the absurdity of existence.

Reading this work is like taking a journey into the darkest recesses of the human psyche, and it is not for the faint of heart.

But for those who are willing to brave the darkness, it offers a unique and unforgettable experience.

A young medical student is sent by Professor Strauch to Weng to observe the condition of his brother and write a detailed report.

It is a linear plot in itself, with each chapter representing a day of stay, but also a step further into a freeze from which it seems impossible to break free. It is a journey into madness, into the lucidly crazy mind of the painter Strauch, the only truly alive being in a closed and narrow community of people.

Like the student, we are also drawn into the long monologues of the painter who has cut off all ties and fled to that gloomy and hopeless place, in the cold of winters and equally inclement summers. We walk on the fragile border between reason and madness, tempted to cross it definitively, in a strange harmony with Strauch, who awaits death in a place that is already dead, with his heavy head that his legs struggle to support.

As we follow the student's experiences, we begin to understand the depth of Strauch's despair and the isolation that has driven him to this point. The descriptions of the desolate landscape and the closed-off community add to the sense of hopelessness and claustrophobia.

We wonder if the student will be able to break free from the grip of Strauch's madness or if he too will become a victim of this strange and terrifying place.

Bernhard is truly one of my all-time favorite novelists, perhaps even the absolute favorite. I am nourished by his novels, his profound ideas, and his unique perspectives on the human condition.

Frost was his first novel, and like many other debut novels, it is not his finest work. Nevertheless, it was fascinating to discover the seeds of his talent, the fertile ground from which would sprout the inimitable Bernhardian style.

From the very beginning, Bernhard remained true to his philosophy. My admiration for him as a writer has only grown stronger after reading this novel.

At certain points, it can be challenging to digest the prose due to the complex ideas presented by the characters in a meandering and obsessive manner, almost like a diatribe.

Anyone new to Bernhard should start with either Correction or Woodcutters, and definitely not with Frost or Gargoyles (his second novel).

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All endeavors are ultimately doomed to failure.

The imagination is an expression of disorder, and it must be so. In an ordered world, there would be no room for imagination, as order would not tolerate such a thing. Imagination is completely foreign to it.

Childhood still trails beside us like a little dog that was once a jolly companion but now requires our care, splints, and countless medicines to prevent it from quickly fading away.

... there is a great deal of merriment, squalor, and the utter futility of everything.

Do you understand? Life is the purest, clearest, darkest, and most crystalline form of hopelessness... There is only one path to take, through the snow and ice into despair, past the adultery of reason.

I'm not entirely certain what it was that I anticipated, but it surely wasn't this.

I have perused the majority of Bernhard's later oeuvre, yet I always postponed reading this particular one.

In hindsight, I believe I'm rather glad. This was an astonishing book, yet I had been hoping for something a bit more straightforward than Bernhard's typical fare, not something even more arduous.

The rant form is present here in nuce, but it is fragmented, as if a later Bernhard book had been shattered into tesserae and strewn before the reader.

Let me elucidate the clear with the obscure: it leans much more towards Wittgenstein or Nietzsche, and is less in the vein of Adorno. And I have a preference for Adorno in every conceivable respect.

It's as if Bernhard is playing a complex game with the reader, challenging our expectations and pushing the boundaries of what we consider literature.

This book forces us to grapple with its difficult ideas and fragmented structure, yet in doing so, it offers a unique and thought-provoking reading experience.

Despite my initial misgivings, I find myself begrudgingly impressed by Bernhard's audacity and creativity in this work.

It is said that the cold enters the bones. Because once it gets in, once it has conquered, just adding one more sweater is not enough to drive it away. It takes possession of us like a virus. Just like madness, a word that is as ambiguous as ever. The cold is contagious. And about this book, I don't dare to say more.

The cold seems to have a mysterious power. It creeps in quietly and stealthily, as if it has a will of its own. Once it invades our bodies, it becomes difficult to expel. It's not like a simple discomfort that can be easily alleviated. It's more like a persistent enemy that refuses to let go.

And the comparison to madness is quite interesting. Madness is something that can grip a person's mind and behavior, making them act in ways that are unpredictable and often self-destructive. In a similar way, the cold can have a profound impact on our physical and mental state. It can make us feel sluggish, irritable, and even depressed.

As for the book, perhaps there are deeper meanings and interpretations that I haven't fully grasped. Maybe it's a metaphor for something else, something more complex and profound. But for now, I'll leave it at that and simply say that this passage has left me with a lot to think about.

One of the most unpleasant books I've ever had the displeasure of reading. I was deliberately seeking something grim and challenging, and this book surely fit the bill. However, the most challenging aspect for me as a reader was the complete lack of narrative momentum, which left me utterly bored.

I even read this aloud to my wife, who shared my general sense of revulsion. Perhaps this wasn't the ideal way to approach this book.

I find the idea of Bernhard quite intriguing. The capsule descriptions of his books and the reviews are so compelling that they make me want to give him another chance. But the actual experience of reading this particular book was deeply disappointing and dissatisfying. I understand that this might be his way of making a point about life. However, my perspective on life is very different. In fact, that's precisely one of the reasons I sought out this author. Is it hopelessly bourgeois of me to expect that tales of ennui could somehow be interesting?

Some writers have the ability to convey their message to a wide and diverse audience, while others will only appeal to those with similar mindsets. Perhaps Bernhard belongs to the latter group. In any event, he failed to connect with me on this occasion, but I'm still likely to give one of his later books a try. I'm open to any suggestions.

Thomas Bernhard's works are a complex and often disturbing exploration of the human condition. His themes of death, suicide, childhood, old age, disease, family, education, science, madness, the state, the mass and the individual, art and the artist, and his misogyny are all deeply ingrained in his writing.

His characters are often tortured by their own obsessions and traumas, and their lives are filled with pain and suffering. Bernhard's writing style is unique, with its repetitive and often overwrought language, which adds to the sense of claustrophobia and despair.

Despite the darkness and despair of his works, there is something strangely attractive about them. Perhaps it is the way in which he forces us to confront the harsh realities of life, or the way in which he shows us the futility of our attempts to find meaning and happiness in a world that seems so often cruel and indifferent.

In conclusion, Thomas Bernhard is a writer who demands our attention. His works are not for the faint of heart, but for those who are willing to face the darkness within themselves and in the world around them.

  “La tierra puede ser clara, pero yo me siento entre sus ángulos, sin consideración hacia mí”

  “El grito sigue estando ahí. Aunque todas las cuerdas vocales estén descuartizadas y seccionadas, estén muertas, todas las cuerdas vocales del mundo, todas las cuerdas vocales de todos los mundos, todas las posibilidades de imaginación, todas las cuerdas vocales de todas las existencias, el grito sigue estando ahí, sigue todavía ahí, el grito no se puede seccionar, no se puede cortar, el grito es lo único eterno.”

  “¡El mundo es lo que yo soy! Empieza donde yo empiezo. Y termina allí. Es tan malo como yo. Tan bueno. Mejor no, porque soy yo…El hombre va siempre solo donde cree que va el mundo. Su abismo es también el abismo del mundo. Su derrota también la suya.”

  “Con la edad, el pensamiento se convierte en un mecanismo del tormento de rozar las cosas.”

  “Todo no es más que aire, todos los conceptos son aire, todos los puntos de apoyo son aire, todo no es más que aire… Aire congelado.”

  “¡Lo horrible necesita su carcajada!”

After delving into Thomas Bernhard's initial novel, I find it opportune to reevaluate my ambivalent stance regarding his literary works. Hitherto, I have been inclined to endure, on occasion, his all-pervasive sense of dread, all for the sake of his awe-inspiring command of the German language.

As is often the case in Bernhard's oeuvre, we are presented with a severely despondent narrator, the painter Strauch. However, his narration reaches us via an actual narrator, a medical student, who has been entrusted by Strauch's brother to "observe" the painter. Strauch's soliloquies center around Bernhard's typically bleak themes. Nevertheless, in the midst of the book, a surprising glimmer of hope emerges.

He [Strauch] remarks, “I think about what will be once everything goes black. When there are no more colors, only black.”随后 he proceeds to point out numerous stars to the narrator, up there in the night sky, more stars than he had witnessed in a considerable period.

Regrettably, the translation by Michael Hofmann falls short in this regard. The German original states, »Ich denke darüber nach, was geschieht, wenn eines Tages alles nur mehr schwarz ist.« Dann erklärt er mir viele der Sterne, die hoch oben ein Firmament bildeten, wie schon lange Zeit nicht so wunderbar. The second sentence, when translated literally, means: Then he explained to me many of the stars which formed a firmament high up above, so wonderful like not for a long time.

Evidently, our narrator still retains the capacity for wonder. Yet, he is being influenced and infected by Strauch's depression. Near the conclusion, he confesses, He thrusts his frailty at me and into me in the form of sentences, like slides into a projector, which then projects those terrors onto the blank and always available walls of my self (or his).

This book is not merely the outpouring of a severely damaged individual; it also chronicles the impact this has on the narrator and how it draws him in. Perhaps Bernhard's later novels are not simply monologues of dread but rather warnings.

**"The Harbinger of Frozen Pains"**

Confronting the terrifying glaciers is a daunting task. "The glaciers are all-powerful." Thomas Bernhard is merciless. He himself wrote: "The world is in a way a gradual disappearance of light." But in the glaciers, there has never been any light from the beginning. Bernhard starts the creation of his world from absolute darkness. "The glaciers that destroy everything, the trees, the humans, the animals, and all that is within them." From the endless struggle to reach the idea of absolute truth and constantly failing, constantly being burned, constantly getting darker, constantly being submerged from within, constantly freezing from within. Bernhard's language is pale and mischievous. It blatantly covers up the always merciless reality and the powerful pain. "He brutally removes the words from their existence and places the bloody, wounded ones on the soul of his interlocutor." Decay, destruction, disease, explosion, decline, misfortune, evil, trauma, hopelessness, horror of nothingness, exile, sadness, and the depth of suicidal thoughts are concepts whose shadows never leave the world of the glaciers for a moment. Just like the snow that gently brings and pours layer upon layer of pain onto the desolate ground, a huge volume of grief and a devilish and sharp silence take shape through the rain of Bernhard's words. Bernhard is the harbinger of frozen pains; standing alone and helpless in the center of the "colorful battlefield of his suffering"; he turns everything into darkness, does not allow life to thrive, and like the painter of his story, he accurately and flawlessly depicts for us a picture of lamentation and "self-destruction."

November 15, 2024

Sepher Hope

+The expressions in parentheses are from his own book sentences.

**"The Complex World of 'Bernhardt' and 'The White Disease'"**

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My first Bernhard novel, and it has been a difficult, heavy, and suffocating experience in the best possible sense of the terms. The premise is that of a young nihilistic and disillusioned medical student who is tasked by his superior Strauch to visit his brother in a remote Austrian village to supervise his erratic behaviors, only to find himself facing an even more misanthropic and pessimistic personality. The only thing that punctuates the unceasing flow of the novel is the division into days.

The novel is deliberately obsessive in its way of describing the events and habits of this God-forsaken little town populated by a crude, selfish, and irredeemable humanity (and the fact that the town, Weng, I discovered to be real also explains part of the controversies that have surrounded the author in his homeland since his debut). Nothing and no one is positive, and everything is correct. The frost of the title is what covers every single element of reality and the only constant in time.

I will surely explore this author further. I can say that already in this his first novel, one can see all the potential that has led him to be defined as a classic author of the 20th century.