Extinction (54 page)

everything belonging to it
, as an unconditional gift to the Jewish community in Vienna. I met Eisenberg, my brother in the spirit, two days after the funeral, and he accepted my gift on behalf of the Jewish community. From Rome, where I now live, where I have written this work entitled
Extinction
, and where I intend to stay, writes Murau (born Wolfsegg 1934, died Rome 1983), I thanked him for accepting it.

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ERNHARD

Instead of the book he’s meant to write, Rudolph, a Viennese musicologist, produces this dark and grotesquely funny account of small woes writ large, of profound horrors detailed and rehearsed to the point of distraction. We learn of Rudolph’s sister, whose help he invites, then reviles as malevolent meddling; his “really marvelous” house, which he hates; the suspicious illness he carefully nurses; his ten-year-long attempt to write the perfect opening sentence; and, finally, his escape to the island of Majorca, which turns out to be the site of someone else’s very real horror story.

Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7757-1

The scientist Roithamer has dedicated the last six years of his life to “the Cone,” an edifice of mathematically exact construction that he has erected in the center of his family’s estate in honor of his beloved sister. Not long after its completion, he takes his own life. As an unnamed friend pieces together—literally, from thousands of slips of papers and one troubling manuscript—the puzzle of Roithamer’s breakdown, what emerges is the story of a genius ceaselessly compelled to correct and refine his perceptions until the only logical conclusion is the negation of his own soul.

Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7760-1

Visceral, raw, singular, and unforgettable,
Frost
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Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-3351-5

One morning a doctor and his son set out on daily rounds through the grim, mountainous Austrian countryside. They observe the colorful characters they encounter—from an innkeeper whose wife has been murdered to a crippled musical prodigy kept in a cage—coping with physical misery, madness, and the brutality of the austere landscape. The parade of human grotesques culminates in a hundred-page monologue by an eccentric, paranoid prince, a relentlessly flowing cascade of words that is classic Bernhard.

Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7755-7

For five years, Konrad imprisoned himself and his crippled wife in an abandoned lime works where he conducted odd auditory experiments and prepared to write his masterwork,
The Sense of Hearing
. As the story begins, he’s just blown his wife’s head off with the Mannlicher carbine she kept strapped to her wheelchair. No one seems to know why, but the town is steeped in speculation. As an unnamed insurance salesman attempts to untangle the hearsay from the truth behind Konrad’s murderous motive, what emerges is a life’s story as mazy, byzantine, and mysterious as the lime works themselves.

Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7758-8

The Loser
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Woodcutters
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