Few present day novelists writing in German make such compulsive reading as Thomas Bernhard…. Few evoke such powerful and haunting images of people and the landscape they live in, and in a language which is individual, direct and new without any attempt to be clever or to hide an insufficiency of content behind a smart playing about with words.

Thomas Bernhard writes of a predominantly rural Austria evidently still suffering from the traumatic experience of two world wars, of its reduction from a multinational empire imbued with fine traditions to a small, almost isolated, inward-looking state festering in the mountains and forests of Central Europe. No direct mention is made of the catastrophes, but they are implicit in the introspective sickness of many of his characters. The introspection exists too in his language which so often turns violently in on itself like a whirlpool. Few writers have managed...