Extinction by Thomas Bernhardt is supposed to be one of The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/23/bestbooks-fiction only for the undersigned, it only makes it on the 10,000 Books to consider if You will have reached Immortality aka Realini’s 10,000 list 8 out of 10

 Extinction by Thomas Bernhardt is supposed to be one of The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/23/bestbooks-fiction only for the undersigned, it only makes it on the 10,000 Books to consider if You will have reached Immortality aka Realini’s 10,000 list

8 out of 10

 

 

On many levels, this work is clearly impressive and one should consider a few criteria, first of all, to consult professionals, critics that know what they are talking about and avoid sites where amateurs that have failed in their hopes to write something significant and rant against or for other people’s productions, in other words, spoiler alert – do not read this, it is not worthwhile, it is just a reflection of a personal failure, the incomprehension of the reader is translated as shortcomings in the novel, and there are other points to watch for…

 

‘German words hang like weights on the German language, That is why their philosophy and their writings are so leaden...the infinite versatility of Italian...Italian versus  German, it we compare the two as children, the Italian would be the child reared in complete freedom , while the German one the one cowed and beaten’ this wondrous musing is placed on the first few pages and it indicates that this is not just a serious author, but a thoughtful, talented writer with much to say, if the reader is educated enough to comprehend it

Furthermore, one could agree with this rift between North and South, choosing to be on one side or the other…in the South, there is a clear tendency for ‘dolce far niente’, an easy going way of life – in the sublime The Leopard aka Il Gattopardo, Giuseppe di Lampedusa has his hero, The Prince of Salinas explain the harsh life under that severe sun, where every drop of water will extract a drop of sweat in summer, when the heat is torturing the people , who want to sleep to the point where they resent you, even if you bring them a gift  http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-leopard-by-giuseppe-tomasi-di.html

 

La Dolce Vita – perhaps as best portrayed by the Magister Ludi, Federico Fellini http://realini.blogspot.com/2017/03/la-dolce-vita-written-with-others-and.html - is set in contrast with Austria and Germany in Extinction – which has this name, because everything will be extinguished inside the covers, family, the Catholic Church, Habsburgs, the food, hunting – Franz-Josef Murau, the main character, had decided to move to Rome – which is the ‘center of the world’, it is not Paris, New York, Lisbon is provincial we find – which he loves, just as he hates Austria, family and much or all concerning it

There may be a smile on my face, for I tend to agree with him somewhat – which begs the question why on earth would I not proceed and finish a book that confirms so much to personal opinions, and stop at just 33%, this is what the Kindle indicates now – given the experiences we have had in Germany and Austria in 1990 and 1991, when we first tried our luck as entrepreneurs, coming out of the Ceausescu Animal Farm

 

Take this example, to see how we felt about Austrians – we had been driving on the motorway, coming from Germany at night – in Germany we had had our share of hostility, dirty looks and especially Contempt http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/11/contempt-by-alberto-moravia.html - in order to reach Mexico Platz, just as the shops opened in the morning, when I noticed that the old VW we had was slowing down and would not react to the acceleration pedal, clearly indicating that soon it would stop.

We asked in the gas station, but the answers were brief, pretending not to speak English and insisting on Assistantz or some such horse shit, for they were not interested in helping in any goddamn way, no matter if we would pay, buys some fuel from them and it took some dozen stops before one of those vendors would behave differently from those other knaves, would utter something, we would buy from him the additive required for the diesel…this was winter, we had been keeping a steady speed to save on expenses and thus we took the temperature of the engine in a zone where it now needed some revitalizing…

 

In Germany, we bought goodies to sell back home, hopefully with a profit, but in one of the homes, we took a television set, the fellow that had the ad showed us one working unit, we went to another room, he offered us some coffee to drink, while he packed the TV in a box, but when we will have opened this thousands of miles away, it would be a different can of worms, and this was not in good shape

The same thing happened in Mexico Platz, where they would claim they sell video tapes (it was the thing of the day here) but we found empty cases when we cursed our hearts out upon arrival – a caveat is needed here, for those trading in Mexico Platz were mostly from other places and not Austrians, nevertheless, memories associated with the place are not in the ‘Reminisce’ about the positive category…

 

Thomas Bernhard has plenty of outré, interesting, amusing even propositions to make ‘Farmers who put on overalls, turn up the sound of grunting pigs and pretending that they work’ are just fooling the intellectuals, who see life in the country as hard and the farmers as the most hardworking of humans, when the opposite is true.

Vienna has been listed as the number one city to lice in by The Economist – through one of its sisters company the study was made I think – and only left the space because of covid and then it was taken by one of the two major metropolises of New Zeeland – Auckland or Wellington, two places from down under are on the top five list anyway – which makes the attacks of the author ever stranger on all things Austrian – true, this is the view of a fictional character, and the exaggerations have a purpose, other that criticism and irony…The Catholic Church and the Habsburgs have had a pernicious effect on the population, for one thousand years we are told, and they are now ‘brainless’, musical though, Mozart, Schubert are mentioned

 

Among the other peculiar statements made in the first part let me mention the ‘Butchery is one of the Supreme arts, on a par with that of the surgeon, if not even more admirable’ and the notion that reading the Russian greats for a second time makes you appreciate them more, while on second try, some authors make one realize they are not worth mentioning…I wonder about Thomas Bernhard himself…