Book #9: Extinction - Thomas Bernhard
"Thomas Bernhard is one of the greatest twentieth-century writers in the German language. Extinction, his last novel, takes the form of the autobiographical testimony of Franz-Josef Murau. The intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family, Murau lives in Rome in self-exile. Obsessed and angry with his identify as an Austrian, he resolves never to return to the family estate of Wolfsegg. But when news comes of his parents' deaths, he finds himself master of Wolfsegg and must decide its fate."
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I tried. I really tried. I failed. I've been reading this book for a month and I fought my way to page 100. And I give up. I was excited for this book. The storyline sounded really interesting. Guy hates his family because his family is a bunch of ignorant, backwoods Nazi-sympathizers. Many of us can relate, right? But 100 pages in, Murau had received news that his parents and brother died in a car accident. That's it. It was 100 pages of unending holier-than-thou, intelligentcia drivel. For example, speaking of his newly dead brother, "Right from the beginning, in fact, he resembled Father more than Mother, at least when it came to quickness, restlessness, curiosity, and percipience. Naturally my essays were better than his, even at primary school, but this did not mean that I got better marks. On the contrary, my marks were always worse than his, even though my essays were undoubtedly better; this is not surprising, however, as our teachers thought the form of an essay more important than the content. I always chose interesting subjects - what I called exotic subjects - when essays were assigned. Johannes always chose the simplest subjects, which he developed and presented in a simple manner, a manner that was not just simple but tedious and pedestrian, while my essays were always composed in a complicated and interesting manner, as is attested by the exercise books lying around in cardboard boxes in our attics." This, of course, turns into a rant about how stupid his teachers are, because they never understood his *genius.*
Murau was such an arrogant, mansplaining prick that I found myself sympathizing with his MAGA hat wearing family. Ahem. I mean, his Nazi-sympathizing family. Who allegedly actually sheltered Nazis on their property. Maybe if I'd ever gotten to that part of the story, my allegiances would have switched. But I couldn't take another 100 pages of Bernhard's ceaseless, petulant whining. And by "ceaseless," I'm being literal. There are no paragraph breaks. It's an endless block of text. I just could not. Moving on.
