Extinction, by Thomas Bernhard
Extinction, by Thomas Bernhard
In Rome I sometimes think of Wolfsegg and tell myself that I have only to go back there in order to rediscover my childhood. This has always proved to be a gross error, I thought. You’re going to see your parents, I have often told myself, the parents of your childhood, but all I’ve ever found is a gaping void. You can’t revisit your childhood, because it no longer exists, I told myself. The Children’s Villa affords the most brutal evidence that childhood is no longer possible. You have to accept this. All you see when you look back is this gaping void. Not only your childhood, but the whole of your past, is a gaping void. This is why it’s best not to look back. You have to understand that you mustn’t look back, if only for reasons of self-protection, I thought. Whenever you look back into the past, you’re looking into a gaping void. Even yesterday is a gaping void, even the moment that’s just passed.
Extinction is an example of the rarest of all books: A 20th century existentialist European novel that I actually found to be an interesting page turner.
The book opens with the narrator, Murau, receiving a telegram informing him that his parents and brother have been killed in a car accident, leaving him the heir to the wealthy family estate in Austria, that he does not want. He gets the telegram while reflecting on the books he has lent to one of his pupils: Sartre, Kafka, Broch. (Oh fuck, I thought. This book is gonna suck. I was wrong). Murau's family is ancestrally stuffy, conservative, tight-assed, tyrannical, mundane and rich enough to throw their weight around such that the local peasants fawn on them. They hold hunting parties. They supported the Nazis in WWII and sheltered them on the estate after the war. They favored Murau's elder brother, spoiled him rotten, and punished Murau for things the brother had done (this was triggering to me. I had parents who routinely refused to believe a thing I said, and took the word of strangers over me, every time. Asked me harshly what I did to cause the school bully to hurt me, and punished me for letting the bully tear my coat. Murau gets treated like that, and I seethed right along with him, reading about it). Murau is gentle, intellectual, cultured, naturally rebellious against the values of those who treat him so poorly, and moves from Austria to Rome, to be cultured and bring meaning to his life. Real, passion-filled meaning, as opposed to the colorless, inhumane existence without humanity that those rotten old aristocrats live. Yes, he's full of himself.
The whole book is two gigantic paragraphs of narrator quasi-stream of consciousness, distinguishable from the final section of Ulysses in that it has punctuation and some structure, like a rambling diary entry. The first half consists of Murau's thoughts right when he gets the telegram, the instinct to mourn being overwhelmed by a flood of memories hating how his parents and brother treated him, agonizing over old wounds freshly opened in his mind, justifying his disgust at the very concept of "Wolfsegg", the family estate, and resolving to take his inheritance and destroy it like a rabid dog.
The other half has Murau some time later, looking back and describing what actually happened after he had the first set of thoughts, and when he went back to the palatial home he grew up in to take charge of the funeral, visit the ancestral home he grew up in, encounter the now-older family retainers with whom he claims pseudo-proletarian solidarity, and commiserate with the distant family members who have come to mourn. And yes, it becomes quite different from his initial thoughts. Some might see Murau as selling out; others may see him as growing up. As is the case in the best literature, there's a touch of ambiguity, and the author lets you make up your own mind.
In Rome I sometimes think of Wolfsegg and tell myself that I have only to go back there in order to rediscover my childhood. This has always proved to be a gross error, I thought. You’re going to see your parents, I have often told myself, the parents of your childhood, but all I’ve ever found is a gaping void. You can’t revisit your childhood, because it no longer exists, I told myself. The Children’s Villa affords the most brutal evidence that childhood is no longer possible. You have to accept this. All you see when you look back is this gaping void. Not only your childhood, but the whole of your past, is a gaping void. This is why it’s best not to look back. You have to understand that you mustn’t look back, if only for reasons of self-protection, I thought. Whenever you look back into the past, you’re looking into a gaping void. Even yesterday is a gaping void, even the moment that’s just passed.
Extinction is an example of the rarest of all books: A 20th century existentialist European novel that I actually found to be an interesting page turner.
The book opens with the narrator, Murau, receiving a telegram informing him that his parents and brother have been killed in a car accident, leaving him the heir to the wealthy family estate in Austria, that he does not want. He gets the telegram while reflecting on the books he has lent to one of his pupils: Sartre, Kafka, Broch. (Oh fuck, I thought. This book is gonna suck. I was wrong). Murau's family is ancestrally stuffy, conservative, tight-assed, tyrannical, mundane and rich enough to throw their weight around such that the local peasants fawn on them. They hold hunting parties. They supported the Nazis in WWII and sheltered them on the estate after the war. They favored Murau's elder brother, spoiled him rotten, and punished Murau for things the brother had done (this was triggering to me. I had parents who routinely refused to believe a thing I said, and took the word of strangers over me, every time. Asked me harshly what I did to cause the school bully to hurt me, and punished me for letting the bully tear my coat. Murau gets treated like that, and I seethed right along with him, reading about it). Murau is gentle, intellectual, cultured, naturally rebellious against the values of those who treat him so poorly, and moves from Austria to Rome, to be cultured and bring meaning to his life. Real, passion-filled meaning, as opposed to the colorless, inhumane existence without humanity that those rotten old aristocrats live. Yes, he's full of himself.
The whole book is two gigantic paragraphs of narrator quasi-stream of consciousness, distinguishable from the final section of Ulysses in that it has punctuation and some structure, like a rambling diary entry. The first half consists of Murau's thoughts right when he gets the telegram, the instinct to mourn being overwhelmed by a flood of memories hating how his parents and brother treated him, agonizing over old wounds freshly opened in his mind, justifying his disgust at the very concept of "Wolfsegg", the family estate, and resolving to take his inheritance and destroy it like a rabid dog.
The other half has Murau some time later, looking back and describing what actually happened after he had the first set of thoughts, and when he went back to the palatial home he grew up in to take charge of the funeral, visit the ancestral home he grew up in, encounter the now-older family retainers with whom he claims pseudo-proletarian solidarity, and commiserate with the distant family members who have come to mourn. And yes, it becomes quite different from his initial thoughts. Some might see Murau as selling out; others may see him as growing up. As is the case in the best literature, there's a touch of ambiguity, and the author lets you make up your own mind.