Three Novellas
"Why do we still have to live," a survivor of a family suicide pact asks in the first of these novellas, all of which revolve around madness or suicide. The Austrian master Bernhard, whose thirty-year career was devoted to the proposition that to be born is a tragedy and that to live is a punishment nobody deserves to suffer, never managed to come up with a satisfactory answer. These novellas are early works, but the point of view that found devastating expression in masterpieces like "Concrete" and "Yes" is already apparent. What is extraordinary about Bernhard is that his relentless pessimism never seems open to ridicule; his world is so powerfully imagined that it can seem to surround you like little else in literature.Copyright © 2005The New Yorker