I’m not sure where this novel sits in the oeuvre of the Austrian arch-miserabilist, Bernhard. A figure both shunned and venerated. Years ago, when I was friends with Mr C, we used to discuss his work and I guess I used to read his novels, but it’s all a blur now, all part of that hinterland life which is also known as ‘the past’.
It might be that I came to Correction expecting something more nuanced than I encountered. In so many ways this feels like a piledriver of a novel, reminiscent of the sound of the road being dug up outside your window when you’re trying to work. It’s a meditative, relentless, exasperating noise, yet not without its fierce beauty. This novel of two parts, the first half dedicated to the narrator’s account of his friendship with the misanthropic Roithamer, the second a reworking (or correction) of Roithamer’s text stroke diary, which he was keeping in the weeks leading up to his suicide. Reading the text is like stumbling forward in a blizzard. Sometimes the words overwhelm, threaten to asphyxiate; at others the snow clears and the clarity seems all the more so for the text having been so dense and illegible moments before.
“…all the decrepit garbage of this totally decrepit European civilization, or rather, to hold nothing back, this totally decrepit modern world of ours, this era that keeps grinding out nothing but intellectual muck and all this stinking constipating clogging intellectual vomit is constantly being hawked in the most repulsive way as our intellectual products though it is in fact nothing but intellectual waste products…”
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