01.01.70
Bernhard's narrators oppose themselves, digress, fall into hyperbolic rants that go on for pages, repeat themselves, and grip, trapped, as it were, in a logorrheic paralysis. He writes whole books in one paragraph, eschews fixed price marks, doesn't mind run-on sentences, changes tense without vindication, and italicizes words apparently at random. Above all he is ironic, and the reader can never be unwavering whether Bernhard means what he says or is joking around. And, paradoxically, when he is just joking around, he is also being cold-blooded serious. This is very puzzling to the reader accustomed to contemporary market-based sticky realism (make no mistake: we are in a Tea Party Lit trough these days, driven by civics, recession and the cultural terror inspired by the digital revolution), the well-disposed of fiction that tells a story about real characters we can identify with and scenes we can sanction, the kind of novel North Americans have come to expect, and, when they erase, to write. In contrast Bernhard's characters are almost all clownishly self-obsessed, suicidal artists with lung diseases who cannot seem to say a story straight.
Source: Brooklyn Rail