I read Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard

An interesting thing about Bernhard is that the characters are known for always being the same "type"- a pretentious and overwhelmingly pessimistic middle class Austrian guy, usually some type of academic, musician or writer, who just unloads over the course of 140 or so pages. And some parts of the rants are like "yessss go off!" ("the dog one" is instantly memorable to anyone who's read Concrete) and some parts are like "hmm idk about that," but the way the writing repeats and loops around on itself, mimicking the mechanisms of thought and self-revision/self-editing, is still "fun" to read.

But also, having read a few of these, I think there's something else going on. Correction, which is on the more abstract end of his work, still has a very disturbing passage about the physical and psychological abuse the main character suffered from his parents, Old Masters, despite being way more "grounded" in the sense that it's about two guys who sit together in an art museum, has a similar passing disclosure of a really disturbing childhood memory.

This, combined with the fact that one character lost his wife (who he emphasizes as unique in her knowledge derived from living with him for so long) due to the incompetence of the staff of the very museum they're sitting in (for not putting grit salt on the steps on an icy day), their refusal to immediately call an ambulance, and the incompetence and carelessness of the doctors at the Catholic hospital she eventually ends up at.

Bernhard monologues can seem a bit seedy and/or elitist when they rage against the mass, the popular, etc. But based on these underlying themes (and the return at the end of the book, to the one main character meditating on his wife as the "one special person" that allowed him to live and then, maybe, inviting the other guy into that symbolic role through tickets to a play they both know is going to be disappointing; much fuel for the discursive fire), I think his theme is less disgust at the humans that end up in various "mass" categories, but terror at what is lost when you become, wilfully or not, a member of the many interlinking and reinforcing "masses" that exist - a state, a class, a member of a religion, patriarchal authority or helplessly obedient child, narrow-minded "experts." Bernhard's relentless pessimism is aimed at what this allows you to convince yourself to do or accept, and how it can mold your behavior towards numbness or carelessness, to abandon the singularity of individual thought and subjectivity or the unique, contingent connection with another.