I read Three Novellas: Amras, Playing Watten, and Walking by Thomas Bernhard

Three interesting novella-length works from various points in Bernhard's career. The first, Amras, is almost surprisingly conventional given his later style, an epistolary gothic about two brothers unwillingly rescued from a family suicide attempt and taken to an isolated tower belonging to their uncle. Playing Watten is more typical, a dialogue between two characters discussing why one no longer meets up to play cards, all circling around the eerie discovery of the suicide of one of their co-players. Walking is the most similar to his major works, with one character primarily reporting on the monologue of another during one of their routine walks, where the conversation gradually turns to an incident at a pants store after which a mutual friend was institutionalized.

Each novella circles around his common themes, the individual against the stupidity and insensitivity of the state or the mass, and how one can talk themselves into and out of madness or suicide. Bernhard's work feels like additive sculpting, in the sense that it revisits many of the same ideas and topics, but from slightly different angles. I feel like it's really rewarding to read his work broadly, it enhances the whole a bit each time. If, on some bizarro planet, I could go back to being an academic, maybe I'd try being a Bernhard scholar.