A book a day: Thomas Bernhard: Correction

Original language: German

Original title: correction

Translation: Miguel Saenz

Year of publication: 1975

Valuation: Almost essential

Roithamer He is a kind of scientist who researches and teaches at Cambridge, and he has also built a cone-shaped house for his sister in the geometric center of a forest. The narrator (perhaps a transcript of Bernhard himself) is her childhood friend, and he reflects on Roithamer from the attic of the house Höller, who also maintains a relationship with both of them since school days. So that Roithamer He is, although in a rather indirect way, the protagonist of this story located in small towns in the Austrian mountains.

Correction It is an enormous interior monologue of almost three hundred pages, although the English concept of stream of consciousnesswhere he stream It would rather have the meaning of ‘stream’ or, better, ‘torrent’, because this is precisely that, an uncontrollable torrent of reflections, memories, facts, ideas, the center of which is the aforementioned Roithamer, with all possible ramifications. The unbridled nature of the monologue, before knowing it through reading, we see when opening any page: each and every one forms the perfect rectangle, without a gap, because we will not find a single full stop, no paragraph, barely any full stop. Following. But if anyone is intimidated by those monolithic-looking pages, I will tell them that there is nothing to fear, in a few lines, just two or three pages, we are immersed in that enormous flow, we let ourselves be carried away by it and it will immediately begin to be addictive , hypnotic.

With equal ease it could be said that Bernhard picks up speed and is in turn dominated by that prose that takes on a life of its own, so that the ideas are linked to each other with total naturalness and, even more important, with absolute clarity. So, despite initial impressions, the book is not at all difficult to read. We are hopelessly inside the narrator’s head, always following his reflections about his brilliant friend, and in that great disorderly flow there is room for many things: the ferocious landscapes of shadowy gorges between mountains, the obsessive search for perfection in construction. del Cono, the destructive nature of rigorous intellectual work, the dark areas of the taxidermist’s work or family meals in absolute silence, the memory of childhood walks to school, the aversion towards mediocrity and the mildness of Austrian society and, above all, the profound toxicity of family history, in which hatred that is difficult to explain is barely hidden behind the apparent normality. Roithamer He is the strange brother who never wanted to adapt to the alienating life in the family home, who always tried to escape, physically and intellectually, from an environment that was strange to him.

And the correction, clear. Correction is annihilation, and so Roithamer, who accumulates thousands of writings scattered throughout his study, has written a voluminous text that loses pages with each correction, until it remains at a few dozen. But correction is such a powerful concept that it is not only applicable to that book but also to life itself, because that search for perfection destroys everything that surrounds it, loved ones and one’s own work. The Cone, the book, life, become eaten away as one progresses trying to thoroughly understand every detail and govern all the mechanisms.

The text is so obsessive, full of repetitions and setbacks to hammer each idea over and over again to a point that is revealed to be insane, that little by little the voices overlap, perhaps merging and, without abandoning an almost musical cadence, they seem to go accelerating, as if rushing towards an abyss. It is like a strange therapy, in which the three characters seem to be different perspectives of the author himself, as in a cubist optic. Thought is allowed to run in different directions to find only glimpses, symptoms or new questions, never answers, a nameless narrator who seems real although he may not be, a friend in perpetual silence who is nevertheless capable of building from his intimate convictions, a tormented genius who stars in pages and more pages but who is perhaps nothing more than the personification of an enormous discomfort with the world.