Correction [Paperback]

I consider Correction as one the best works of his author. I've read Miguel Saenz' translation into Spanish and I've found it excellent. I can't quite say wether English traslation is as good or it's not. The main Bernhard obsession are shown in this book. His peculiar, rather tough style is displayed in all its intensity as well. Amongst the former the suicide topic and the relationship between the man and Nature are worth mentioning. Among the latter, I guess those endlessly soliloques whose secret only Bernhard seems to know, would be the most characteristic. The plot is based upon Wittgenstein's life or, rather, upon Wittgenstein's philosophy. The method of this philospher has been described as a spiral -rather than lineal way of thought. He rounds the same issues all the time but getting deeper and deeper every time. In Bernhard prose, the same process can be verified. In a lineal following of the plot, not many things can be registered. But the thoughts of the protagonist are able to discover always a new view of those few issues he is obsessed with. At last, the suicide of his friend (known for the reader since the first page) can be interpreted as his last step in his impossible way from civilization (in wich he has been thrown against his will) back to Nature. Highly significative in this regard is the place where the suicide takes place: a spot in the woods exactly in the half of the way between the town and his house in the mountains. The style and the strange use of the lenguage can be interpreted in the same way. Wittgenstein once said: "When you can't talk about things is better to keep silence." Bernhard try to fight this assumption by writing. No matter what he is writing about, keep writing, unceaselessly, correcting the former phrase with the current one, and recorrecting it again, and again and againg. This effort is highly evident Bernhard work. Like the life of the suicidal, his literature is a continuos process of correction, of amending, improvement, redefinition. But is never enough. There is no end, no limit, measure bound in this toil. Written words in Bernhard are just useful to realize they can't quite convey what they are trying to. But is not a failure what he gets as a result. On the contrary, by means of suggesting what he is not able to convey, he remarks exactly what the rest of the literature always tries to hide: its dispatched of the essential, its lack of hinges, its desperately seeking in a world where no points of reference have been left.

Correction is a strange book, at times bewildering, but overall enthralling, in particular the dense, obsessional style, which I found addictive. An unnamed narrator arrives at a friend's house (an unusual house situated on the banks of a fast-flowing river) where another friend, Rothaimer, stayed before he committed suicide in the nearby forest. The story is basically about the unnamed narrator's attempt to fully understand what drove Rothaimer to lose his mind and take his own life. He does this by going through Rothaimer's obsessional writings. On the backcover someone describes Bernhard's writing as a "strange new beauty", and I have to agree. The prose is relentless (there are only two paragraphs), it's somewhat deranged (for the most part it's a rambling monologue concerned with the construction of a Cone in the middle of a forest), it's obsessional (with repetition being a marked feature), and overall I found it compelling, with the nature of genius, the worth of creativity, and the slow-death of life being the main themes. Unique.

"Actually I'm shocked by everything I've just written, what if it was all quite different, I wonder, but I will not correct now what I've written, I'll correct it all when the time for such correction has come and then I'll correct the corrections and correct again the resulting corrections andsoforth ... We're constantly correcting, and correcting ourselves, most rigorously, because we recognise at every moment that we did it all wrong (wrote it, thought it, made it all wrong), acted all wrong, how we acted all wrong, that everything to this point in time is a falsification, so we correct this falsification, and then we again correct the correction of this falsification and we correct the result of the correction of a correction andsoforth ... But the ultimate correction is one we keep delaying ..." And that ultimate correction is made at the point of death.

This (semi-autobiographical?) novel raises profound issues about the meaning of existence, the interpretation of memory, the lack of certainty about our own interpretations, and - as a side issue - the importance of cherishing intellectual and social diversity in children.

Whilst Bernhard made me think deeply about these issues, his response - suicide - is the ultimate cop-out. At the end of the work I was left underwhelmed by the conclusion (if, indeed, there IS a conclusion) but impressed by his method and viewpoint.

I would recommend that everyone who has an interest in these issues should read this book for the originality of thought and style. But I would find it difficult to love this book and rate it five stars.