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'Thomas Bernhard is one of the masters of contempotary European fiction...After Kafka's and Canetti's, his sensibility is one of the most acute, the most capable of exemplary images and gestures, in modern literature' George Steiner; 'Astonishingly original, a composition of strange new beauty' The Nation
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'Thomas Bernhard is one of the masters of contemporary European fiction-After Kafka's and Canetti's his sensibility is one of the most acute, the most capable of exemplary images and gestures, in modern literature.' George Steiner, Times Literary Supplement
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format: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.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Before anyone thinks that my 2 stars are due to Bernhard's dense writing style, with its unparagraphed blocks of text lasting for hundreds of pages, I want to point out that his `Extinction' is one of my favourite books. `Correction' however, failed to grab me anything like as much and consequently I found myself wading through it without much enthusiasm. I was more than ready for it to end.
`Correction' is apparently based on the philosophy of Wittgenstein, something that I know very little about, which is perhaps why it lost me so quickly. The preface (by Geaorge Steiner) was written in pretentious and obscure language, where perhaps a clearer explanation of the themes and structures of `Correction' would have helped. The story is typical of what I have read of Bernhard. An alienated academic works on a project of philosophical import (a cone in the middle of a forest in which his sister will live), and while he is building it he muses on his relationship with his family and his home. The academic (Roithamer) is dead before the book begins, and it is his friend who must put Roithamer's thoughts together by staying in the room where he made his plans and wrote his thoughts down. The friend begins to understand why Roithamer had to build a cone, and why it inevitably lead to his own negation.
`Correction' contains a lot of motifs that will be familiar to Bernhard's readers, such as repetition of themes and words, and circularity of structure, as well as obsessive focus on some subjects. There are some pages where the words Altensam (Roithamer's home town) or Hoeller's garret (the room he stayed in) are repeated 20 or 30 times. For me, this structure was one of the joys of `Extinction', and something I enjoy in other writers, such as Joseph Heller. However, because I just didn't make any great intellectual or emotional connection with `Correction', it just ended up boring me, making the book a slog. Perhaps it is fairer to say that this isn't a bad book, but it was a bad one for me to have read. I'm not giving up on Bernhard yet, and will try reading more of his stuff in the future, but `Correction' isn't the one for me.
`Correction' is apparently based on the philosophy of Wittgenstein, something that I know very little about, which is perhaps why it lost me so quickly. The preface (by Geaorge Steiner) was written in pretentious and obscure language, where perhaps a clearer explanation of the themes and structures of `Correction' would have helped. The story is typical of what I have read of Bernhard. An alienated academic works on a project of philosophical import (a cone in the middle of a forest in which his sister will live), and while he is building it he muses on his relationship with his family and his home. The academic (Roithamer) is dead before the book begins, and it is his friend who must put Roithamer's thoughts together by staying in the room where he made his plans and wrote his thoughts down. The friend begins to understand why Roithamer had to build a cone, and why it inevitably lead to his own negation.
`Correction' contains a lot of motifs that will be familiar to Bernhard's readers, such as repetition of themes and words, and circularity of structure, as well as obsessive focus on some subjects. There are some pages where the words Altensam (Roithamer's home town) or Hoeller's garret (the room he stayed in) are repeated 20 or 30 times. For me, this structure was one of the joys of `Extinction', and something I enjoy in other writers, such as Joseph Heller. However, because I just didn't make any great intellectual or emotional connection with `Correction', it just ended up boring me, making the book a slog. Perhaps it is fairer to say that this isn't a bad book, but it was a bad one for me to have read. I'm not giving up on Bernhard yet, and will try reading more of his stuff in the future, but `Correction' isn't the one for me.
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Correct your life by leaving it?
"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... Read more
Published on 26 Sep 2006 by Nicholas Casley
When a Novel Critiques a Philosopher
In Correction, Thomas Bernhard arranges an interlocution between poet and thinker, between his own protagonist's theories and Heideggerrian thought. Read more
Published on 31 Dec 1997
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