Novel
Extinction
Auslöschung
Thomas Bernhard · 1986
Synopsis
Rome. Franz-Josef Murau, an Austrian in his fifties who teaches German literature to his pupil Gambetti, receives a telegram: his parents and his brother have died in a car accident, eight days after his sister's wedding. He is now the heir to Wolfsegg, the family estate in Upper Austria that he fled. Before leaving for the funeral, he retraces, in front of a few photographs, the history of a family that he accuses of having come to terms with Nazism.
Context
The author completed the bulk of it in 1981 and 1982, but allowed it to be printed only in 1986; his publisher Siegfried Unseld had noted the project as early as 1971. The book is in two parts, Le Télégramme and Le Testament, in a single flow with no chapters or paragraph breaks, punctuated by the repeated address to Gambetti. The narrator says he wants, through his account, to extinguish everything he describes. Julien Gosselin brought it to the stage in 2023.
Who it is for
More than six hundred pages in a single block, with nothing to catch one's breath. Reading it demands patience, and it is better to have already read a shorter book by the author.
Prizes and reception
The longest and last-published of its author's novels, often regarded as his masterwork, which critics debate.
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