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“... The​ posthumous progress in English of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is marked by deaths: those of his majoritarian and minoritarian translators David McLintock and Ewald Osers, in 2003 and 2011 respectively; and in 2015 that of Carol Brown Janeway, his publisher at Knopf, his unlikely champion over decades (because, for all his influence and cultishness, Bernhard in English never exactly sold), and the translator herself of the posthumous My Prizes, in an exquisitely bound volume from Notting Hill Editions, with a justly amused introduction by Frances Wilson: ‘Few writers have received more applause than Thomas Bernhard, Austrian novelist, playwright and enfant terrible, and few have bitten more sharply the hand that clapped ...”

“... The Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) once said: ‘You have to understand that in my writing the musical component comes first, and the subject matter is secondary.’ It’s a strange thing for this professional controversialist and Austropathic ranter to have said – that we should attend to the form, balance and measure in his work, when everything in it would seem to lead to the giggle and gasp of hurt given or received, or the hush and squeal of scandal – but it is sound advice ...”

“... mad nephew Paul Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s Nephew: A Friendship is a brief memoir by Thomas Bernhard, the poet and novelist, naturalised Austrian. It reeks of a Central Europe some thought was extinct, but the narrative begins in 1967, when Paul was 60 – although it reminisces about many earlier events. It will be read at one ...”

“... of his death, Glenn Gould had become the subject of a novel, Der Untergeher by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. Der Untergeher (literally ‘the sinker’ or ‘the one who goes, or is destined to go, under’ – perhaps ‘the loser’) describes the impact of Gould’s playing and personality on two exceptionally talented young Austrian ...”

“... around electronic music and rave culture produced by journalists and academics) is clearly Thomas Bernhard, whose books also sometimes begin with an ellipsis. The prospect of Bernhard in Berghain doesn’t quite arrive, sadly: Goetz’s acoustic effects, such as filtering sentences to the ‘etc etc’ of a drum ...”

“... of a needle trapped in the final groove of a record. Their dark outlook isn’t like that of Thomas Bernhard, whose cynicism is driven by a kind of grim joy, nor do they have the animated interiority of Lynne Tillman or Lydia Davis, whose currents of thought sweep up the reader and carry them along. Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation are ...”

“... add a little of the ‘I can’t go on, I go on’ of Beckett and a lot of the run-on ranting of Thomas Bernhard, a contemporary whom the Gaddis surrogate here accuses of plagiarism before the fact. (Agapē Agape does recall Concrete, a Bernhard novel about a writer unable to begin a biography of a composer.) In the ...”

“... a tuneless cover of ‘Smoke on the Water’ with the grown-up novelist who’s read Proust and Thomas Bernhard. As in the earlier book, he devotes many pages to his feeling that scientism, humanism and religion have conspired to enmesh the world in abstract thought, robbing it of an inexpressible ‘beyond’. His wish for ‘the world … to step ...”

“... is confounding by design, as it was with his fellow countryman, contemporary and sometimes rival, Thomas Bernhard, and as it was with one of his finest critics, W.G. Sebald. In Essay on the Jukebox, the second volume in the series Handke has recently finished, he, or a narrator quite like him, tells of how, in writing, he moved a cypress he’d seen in ...”

“... summer, began by placing him in the capacious context of such postwar avant-garde novelists as Thomas Bernhard, José Saramago and David Foster Wallace, only to acknowledge that, despite a shared affinity for ‘very long, breathing, unstopped sentences’, Krasznahorkai was ‘perhaps the strangest’ of them. The writer is ‘peculiar’; his work ...”

“... from Europe in 1948. White – the only antipodean to join Proust and Kafka, Michel Tournier and Thomas Bernhard on Bail’s shelf of severe masters – is the big daddy rabbit-killer; Bail and his minimalist contemporaries are something of a mopping-up operation. The anxiety here is that of being the last guest at the wake of Modernism, and so Bail is ...”

“... Dyer, perhaps, is a bit like Nick Hornby, singing for his supper, a bit too eager to be liked: Thomas Bernhard For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It; virtually fat-free modernist romances designed to fit the side-pockets of rich students’ gap-year rucksacks, in need of reading matter neither too heavy nor too light. But then, I was reading the ...”

“... in the early summer of 1933 …’ Sebald borrowed this habit of repetitive attribution from Thomas Bernhard, who also influenced Sebald’s diction of extremism. Almost every sentence in this book is a cunning combination of the quiet and the loud: ‘As usual when I go down to London on my own,’ the narrator tells us in a fairly typical ...”

“... meeting one of his five marriageable daughters looks forward to some of the best work of the early Thomas Bernhard and must be among the most powerful passages in 20th-century Italian fiction. As the narrative moves through one painful revelation after another towards a truly ugly dénouement, it is not difficult to understand why Gadda put this book ...”

“... Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, Marguerite Duras’s The Lover and, above all, Thomas Bernhard – I thought of no one so much as Proust. As Davis says of his style, ‘to be exhaustive is, of course, an infinite task: more events can always be inserted, and more nuance in the narration, more commentary on the event, and more nuance ...”