It took a hundred pages or so, but once I started to feel the drilling rhythm, that dully effervescent quality unique to Bernhard's prose, the momentum quickly built, and I was swept along in its wake until stranded at 3 am, the novel concluded, myself extinguished. (Two absolutely inane puns--if they can even be considered that--in the last sentence, read the book to find out). The usual elements (or at least what I assume are the usual elements, I'm at n=2) of Bernhard's semi-autobiographical narrators are here, a total disgust with Austria in all respects; a constant vacillation between the frivolity and seriousness of any intellectual project or pretension post-Holocaust; and a thrumming, instinctual bordering on accidental, will to survive. The metaphysical landscape of *Extinction* is sloped, the people of the novel slipping towards the depraved gravity of modern Europe, but flecked with sinkholes that can instantly plummet one to moral, intellectual, or spiritual turpitude--Wolfsegg, the narrator's renounced home, is located on top of a hill. Under these conditions, the narrator's rejection of the world undergirds his cockroach-like survival instinct; the endless critique and suspicion surrounding his social relations and Austrian society--both of which he tries to pass on as object lessons to his pupil, Gambetti--are essential to avoid losing his footing on this slope, even if it may be altogether pointless to try. With Bernhard, where there's bark there is (almost) always bite, and the narrator's muddled ranting and raving is given purpose after the not-so-surprising reveal--this is Austria we are talking about after all--that the narrator's parents were collaborators with the Nazis. Paranoia becomes necessary vigilance when the self must be defined and defended against such horrors.
The prose in the novel, as mentioned earlier, is brilliant, and one of the diatribes in the book clarified for me at least a part of what makes Bernhard an inimitable stylist. The narrator compares German literature and classifies Mann and Musil, while great, as fundamentally bureaucratic in their language; whereas Kafka is able to escape this bureaucratic, stolid tendency of the German language, in part because he himself was a bureaucrat in his daily life. Bernhard's sentences, even at his most caustic and emotional, are outfitted with abstract vocabulary and squeezed into matter-of-fact, linear constructions. His language is in fact more bureaucratic than the bureaucratic writers; Bernhard never dared to write sentences half as purple as the ones in *The Confusions of Young Törless*. And yet Bernhard's prose, while, like Kafka, wafts the sandalwood cologne of a bureaucrat, he does so only to make the effect decidedly unbureaucratic. Unlike the perfunctory language of say a terms and conditions agreement, which floats like scum at the top of consciousness; Bernhard's prose, like Tupac's rose in the concrete, bores into the interior of the consciousness and blooms petals sticky with blood. From the dead morass of the German language, Bernhard's writing emerges, a shambling zombie in a charcoal gray suit.
This is kind of a dumb aside but the survival compulsion of Bernhard's narrators strikes a personal chord with me, which is likely a large part of why I've enjoyed the two books I've read by him so much. I don't think of myself as a strong person--in fact, I am weak and lazy--but I do have this tendency to proceed through live mentally unscathed. This survival compulsion is a careful balance of narcissism, intellectualism, and callousness that allows one to act at a remove from life. Like me, it isn't that Bernhard's narrators have had difficult lives; by material standards their lives, like mine, are quite easy, but the first danger, constantly perceived, is the potential for moral or intellectual rot, a fear of slipping towards a bastardized bourgeoise life so easily taken up by many. The sad thing of course, is that this fear doesn't entirely stop the slipping, it only makes us aware of it and less able to enjoy the fruits of the bourgeoise life we lead. The other danger is of suicide, but the dialectical motions of their narcissism and callousness keep them simultaneously invested and removed enough from life to preclude suicide. Now, it could also be said that this "survival instinct" is a fiction, propped up by delusion and luck, that would dissolve in contact with actual difficult material circumstances. This could very well be correct, and I think, is a central tension within Bernhard's narrators (and arguably Musil's as well). The difference is, they are characters in a literature, and I'm a living human being so the comparison (if even valid) is basically cringe.
Surprisingly, at least to me, I'm realizing that there is still more I could say about this novel--I'm realizing yet again that writing begets more thinking and therefore more writing--but I've already exhausted my patience for my own prose. Ignoring the obvious fallacy, hopefully if I write better I'll write more (to the woe of those who read it).