The Discreet charm of the lugubriosie (or The art of tiding oneself over): Thomas Bernhard's Extinction, trans. David McLintock, Penguin Books, London, 1996, pp. 335, RRP $16.95 (paper). [Book Review]

Abstract

It's all here – the escalating hyperbole, the grandiosity, the connoisseurship, the importuning of the witness – the unmistakeable voice of one of Thomas Bernhard's protagonists holding out, fittingly enough, on the topic of exaggeration. On the occasion of the publication of Bernhard's biography, reviewed recently by Murray Bail in <i>The Age</i>,<a href="http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/20741/20020628-0000/www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/current/Issue Six/Hanratty.htm#_edn2">[2]</a> I look at his last novel, <i>Extinction</i> and its fine contribution to the sensibility of lugubriousness