Correction

"Bernhard's prose is lapidary and translucent in its vocabulary, but sinuous and formidably dense in its phrasing. This prose enacts the essential motif of the novel: the notion that every 'correction' is also a negation . . . . The remarkable point is the extent to which the ascetic compactness of Bernhard's style turns these abstractions into a sensory presence . . . . [Bernhard's] connections, at once developmental and contrastive, with the great 'Austrian' constellation of Hofmannsthal,...