About six months ago I read Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love. I really adored this book, which is about a young woman, a writer, who goes to a dinner party full of trendy artists and scenesters. The woman sits in a corner, brooding to herself about how everyone at this party is a hack and fake, until one of those fakes, an actress in a streaming show, gets angry at the others and calls them out for being pretentious. Somehow this rant emancipates our silent protagonist—she’s able to escape into the outdoors and let go somewhat of her anger.
Thank you for such a thorough examination of both Bernhard's work and his influence on (some) contemporary American writers. The only comment I want to offer is that influence often has an inverse relationship to exposure, and Bernhard's influence on writers like Dubno and Haber is in part a consequence of how much they haven't, or have yet, been exposed to.
Focus inherently requires exclusion: focusing on one thing requires us to ignore many other things, and young writers often focus on a small slice of literature that resonates with them. Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, Brautigan and Vonnegut were such influences. Recently, it's Bernhard, Sebald. But, as you note, all literature is effectively a palimpsest of what's been written before, and a writer who really wants to understand a particular approach has to burrow back through those layers to understand where it came from and how it evolved, and too often, we're reading the work of a young writer who hasn't done much burrowing.
Well, one other comment: modern Austrian literature, including Bernhard, also comes from the legacy of a lost empire, which colors some of its resentment and bitterness. It may seem like Europe's Rhode Island today, but there was a time when it was Europe's Texas.
Yes! It really feels like there is a moment in their twenties when many young writers are exposed to the influences that will define them, and those influences will come to define literature for them. I feel like, for me, that never really happened. I was too committed to reading widely, perhaps to my detriment.
I really enjoy when you go long on a writer and the consequences of their work on later writers. Thanks for taking on Bernhard and his imitators.
Also, I strongly agree with the claim that aspiring writers should imitate artists whose work they love. I encourage younger writers to build for themselves a "personal pantheon." This short list should include authors whom the younger writers would be thrilled to be mentioned alongside. Then, the younger writers should identify qualities in all their personal pantheons in order to recreate and iterate on those qualities. Style is just a collage of work you love; a great style is one with obvious focus but whose precedents seem at least a little mysterious.
Yes I wish when I was a younger writer I had tried to consciously imitate my favorite writers. I had a professor once who encouraged me to do that, but I was too focused on trying to be original :)
I'll never object to a 15k-word essay about Thomas Bernhard. Could have done with fewer paragraph breaks, though.
As someone who has written both about Bernhard and like Bernhard (i.e. my own Neo-Berhardian rants), this essay captured multiple aspects of his work and influence that have resonated with me, plus many more that I hadn't considered, and which now expand my understanding. Thank you so much!
Like you, I've grappled with the question of imitation, and whether that somehow 'cheapens' the end result, even notwithstanding the fact that all art is to some degree imitation etc etc. Personally, while I agree that producing a Neo-Bernhardian novel is a feat in itself and certainly better than nothing, I think I ultimately come down a bit more harshly on the phenomenon, both as a reader and a writer.
As a reader, to take Mark Haber as an example, I've read Reinhardt's Garden and St. Sebastian's Abyss and Lesser Ruins, and while I found them all enjoyable enough, to me there's no meaningful progression in Haber's style or ambition across these novels. It feels very programmatic: apply inputs X Y and Z to the Berhardifier, shake twice, let cool. And I can't get over the notion that if prose style is meant to mirror the contours of a writer's thoughts and the process by which he analyzes and makes discoveries about both himself and the world, then borrowing—wholesale stealing, really—those contours from someone else displays a fundamental limitation. It's the difference between someone like Haber and someone like Sebald, who was clearly inspired by Bernhard, but introduced enough wrinkles to make the work his own.
This sense of limitation is amplified by my experience writing Neo-Bernhardian rants: granted, the same might not be true of everyone in this camp, but I find writing in this style *easier* than writing in a voice that's more my own. The propulsive rhythm and pre-determined structure help everything flow. It's also, and I think this is undercommented on in essays about the rise of Bernhard, *fun* to write this way; there's something satisfying about tapping into such rage, and twisting it toward your own ends. But it's still a shortcut, a substitute for generating those emotions, like a cheesy musical cue. It often feels unearned.
I think it's telling that so many Neo-Bernhardians default to the writer's block plot. Copying his voice is a great means of generating content, and helps to conjure up the requisite vitriol and self-loathing to sustain a narrative about creating or failing to create art, but at a certain point you're kind of just dicking around.
All that being said, I eagerly await the Neo-Bernhardian novel that incorporates enough new elements (and pisses off enough of the right people) to break through, thus pushing the movement toward another stage.
What a fantastic comment. Truly the kind of comment that I really wanted to elicit with this article. I agree that there is something about this style that feels oddly….easy. It is a way of seeming serious, while generating a lot of material. But it’s also self limiting, because most people aren’t going to want to read the stuff you produce in this style. The trick is just to write something in this style that is provocative enough that people enjoy it.
Regardless, I really liked your comment. I feel like you really get it :)
I ended up writing a more fleshed-out take on what I mean by saying this style is "easy," as well as an analysis of how and why various Neo-Bernhardian novels make or miss the mark. Thanks again for sparking such a fruitful line of thought!
I read a lot of contemporary lit fic and I am sooooo beyond sick of the Bernhard style and I suspect many others are as well - which is why Dubno’s book, with the seeming publicity intention to take it to the next level (with normie Netflix and NYC as opposed to Haber’s high brow art history/Montaigne essay bits) is sorta flopping - the people who do care about this are perhaps bored and the normal people haven’t been sold yet.
Also I would argue that I do think contemporary authors understand Bernahrd’s misanthropic hypocrisy of bourgeoise life and, in fact, totally relate to it. It’s the bourgeois hypocrisy that they love so much, even. Castillo is saying it’s boring to write a book about a middle class guy on a cruse, but then Fresh Green Life is about? A grad student party? Bro that’s just as bourgeoise! It’s all self-hating cultural elite who know what being a cultural elite looks like - hustling for 5 awards that only 6 people care about or whatever - complaining on Twitter (also the influence of The Complaining App of Twitter on this style, esp with Castillo & Castro, could def be explored…) ain’t no cultural elite, I just like reading!
Appreciated the essay, it really synthesized everything so nicely, I just can’t help but want to poke back.
And finally, a rec - Patrick Yumi Cottrell’s new novel sort of plays on/riffs with this Bernhard thing by having the character’s MFA professor BE Thomas Bernhard. I’m still too sick of Bernhardian writing to love it, but I really appreciated how he specifically Calls Out this style for its blatant hypocrisy lol - and it’s sorta funny to imagine MFA prof Bernhard
It is impressive that people got so thoroughly bored of this and meanwhile I had never even heard it was a thing! I do feel like there is a gap to be bridged. Highbrow people are done with this, but folks like me are probably willing to give it a try—we just need something that has a little more juice than Dubno does.
Enjoyed this comment! Might check out the Cottrell.
You are right! I read 10,000 words and I'm pretty comfortable saying that I don't want to read Thomas Bernhard (or his imitators, though in the past I thought some of Geoff Dyer's work might be interesting.) It's purely a case of "not for me", and also of "there are so many great books that aren't nihilist rants that I won't be able to get to".
That said, I admire your ambition and perseverance to get through all those books!
As for The Dalkey Archive, I admire them but mainly for two authors in particular: their "founder" (sort of), Flann O'Brien; and also W. M. Spackman. I've read the complete fiction of both those writers, who are very different from each other (you could hardly be more different!) and both very enjoyable, very funny, and not (in my opinion) difficult. (Though O'Brien at least can be called "experimental", I guess.)
Dalkey is great! They got acquired by another press, and there is a great series of posts where their new owner goes spelunking through their archives. https://dalkeyarchive.substack.com
This was a marvelous overview of Thomas Bernhard's work, for which I thank you whole-heartedly. But I didn't find anywhere in it the Bernhard that took me by surprise when I picked up 'Woodcutters' by chance at a bookshop on Madison Avenue in 1987-88: It was that 'voice' (its misanthropy genuine or fabricated) that captivated me as something completely new: a writer who embeds and embodies himself in the pages of a novel with a persona so distinct and yet so recognizable from novel to novel. Bernhard's novels are subjectivity at its most extreme and most entertaining.
At the time I had not yet lived in Austria, but in late 1988, I bought tickets to hear the great Gielgud-esque Austrian actor Walter Schmidinger read from Bernhard's works at the 1989 Salzburg Festival--even though my German at the time was limited to Schubert lieder and restaurant menus. I wanted to hear what that 'voice' sounded like, read aloud. I wanted to hear those repetitions of phrases, the musicality of the writing. Bernhard's impact on me was also musical, just as music's impact on Bernhard is so evident in the flow of words curling back on themselves. Those refrains! Bernhard died in February of that year and the ban on his works being read in public in Austria took immediate effect. That's how I found myself at an evening of Schmidinger reading the great monologues of the Bavarian comic Karl Valentin instead--an unforgettable experience in itself as it turned out.
After I had lived in Austria a few years, I began to understand Austrians' deep-rooted tradition of black humor and brutal satire--Wiener Schmäh, Karl Kraus, the cartoons of Manfred Deix. etc. Bernhard didn't grow up with this tradition, but he certainly was aware of it to the extent that his targets were similar to the targets that humorists often aimed at. In a way, Bernhard invented a new tradition--not satire, not dark humor, but a form of literary takedown that didn't require a laugh to hit home.
So happy to see the Bernhard piece. I've been waiting eagerly.
Having read and enjoyed Concrete, Woodcutters, and The Loser, I think Bernhard is so compelling because he faces nihilism so thoroughly. His narrators hate the world but they hate themselves too, they are fully aware of their hypocrisy, they have nothing to hold on to, no life preserver. But he eventually works his way through nihilism somehow, and in each of these novels, the ranting eventually terminates and the narrator does something, goes somewhere, and there's usually a glimmer of positivity in the end. A hundred pages of bitter ranting gives way to a few positive sentences.
That willingness to face nihilism is conspicuously missing from contemporary American literature. It just doesn't sell, I guess. Even worse, it gives women the ick.
That’s definitely what makes these books the best! I didn’t get a chance to talk about it much in this post, but I like how in The Loser, the main character just gives up on being the best. He survives, unlike the titular loser, simply because he accepts that there is no way he will ever be the best.
Maybe! But there's something in that final image, I think it's Wertheimer inviting his friends over and burning his papers, it almost seems like a triumph in a completely paradoxical way.
I also get the sense, in a kind of Beckettian way, that the distinction between Wertheimer and the narrator becomes blurred, almost like they're two different versions of the same person.
All this to say, I get the feeling that the novel is trying to somehow overcome the loser/winner dichotomy.
Jesus christ this post is long. I knew I was in for a good time when I read: "I decided to read all of Thomas Bernhard’s novels, so I could understand the hype." I'm only a few thousand words in and have already learned a lot I didn't know about Bernhardt (having only read Woodcutters). You get at the contradiction at the heart of his work: his sneering posture paired with the insatiable need for attention. He wanted to be accepted, but on his own terms. Tough desire to fulfill.
Thanks for linking to my essay on humor in Bernhard and for posting this long piece. I feel like the current Bernhard imitators are a second wave, and it's possible that they're wielding the technology more for the sake of attention than fascination/infection with the style. But I don't feel like that was the deal with the first wave, among them Geoff Dyer (Out of Sheer Rage), WG Sebald (Austerlitz), William Gaddis (Agape Agape), and Horacio Castellanos Moya (Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador) -- that last one was written in El Salvador in 1997 as a self-conscious imitation of the ranting repetitive Bernhard style, attacking everything about El Salvador. (My translation was published by New Directions a decade ago, and I know Mark Haber, when he worked at Brazos Bookstore in Houston, was a fan.) Dubno's recent take on Woodcutters I enjoyed, especially how she infused the stylistic imitation with a bit of Gawker or Michael Musto. Otherwise, I'd definitely rank Bernhard the stylist up there with anyone, particularly as the style's expressed in his masterpiece Extinction, and on re-read (or re-listen -- the audiobook of Woodcutters on Spotify is great) they all reveal complexities/nuances that transcend reductions like "angry Austrian" etc. Anyway, thanks again for the linkage.
I really loved Zoe Dubno's novel and at the end when she acknowledges and recommends Woodcutters, it didn't take away any of my enjoyment of her novel. Nor did I want to read Woodcutters.
I respect your POV about the relationship of the two novels and you have studied Bernhard and his imitators in depth, while I have not, but I don't think it's correct to use the word "stealing" for Happiness and Love.
Thank you for such a thorough examination of both Bernhard's work and his influence on (some) contemporary American writers. The only comment I want to offer is that influence often has an inverse relationship to exposure, and Bernhard's influence on writers like Dubno and Haber is in part a consequence of how much they haven't, or have yet, been exposed to.
Focus inherently requires exclusion: focusing on one thing requires us to ignore many other things, and young writers often focus on a small slice of literature that resonates with them. Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, Brautigan and Vonnegut were such influences. Recently, it's Bernhard, Sebald. But, as you note, all literature is effectively a palimpsest of what's been written before, and a writer who really wants to understand a particular approach has to burrow back through those layers to understand where it came from and how it evolved, and too often, we're reading the work of a young writer who hasn't done much burrowing.
Well, one other comment: modern Austrian literature, including Bernhard, also comes from the legacy of a lost empire, which colors some of its resentment and bitterness. It may seem like Europe's Rhode Island today, but there was a time when it was Europe's Texas.
Yes! It really feels like there is a moment in their twenties when many young writers are exposed to the influences that will define them, and those influences will come to define literature for them. I feel like, for me, that never really happened. I was too committed to reading widely, perhaps to my detriment.
Finding one's niche early on may be comforting, but in the long run I suspect it's more of a detriment than reading widely.
I really enjoy when you go long on a writer and the consequences of their work on later writers. Thanks for taking on Bernhard and his imitators.
Also, I strongly agree with the claim that aspiring writers should imitate artists whose work they love. I encourage younger writers to build for themselves a "personal pantheon." This short list should include authors whom the younger writers would be thrilled to be mentioned alongside. Then, the younger writers should identify qualities in all their personal pantheons in order to recreate and iterate on those qualities. Style is just a collage of work you love; a great style is one with obvious focus but whose precedents seem at least a little mysterious.
Yes I wish when I was a younger writer I had tried to consciously imitate my favorite writers. I had a professor once who encouraged me to do that, but I was too focused on trying to be original :)
Fascinating long-form literary analysis. Thank you!
I'll never object to a 15k-word essay about Thomas Bernhard. Could have done with fewer paragraph breaks, though.
As someone who has written both about Bernhard and like Bernhard (i.e. my own Neo-Berhardian rants), this essay captured multiple aspects of his work and influence that have resonated with me, plus many more that I hadn't considered, and which now expand my understanding. Thank you so much!
Like you, I've grappled with the question of imitation, and whether that somehow 'cheapens' the end result, even notwithstanding the fact that all art is to some degree imitation etc etc. Personally, while I agree that producing a Neo-Bernhardian novel is a feat in itself and certainly better than nothing, I think I ultimately come down a bit more harshly on the phenomenon, both as a reader and a writer.
As a reader, to take Mark Haber as an example, I've read Reinhardt's Garden and St. Sebastian's Abyss and Lesser Ruins, and while I found them all enjoyable enough, to me there's no meaningful progression in Haber's style or ambition across these novels. It feels very programmatic: apply inputs X Y and Z to the Berhardifier, shake twice, let cool. And I can't get over the notion that if prose style is meant to mirror the contours of a writer's thoughts and the process by which he analyzes and makes discoveries about both himself and the world, then borrowing—wholesale stealing, really—those contours from someone else displays a fundamental limitation. It's the difference between someone like Haber and someone like Sebald, who was clearly inspired by Bernhard, but introduced enough wrinkles to make the work his own.
This sense of limitation is amplified by my experience writing Neo-Bernhardian rants: granted, the same might not be true of everyone in this camp, but I find writing in this style *easier* than writing in a voice that's more my own. The propulsive rhythm and pre-determined structure help everything flow. It's also, and I think this is undercommented on in essays about the rise of Bernhard, *fun* to write this way; there's something satisfying about tapping into such rage, and twisting it toward your own ends. But it's still a shortcut, a substitute for generating those emotions, like a cheesy musical cue. It often feels unearned.
I think it's telling that so many Neo-Bernhardians default to the writer's block plot. Copying his voice is a great means of generating content, and helps to conjure up the requisite vitriol and self-loathing to sustain a narrative about creating or failing to create art, but at a certain point you're kind of just dicking around.
All that being said, I eagerly await the Neo-Bernhardian novel that incorporates enough new elements (and pisses off enough of the right people) to break through, thus pushing the movement toward another stage.
What a fantastic comment. Truly the kind of comment that I really wanted to elicit with this article. I agree that there is something about this style that feels oddly….easy. It is a way of seeming serious, while generating a lot of material. But it’s also self limiting, because most people aren’t going to want to read the stuff you produce in this style. The trick is just to write something in this style that is provocative enough that people enjoy it.
Regardless, I really liked your comment. I feel like you really get it :)
I ended up writing a more fleshed-out take on what I mean by saying this style is "easy," as well as an analysis of how and why various Neo-Bernhardian novels make or miss the mark. Thanks again for sparking such a fruitful line of thought!
https://aspaceforthought.substack.com/p/the-voice-imitators?r=8gviup
I read a lot of contemporary lit fic and I am sooooo beyond sick of the Bernhard style and I suspect many others are as well - which is why Dubno’s book, with the seeming publicity intention to take it to the next level (with normie Netflix and NYC as opposed to Haber’s high brow art history/Montaigne essay bits) is sorta flopping - the people who do care about this are perhaps bored and the normal people haven’t been sold yet.
Also I would argue that I do think contemporary authors understand Bernahrd’s misanthropic hypocrisy of bourgeoise life and, in fact, totally relate to it. It’s the bourgeois hypocrisy that they love so much, even. Castillo is saying it’s boring to write a book about a middle class guy on a cruse, but then Fresh Green Life is about? A grad student party? Bro that’s just as bourgeoise! It’s all self-hating cultural elite who know what being a cultural elite looks like - hustling for 5 awards that only 6 people care about or whatever - complaining on Twitter (also the influence of The Complaining App of Twitter on this style, esp with Castillo & Castro, could def be explored…) ain’t no cultural elite, I just like reading!
Appreciated the essay, it really synthesized everything so nicely, I just can’t help but want to poke back.
And finally, a rec - Patrick Yumi Cottrell’s new novel sort of plays on/riffs with this Bernhard thing by having the character’s MFA professor BE Thomas Bernhard. I’m still too sick of Bernhardian writing to love it, but I really appreciated how he specifically Calls Out this style for its blatant hypocrisy lol - and it’s sorta funny to imagine MFA prof Bernhard
It is impressive that people got so thoroughly bored of this and meanwhile I had never even heard it was a thing! I do feel like there is a gap to be bridged. Highbrow people are done with this, but folks like me are probably willing to give it a try—we just need something that has a little more juice than Dubno does.
Enjoyed this comment! Might check out the Cottrell.
THIS IS EPIC!!! Well done. Can't wait to read.
Another monumental, roller coaster of an essay. You truly are sui generis.
You are right! I read 10,000 words and I'm pretty comfortable saying that I don't want to read Thomas Bernhard (or his imitators, though in the past I thought some of Geoff Dyer's work might be interesting.) It's purely a case of "not for me", and also of "there are so many great books that aren't nihilist rants that I won't be able to get to".
That said, I admire your ambition and perseverance to get through all those books!
As for The Dalkey Archive, I admire them but mainly for two authors in particular: their "founder" (sort of), Flann O'Brien; and also W. M. Spackman. I've read the complete fiction of both those writers, who are very different from each other (you could hardly be more different!) and both very enjoyable, very funny, and not (in my opinion) difficult. (Though O'Brien at least can be called "experimental", I guess.)
Dalkey is great! They got acquired by another press, and there is a great series of posts where their new owner goes spelunking through their archives. https://dalkeyarchive.substack.com
This was a marvelous overview of Thomas Bernhard's work, for which I thank you whole-heartedly. But I didn't find anywhere in it the Bernhard that took me by surprise when I picked up 'Woodcutters' by chance at a bookshop on Madison Avenue in 1987-88: It was that 'voice' (its misanthropy genuine or fabricated) that captivated me as something completely new: a writer who embeds and embodies himself in the pages of a novel with a persona so distinct and yet so recognizable from novel to novel. Bernhard's novels are subjectivity at its most extreme and most entertaining.
At the time I had not yet lived in Austria, but in late 1988, I bought tickets to hear the great Gielgud-esque Austrian actor Walter Schmidinger read from Bernhard's works at the 1989 Salzburg Festival--even though my German at the time was limited to Schubert lieder and restaurant menus. I wanted to hear what that 'voice' sounded like, read aloud. I wanted to hear those repetitions of phrases, the musicality of the writing. Bernhard's impact on me was also musical, just as music's impact on Bernhard is so evident in the flow of words curling back on themselves. Those refrains! Bernhard died in February of that year and the ban on his works being read in public in Austria took immediate effect. That's how I found myself at an evening of Schmidinger reading the great monologues of the Bavarian comic Karl Valentin instead--an unforgettable experience in itself as it turned out.
After I had lived in Austria a few years, I began to understand Austrians' deep-rooted tradition of black humor and brutal satire--Wiener Schmäh, Karl Kraus, the cartoons of Manfred Deix. etc. Bernhard didn't grow up with this tradition, but he certainly was aware of it to the extent that his targets were similar to the targets that humorists often aimed at. In a way, Bernhard invented a new tradition--not satire, not dark humor, but a form of literary takedown that didn't require a laugh to hit home.
So happy to see the Bernhard piece. I've been waiting eagerly.
Having read and enjoyed Concrete, Woodcutters, and The Loser, I think Bernhard is so compelling because he faces nihilism so thoroughly. His narrators hate the world but they hate themselves too, they are fully aware of their hypocrisy, they have nothing to hold on to, no life preserver. But he eventually works his way through nihilism somehow, and in each of these novels, the ranting eventually terminates and the narrator does something, goes somewhere, and there's usually a glimmer of positivity in the end. A hundred pages of bitter ranting gives way to a few positive sentences.
That willingness to face nihilism is conspicuously missing from contemporary American literature. It just doesn't sell, I guess. Even worse, it gives women the ick.
That’s definitely what makes these books the best! I didn’t get a chance to talk about it much in this post, but I like how in The Loser, the main character just gives up on being the best. He survives, unlike the titular loser, simply because he accepts that there is no way he will ever be the best.
Maybe! But there's something in that final image, I think it's Wertheimer inviting his friends over and burning his papers, it almost seems like a triumph in a completely paradoxical way.
I also get the sense, in a kind of Beckettian way, that the distinction between Wertheimer and the narrator becomes blurred, almost like they're two different versions of the same person.
All this to say, I get the feeling that the novel is trying to somehow overcome the loser/winner dichotomy.
I've read only 5 or 6 of Bernhard's novels, and I was totally entranced by Correction, for several reasons.
1)It's a brilliant portrait of a paradigmatic genius, Roithamer.
2)Roithamer is obviously based on Ludwig Wittgenstein, a hero of mine.
3)The book is such an unusual exemplar of voice and rhythm. I found the rhythm enthralling. Try reading it aloud - it is like music, the way it rolls.
4) Bernhard is clearly an auditory writer. He belongs to a minority of writers in that respect, like Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and a few others.
None of his other books impressed me as much. I did not know (and don't care) that he was as nasty and misanthropic as you portray him.
Jesus christ this post is long. I knew I was in for a good time when I read: "I decided to read all of Thomas Bernhard’s novels, so I could understand the hype." I'm only a few thousand words in and have already learned a lot I didn't know about Bernhardt (having only read Woodcutters). You get at the contradiction at the heart of his work: his sneering posture paired with the insatiable need for attention. He wanted to be accepted, but on his own terms. Tough desire to fulfill.
He managed, to some extent. But it was a hard way to live.
Thanks for linking to my essay on humor in Bernhard and for posting this long piece. I feel like the current Bernhard imitators are a second wave, and it's possible that they're wielding the technology more for the sake of attention than fascination/infection with the style. But I don't feel like that was the deal with the first wave, among them Geoff Dyer (Out of Sheer Rage), WG Sebald (Austerlitz), William Gaddis (Agape Agape), and Horacio Castellanos Moya (Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador) -- that last one was written in El Salvador in 1997 as a self-conscious imitation of the ranting repetitive Bernhard style, attacking everything about El Salvador. (My translation was published by New Directions a decade ago, and I know Mark Haber, when he worked at Brazos Bookstore in Houston, was a fan.) Dubno's recent take on Woodcutters I enjoyed, especially how she infused the stylistic imitation with a bit of Gawker or Michael Musto. Otherwise, I'd definitely rank Bernhard the stylist up there with anyone, particularly as the style's expressed in his masterpiece Extinction, and on re-read (or re-listen -- the audiobook of Woodcutters on Spotify is great) they all reveal complexities/nuances that transcend reductions like "angry Austrian" etc. Anyway, thanks again for the linkage.
Dubno's opening is so much less alive than Bernhard's that it's difficult for me to comprehend anyone would prefer the lifeless imitation.
Agree. It's not even close.
I really loved Zoe Dubno's novel and at the end when she acknowledges and recommends Woodcutters, it didn't take away any of my enjoyment of her novel. Nor did I want to read Woodcutters.
I respect your POV about the relationship of the two novels and you have studied Bernhard and his imitators in depth, while I have not, but I don't think it's correct to use the word "stealing" for Happiness and Love.
you coined the term "effort post" and now you've won the crown 👑