Correction: A Novel (Vintage International)
Thomas Bernhard
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 1400077605
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The scientist Roithamer has dedicated the last six years of his life to “the Cone,” an edifice of mathematically exact construction that he has erected in the center of his family’s estate in honor of his beloved sister. Not long after its completion, he takes his own life. As an unnamed friend pieces together—literally, from thousands of slips of papers and one troubling manuscript—the puzzle of Rotheimer’s breakdown, what emerges is the story of a genius ceaselessly compelled to correct and refine his perceptions until the only logical conclusion is the negation of his own soul.
Considered by many critics to be Thomas Bernhard’s masterpiece, Correction is a cunningly crafted and unforgettable meditation on the tension between the desire for perfection and the knowledge that it is unattainable.
used by me all the time. In each one of these books she was bound to recognize me and she hated these books as she hated me, but she didn’t dare to destroy the books, to do away with them, she didn’t have the nerve to do that even though her thoughts and everything in her tended in that direction. If I merely think of all the things we came to quarrel about on our so-called walks, with such regularity and occasional obsessiveness, we’d taken our nature walks only to quarrel, always, we walked
thoughts, in danger of deadening himself out of existence. For the longest time I could not manage to think my own thoughts in England, all I could do was to think Roithamer’s thoughts, so that during all that long time in England I had, in effect, given myself up. Since my thinking had actually been Roithamer’s thinking, during all that time I simply had not been in existence, I’d been nothing, extinguished by Roithamer’s thinking into which I’d suddenly been absorbed for such a long time that
criminal elements, with whom no one wanted to have anything to do, were always secure in his affection, for this tendency Roithamer had always been under attack or at least regarded with suspicion, most of all these sympathies of his for the most miserable members of society, the most helpless in the world, had soon earned him the radical dislike of his family and they, his family or what was left of them, whichever, must have been horrified at the reading of his will, suddenly hearing all those
through life like our way to school kept being subjected to abrupt changes of weather, kept following the course of a torrential river always to be feared, for as we always lived in fear on our way to school, fear of falling into the raging Aurach among others, so on our way through life we always lived in extreme fear of falling into this river where we lived, always terrified of this river which is invisible but always torrential and always deadly. However, I said to Hoeller, while we were
no changes at all in the garret, Hoeller said, never again touched anything in it. The garret is still exactly as it was when he left it. Nor have I changed anything in the garret, Hoeller said. Then Roithamer went away and they never heard from him again. The news of Roithamer’s death came as no surprise, so Hoeller said, everything about Roithamer on that last evening and that last night had pointed to his death, Hoeller could see clearly during that night, during all of that last encounter