A novel of fierce lucidity and one that cleanses like an acid

We know that there are journeys that cross geographies and journeys that cross consciences. In the former, the gaze is fixed on the destination; in the latter, deeper and more silent, thought evidences the outcome of the world, a dark and hidden world that is revealed with each step. Extinction is an immersion into the bernhardian universe, into a deep place where lucidity and vertigo are confused. When Thomas Bernhard (Heerlen, Netherlands, 1931 - Austria, 1989) publishes Extinction. A Descent in 1986, he has taken his writing to the limit. It is his last novel, the most extensive, the most radically closed and suffocating, like a windowless room where the air has been slowly consumed. That we can read it today in Catalan is thanks to the translation by Clara Formosa Plans, and Quid Pro Quo Edicions' commitment to demanding authors who enrich our spirit.The work consists of two parts: The telegram and The will. In the first, Franz-Josef Murau, self-exiled in Rome, receives a telegram: “Parents and Johannes dead in accident. Caecilia, Amalia”. The news of the death of his parents and brother in a trivial accident due to chance does not apparently represent a great catastrophe for him, but it forces him to return to Wolfsegg, the family castle, a place where the spirit is destroyed with methodical efficiency. The return becomes a condemnation and unleashes a mental avalanche of memories, judgments, insults, guilt, reproaches, and hatreds. Murau gives himself over to an inextinguishable obsessive rhetoric with a single purpose: to use language as a tool for extinction. Wolfsegg is not only a decadent aristocratic rural estate, but a machine for the destruction of the mind and for submission, where its five libraries are locked up, a refuge for subsidized Catholic National Socialist hunters. Wolfsegg is Austria itself, with its outdated nobility and its oppressive national Catholicism. When Murau decides to symbolically destroy Wolfsegg, there is no redemption, only the final gesture of a condemned man.Talk to destroy

Murau speaks. He speaks to destroy. But every sentence that wants to free him chains him more deeply to what he hates. And here the characters must be considered. The mother, a fierce administrator of domestic resentment, is a fanatical Catholic manipulator. The father, a political opportunist, a powerful industrialist and a National Socialist sympathizer. Johannes, the brother, an anodyne and obedient being, destined to perpetuate the comedy. And the sisters Amalia and Caecilia, emblems of family decay, who are copies without an original. We still find a brother-in-law, the maker of wine bottle stoppers, a petty bourgeois who, with his insubstantiality and mental weakness, wanders through Wolfsegg during the funeral. On the other hand, we have Archbishop Spadolini, the high official of the Vatican Curia, admired and hated, who represents the sophisticated and international version of religious power. A functionary of the spirit. Fortunately, there is the beloved and admired Uncle Georg, the narrator's mentor, the guide who liberates Morau from this disgusting and oppressive world. And also Gambetti, the narrator's Roman student, a friend and sole interlocutor. And Maria, the brilliant poet, a literary transfiguration of Ingeborg Bachmann, with whom he maintains a relationship of admiration and dependence. The author uses the figure of Gambetti as a conversationalist, but in fact there is no dialogue. Bernhard had already brought this structure to the theatre, both in Ritter, Dene, Voss (1984)and in Plaza de los héroes (1988), imposing a central voice that speaks before presences that cannot contradict it. Extinction, therefore, takes the form of a bare stage, with a single actor under the spotlight, a spotlight that burns and does not go out. And as always, the wealth of an unparalleled narrative style: obsessive repetition, circular rhythm, the sentence that returns again and again over the same wound, turning prose into a relentless hypnotic music. A language that advances like a sawmill. This is the author's most stripped-down work, the most devoid of narrative curtains and closest to the act of thinking against oneself. Only a subterranean, dry, and cruel comic element prevents the text from sinking into pure despair. To read Thomas Bernhard one must accept a discipline: to renounce entertainment and endure the harshness of raw thought. Because with him there is no catharsis or comfort, only a form of terrible clarity, a fierce lucidity that cleanses like an acid and that forces the reader to examine themselves thoroughly, with no possibility of looking at the origin again with innocence. Extinction, therefore, is not a novel to be loved, but a work written to abolish self-deception.