Correction (edition 1991)

A troubled Austrian intellectual named Roithamer has killed himself, leaving his papers as a legacy to his lifetime friend, who also holds a position at Cambridge. The friend—never named—is the narrator of the novel. He goes to another friend’s house in an Austria forest where Roithamer had use of the garret as his apartment and study. The narrator moves into the garret where he finds Roithamer’s papers everywhere and in complete disarray.

Roithamer was the middle son of a wealthy and deeply divided family. He grew up hating his home, his country, his mother, and his two brothers. His only allies were his father and his sister. His father died years ago, leaving the family property to Roithamer, knowing that he hated it and would sell it. Roithamer does so, and decides to invest the proceeds—along with several years of his life—into a fantastic house known as the “Cone” where his sister would spend the rest of her days alone and in perfect happiness.

What this bizarre novel comes down to is the notion of correction. “We’re constantly correcting, and correcting ourselves, most rigorously because we recognize at every moment that we did it all wrong (wrote it, thought it, made it all wrong), acted all wrong, how we acted all wrong, that everything to this point in time is a falsification, so we correct this falsification, and then we again correct the correction of this falsification and we correct the result of a correction of a correction andsoforth.” Everything goes back to our childhood and the corrections we have made to that world, and the corrections to the corrections, in the hope that we “can say at last, at the end of our life, that we have lived at least for a time in our own world and not in the given world of our parents.”

Bernhard eschews paragraphs, and some sentences go on for pages. The first half of the novel is the narrator’s stream of consciousness. There are many repetitions of ideas and phrases, so it isn’t as hard to read as it sounds. In the second half, the narrator begins to read from Roithamer’s various scraps of paper. Eventually the voice is all Roithamer. It’s hard in the end to know what to think of this novel. Its ideas are quite thought-provoking, but are they worth the effort of getting to them? ( )

yes! ( )