For the past year or so, I seem to read a book and then read one by Thomas Bernhard, then another, and then one more by Bernhard.  His stories in The Voice Imitator are messing with my mental grammar and syntax these days.  He can take you through days of cognitive motion in a single sentence.  And it’s really amazing to see his language distilled in these one-page stories.  It’s usually his dense pages-long considerations of minutiae that drive and comfort me.  I think of Bernhard as exhaustive, but these stories rely on a much finer balance of language.

I first came to Bernhard when I learned that Stephen Dixon has only written one critical work in his life, and it is about Bernhard. That was enough to make me realize that I needed to read him immediately.  The essay was in Rain Taxi about 10 years ago; you can read it here (it’s got a classic Dixon first line that begins, “I did a coupla readings for my last novel…”).  Now, having read Bernhard, it seems that his work is the closest I’ve found to acting as a precursor for Dixon’s own beautiful exhaustion.

click to read five selected stories