Opera del 1970, una delle più influenti di Bernhard su altri scrittori (per esempio, mi pare di capire, su Vitaliano Trevisan). Un racconto che parte ingannevolmente come un "giallo", con un delitto subito attribuito e dunque risolto, che lascia piuttosto spazio a una indagine su una storia di solitudine e follia, in cui ogni dettaglio, luogo, oggetto o avvenimento, diventa spunto di un malessere che cresce, con al centro la disgregazione della coppia, la malattia e la scrittura, con riflessioni di marca filosofica sul processo di ideazione e messa nero su bianco del pensiero. Fra le cose migliori (insieme a Perturbamento) che ho letto fino a ora dell'ampia produzione di Bernhard.

«Le parole rovinano il pensiero, la carta lo rende ridicolo, e mentre ci si accontenterebbe di mettere sulla carta anche qualcosa di rovinato e di ridicolo, la memoria si lascia scappare persino questo qualcosa di rovinato e di ridicolo. La carta trasforma una cosa straordinaria in una cosa priva d’importanza, in una ridicolaggine». ( )

> Esprit, No 434 (4) (AVRIL 1974), pp. 755-757 : https://esprit.presse.fr/article/casanova-nicole/thomas-bernhard-la-platriere-22...

> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Bernhard-La-Platriere/199747

Prime Bernhard here, a novel so horrific that on opening its pages I heard a faint whisper of black metal beckoning me hither. The glorious centerpiece is the narrator's attempt to produce a theory of hearing (note: he has no idea what he's talking about) by forcing his wife to undergo the 'Urbanchich Method,' which doesn't exist, but consists nonetheless in repeating words, syllables and sentences at the poor woman and then asking her how she feels about them.

That is, of course, just what the novel does. Like the wife, you, dear reader, are trapped in a post-industrial shithole. Like the wife, some lunatic is yelling at you as soon as you open the book until you put it down (the wife, of course, has no such option). Unlike the wife, you'll likely find it quite entertaining.

This fool, who has locked up himself, and his wife, and forced her to listen to his craziness, claims that "the keen of ear as well as the keen-eyed are not wanted these days; when a man is keen of ear or keen of eye they simply wife him out, lock him up, isolate him, destroy him by locking him up and isolating him... society is in favor of the dim, vegetative existence and nothing else. People want to be left in peace, and consequently they hate nothing than the ear and the brain" (67). Voila, a destructive dialectic! I love this kind of thing.

But the heights are reached on page 82-3:

"He would wander around, Konrad said to Fro, all over the lime works without getting anywhere near calming himself, everywhere, that is, except one place, his wife's room, because he did not want to aggravate his wife's depression by his own restlessness, considering that she was already in a state of deepest depression, constantly, in fact, he said to Fro; like him she would delude herself into thinking that times of unrest would alternate with times of inner peace, but in reality neither one of them ever came inwardly to rest, and so they both lived a permanent lie, not only did they lie to each other but each lied, side by side with the other, to himself and herself, while she lied to him and he to her and then simultaneously they lied to each other, in any case they lied that they were having a bearable life in the lime works, lied incessantly, although they were both trapped in an unbearable life, but if they did not simulate bearability, its unbearableness could simply not be borne, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, an unwavering simulation of leading a bearable life while actually and incessantly enduring the unendurable is simply the only way to get on with it, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, he also said something like it to Wieser, he even spoke to me about the bearability of the unbearable being made possible by the pretense of bearability, in the same words, with the same invisible gestures, as I recall, that time int eh timber forest; but to get back to what he was saying to Fro, he said that he would wander all over the lime works which on days of that particular kind indeed seemed boundless to him, and try to come to the end of them, but could not get to the end of the lime works because one could walk and run and crawl through the lime works and never get to the end of them, he is supposed to have said, and finally, reaching a sort of climax in the utter shamefulness of his situation, he was often reduced to putting his hands on the walls, those ice-cold rough masonry walls, the ice-cold doorframes, the ice-cold trapdoors to the attic, the icy window glass, the ice-cold wood of the few remaining pieces of furniture, saying to himself, with his eyes shut, over and over, steady now, steady, steady, man."

I want to start a website that comprises just that sentence. What follows?

"The lime works is not exactly an idyll, he is supposed to have said to Wieser..."

Of course. ( )

Kalkwerk differs from most of Bernhard's fiction in that the narrator is not the protagonist, but a neutral, transparent observer. He reports without comment what he has heard about Konrad (whom he apparently doesn't know) from Konrad's acquaintances Fro and Wieser, complemented by the various opinions of the people in several local pubs. It's easy to understand why Bernhard needs to set up this wall between the narrator and Konrad, because Konrad is the cynical, depressed, frustrated and alienated Bernhard-figure frighteningly taken to the extreme and somewhere beyond. At the outset of the book, we learn that Konrad has murdered his wheelchair-bound wife and has been found by the police hiding in a frozen cesspit. Bernhard uses his customary 200-page paragraph to analyse the process of intellectual self-destruction that brought Konrad to this point, at the root of which is the apparently seminal monograph On Hearing that Konrad has been working at for the last twenty years, without ever quite having the courage to realise it on paper.

As the title implies, the former lime-works where Konrad has chosen to live is a major character and source of symbolism throughout the book. He has supposedly picked it because of its remoteness and freedom from distractions, but in fact it turns out to be in the middle of all kinds of rural activity. As a functional industrial building it is meant to embody his disgust for prettiness and bourgeois country-house life, but we quickly realise that it also expresses his unproductive lifestyle, and his failure to break with his bourgeois roots (the works was part of his family's business empire). And it obviously has more than a hint of the tomb about it, and on a prosaic level it seems to reflect elements of the decrepit farmhouse Bernhard describes buying for himself in Meine Preise.

There is a wonderful Whatever happened to Baby Jane struggle going on between Konrad and his wife, as they spar about food, her clothes, Konrad's interminable hearing-tests according to the method of Urbantschitsch, and above all, about which book he should read to her from: she prefers Heinrich von Ofterdingen, but he is dedicated to Kropotkin's memoirs. Even when his wife isn't ringing her little bell, Konrad is disturbed by interminable visits from the locals, or the thought that there might be a visit from a local, or a passing huntsman or forester might be making a noise in the woods....

I don't want to repeat my comments about Bernhard's style for the umpteenth time: it is what it is, and it's splendid, but it's best to experience it at first hand. But one detail I haven't commented on before, which struck me especially in this book, is the extent to which Bernhard enjoys peppering us with Austrianisms, even whilst pouring contempt on every aspect of Austrian prettiness and quaintness. He clearly gets real (and no doubt perverse) pleasure from foregrounding words like Jänner, Fleischhauer, Rauchfangkehrer, Störschneider, Zuhaus - words which are just so much more fun that their standard German counterparts. And why not? ( )

One of the few books to contribute to my nightmares (where I was being subjected to a visual variant of the Urbanchich exercises where a screen of words was overlaid on my eyes and my focus on choosing the "correct" word was my only chance at being free of a diagnosis of some nameless psycopathology - a bit too much time spent on Duolingo and Memrise lately I guess).

Having recently read The Trial and The Castle, I detect the influence of Kafka on this book more than any of the others I've read thus far by Bernhard. This is true on a superficial level ("Konrad" vs. "K") and on a more abstract yet substantive level (the mood created by the Lime Works, by the town of Sicking, by the sense of inescapability and impossibility*, by the trap created by the mind of the protaganist more than anything, etc.).

Quite disturbing, though the distinctive style and (black) humor is fully intact and readily identifies the author. I might have ranked this more highly if considering it on its own terms (it succeeds in so many ways), but I have little desire to return to the obsessive miniature universe within the covers.

*everything is deeply provisional yet final; every object, emotion, or event is a "so-called" object, emotion, or event. Each encounter is a second-hand or third-hand encounter so there is always an distance between the reader and the protaganist - an unbridgeable chasm remaining no matter how close you get to understanding the most minute detail of Konrad's disappointments, his hopes, his (so-called?) madness... ( )