Extinction

Description

'Extinction features, without doubt, the funniest passage in the whole of literature. The dreadful becomes hilarious, joyful - and it makes one thirst for more of the similar.' - Geoff Dyer Franz-Josef Murau is the intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family. He now lives in Rome in self-imposed exile, surrounded by a coterie of artistic and intellectual friends. On returning from his sister's wedding on the family estate of Wolfsegg, having resolved never to go home again, Murau receives a telegram informing him of the death of his parents and brother in a car crash. Not only must he now go back, he must do so as the master of Wolfsegg: and he must decide its fate. The summit of Thomas Bernhard's artistic genius - mesmerising, addictive, explosively tragicomic - Extinction is a landmark of post-war literature.

Thomas Bernhard was born in Holland in 1931 and grew up in Austria. He studied music at the Akademie Mozarteum in Salzburg, but was plagued by ill-health, and in 1957 began a second career as a playwright, poet, and novelist. The winner of the three most distinguished and coveted literary prizes awarded in Germany, Bernhard became one of the most widely translated and admired European writers of his generation, famed for his torrential prose and bleak comedy. He published nine novels, an autobiography, one volume of poetry, four collections of short stories, and six volumes of plays. Thomas Bernhard died in Austria in 1989. Faber & Faber are reissuing five of Bernhard's novels in 2019 to coincide with the 30th anniversary of his death.