lowkey the funniest book ever

i went through various stages of being sold and not sold on this; i think bernhard's imprint is clear in a lot of contemporary folk i admire deeply, like ben lerner or alan hollinghurst or even anuk arudpragasam. bernhard makes a strong argument for the long sentence, and i'm going to suffer from the bernhard effect (mimicry) for some time, probably; but some of this is overelaborated and at points really quite tediously bitter (but i think what convinced me was two sequences, one near the middle and one near the end of this book, that came about with a startling self-diagnosis of sameness and/or envy, that made some sense of the tedious bitterness). sharp satire of the viennese bohemian artistic elite etc., but maybe a more stunning indictment of the sort to satirise (probably very earnest, passionate people) from within

I relate with the narrator very much. I too enjoy sitting alone thinking of how much I hate everyone when I'm at a party/event with people I despise. A very strange book. I never would have thought I would like a book about a guy sitting and hating on every person around him. But it was enjoyable.

Our narrator is sitting in a chair among a group of people he claims to abhor and he is regretting some decisions he made in the past. He is mourning a friend who committed suicide but he is also sort of mad at her and sort of jealous of her. He feels he was wronged but he also did some disappointing things. There are no breaks - no paragraphs, no chapters, no sections to give you a chance to regroup. No dialog. We stay in his head for the duration. My husband will not touch the little book. But I thought it was a sort of prickly gem.