Thomas Bernhard and NPRs Three Minute Fiction
Here’s one for the contest...chosen from 104 found in The Voice Imitator (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997):
My former classmate who emigrated to Australia eleven years ago and returned to his Styrian homeland two years ago emigrated to Australia again six months ago, although he knows he will return to Styria again and will continue to emigrate to Australia and return to Styria as often as it takes him to find peace either in Australia or Styria. His father before him, a journeyman baker from the Molltal who went to school with my father,emigrated from Carinthia to Styria at least twenty times and each time returned to Carinthia from Styria until he finally found peace in Carinthia, in Arndorf near St. Veit-on-the-Glan, where in the old smithy – his final lodgings- he hanged himelf on an iron hook because he was homesick for Styria, without, and he was reproached for this at the time and long after his death, thinking of his wife and children.
I choose this story for how it illustrates, how it humourously exaggerates, Bernhard’s tendencies toward repetition, precision, morbidity, parenthetical comment, and sonnet-like endings.
