Anyone else a Thomas Bernhard fan?

[BabelFishSpeaks]

I both adore and detest Bernhard in equal measure, an emotional response that he would doubtless be pleased with.

I can safely say that he shaped who I am and who I was. When I first picked up The Loser in 2015 it took my breath away. It was one the first times that I saw some of my deepest and darkest feelings reflected in a book, and the prose itself was a thing of wonder, a continually evolving monster of a paragraph that achieved an exhaustive beauty despite focusing on the mire of the mind and the futility of living, along with frequent moments where I had to put the book down due to laughing so much. I immediately became obsessed and that obsession lasted throughout my early-mid 20's. I'm not sure if this will make sense, but he was one of the only authors outside of Ligotti who I thought wasn't trying to hold my hand and present me with a false picture of the world. I appreciate any author who can do that.

At the same time, I have grown to dislike the impact his works have had on writing since. There are so many people (and I direct this at myself, for the most part) who mostly seem to ape his writing style whilst not understanding why he used these techniques to begin with and as a result it ends up with barely a fraction of the original power. I have read quite a few "Bernhardian" novels and they have not stuck with me anywhere near as much as his works have. Likewise, I also tried to write fiction that came out Bernhardian and it was excerable. I also find that his novels are frequently repitious in both theme and scope, to the point where I once tried to binge read several of his books in one week but grew so bored by the constant repetition that I ended up putting it down and picking up Gogol instead.

Oddly enough, despite his reputation as a cankerous and life denying pessimist I have found that his work frequently puts me in good humour. Now that, he would probably be less pleased with.