Thomas Bernhard’s Afterlives. Edited by Stephen Dowden, Gregor Thuswaldner, and Olaf Berwald. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 264 pages. $135.00 hardcover, $39.95 paperback, $35.95 eBook.

This volume charts the ways in which Thomas Bernhard’s prose has informed the aesthetics and stylistic approaches of several recent writers working in different linguistic and cultural contexts and, particularly, the way their literary engagement with his work can take surprising turns to produce, as Stephen Dowden writes in his introduction, “Unexpected Affinities” (5). The idea of authorial influence is productively problematized in these essays. Indeed, Dowden notes that the term ‘influence’ would imply a single direction of travel from a lionized author to his epigones. What is at stake in this collection is instead an appreciation of the way adaptations of Bernhard’s œuvre emerge from a critical understanding of his texts, and that these reworkings emphasize the continuing relevance of Bernhard’s prose to ongoing debates in twenty-first century literary aesthetics, especially the dialectical relationship literature maintains to its own historical and cultural context.

The book has a generous cosmopolitan focus and only one of the essays focuses on the specifically Austrian legacy of Thomas Bernhard’s work, evidence that the author achieved his stated aim of “resonating internationally” (“weltweit ausstrahlen,” 208). Katya Krylova’s exploration of recent novels by four of his compatriots confirms, she writes, the enduring status of Bernhard as a literary authority whose tone and technique are deferred to in his native country, but which can be flexibly and self-reflexively re-purposed—for example, in Thomas Mulitzer’s Tau (2017), the title an inversion of Bernhard’s first novel, Frost (1963)—to critique Bernhard’s own “musealization” (39) as Austrian national treasure.

Bernhard had a particular penchant for the Latin Mediterranean, an attraction that was reciprocated in Spain, where Heike Scharm notes the popularity of the writer for intellectuals of the post-Franco desencanto. Bernhard’s savage critique of Austrian society for having failed to acknowledge its complicity with National Socialism seemed to align with political conditions in a Spain that had yet to confront the legacy of the Nationalist dictatorship. Intriguingly, Scharm sees aspects of Spanish culture as foreshadowing Bernhard: depictions of post-imperial decay and despair in the work of writers such as Pío Baroja, for example, bear an uncanny resemblance to Bernhard’s postwar Austrian dystopias.

Otto Berwald’s essay provides an illuminating look at the way Bernhard has been received by Francophone writers. Berwald argues that writers such as Hervé Guibert, Gemma Salem, and Linda Lê do not produce mechanistic reproductions of Bernhard; rather they seek to perform “creative continuations” and “escape attempts” (157) from an author whose narrative voice and style can sometimes be perceived as a type of infection or contagion. The dangers of getting too close to Bernhard are also addressed by Gregor Thuswaldner, who points out in a contribution on the British writer Gabriel Josipovici—at one time marketed as a “British Bernhard”—that a glib positing of stylistic similarities with Bernhard can overlook sophisticated aesthetic strategies. In his own critical writing Josipovici had drawn a parallel between Marcel Duchamp and Bernhard: the essential modernism of both lay in their ability to blur the categories between serious art and the spoof—an aesthetic destabilisation which, it is implied, may also play out in a text such as Josipovici’s Bernhardesque Moo Pak (1994).

Saskia Ziolkowski reveals unexpected connections between Bernhard’s work and modern Italian literature. Italo Calvino’s engagement with his much-admired Austrian contemporary is explored, and the theme of repressed postwar guilt, which pervades Bernhard’s work, is discussed with respect to Claudio Magris’s novel Non luogo a procedere (2015; Blameless, 2017). An “unexpected affinity” highlighted in Ziolkowski’s essay is to Elena Ferrante, whose work, Ziolkowski argues, echoes Bernhard in its hostility to institutions, its unsentimental depiction of family relations, and its problematization of the Other.

Juliane Werner looks at three “variations” on Bernhard’s literary influence in three different linguistic spaces: Tim Parks’s Destiny (1999), Vitaliano Trevisan’s Il ponte. Un Crollo (2007), and Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El Asco (1997; Revulsion, 2016), detailing the ways in which they adapt Bernhard’s stylistic and thematic traits in pursuit of an original program. Werner notes that in the case of Moya, the translation of Bernhard’s apparently apolitical aesthetics into a Salvadorean context had dramatic consequences: the author received death threats and was compelled to leave the country.

One of the most prominent features of Bernhard’s prose is its digressiveness. Kata Gellen’s essay on Geoff Dyer’s autofictional work Out of sheer rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence (1997) notes the way the British writer appears to take his cue from Bernhard but then himself digresses productively from the path mapped out in the latter’s novels. Dyer’s text, writes Gellen, demonstrates that a protocol of the artistic struggle is itself aesthetically generative since it ultimately produces writing in response to a failure to write. The autofictional frame of Dyer’s work provides scope—in contrast to Bernhard—for a kind of aesthetic self-overcoming.

For Susan Sonntag, what was valuable in art was its “pure untranslated sensuous immediacy” (83), a quality, writes Stephen Dowden, that she identified and admired in Bernhard. Far from being merely aestheticism, this style, Dowden argues, also made Bernhard historically and politically relevant. Imre Kertész, for example, saw in Bernhard an artist whose radical style could convey radical experience and who identified with the Jewish condition as “paradigmatic” for modernity (95). Dowden argues that Bernhard’s death-obsessed style—a kind of precocious and prickly “Altersstil”—was paradoxically progressive in the postwar era because it was “aesthetically sufficient” (85) to the German experience of National Socialism.

For Byron Spring, Bernhard’s prose style also takes on a decidedly political coloring. In an essay that breaks interesting new ground in the correspondence it proposes between Bernhard’s Auslöschung (1986) and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000), Spring sees both texts engaged in an exploration of the limits of textually rendered (self-)knowledge which must always be circumscribed by a stain of cultural-literary and historical inheritance. The comparison with Roth’s work is illuminating and, as Spring writes, “suggests the ongoing transferability of the Austrian writer beyond his immediate contexts” (114).

Martin Klebes’s theoretically sophisticated reading of the complex interplay between Bernhard’s work and US author William Gaddis’s own famously Bernhardian novella, Agapē, is particularly rewarding. Drawing on the thought of Johan Huizinga, Walter Benjamin, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, and on the idea of “anticipatory plagiary” proposed by the French Oulipo group, Klebes advances a reading of Gaddis’s text that reexamines some of the key aesthetic and epistemological questions in Bernhard’s work, such as the identity of artist and artwork, the notion of authenticity, and the entanglements of voice and text.

The essays in Thomas Bernhard’s Afterlives bear witness to the enduring legacy of a writer whose work continues to exert a productive fascination for his peers in Austria and beyond. This series of innovative reflections on and thoughtful engagements with Bernhard are an excellent addition to the field, especially to those studies of the author’s work that explore its effects in a range of cultural and linguistic contexts. The writing is at all times engaging and, in acknowledgement of the seductive nature of Bernhard’s texts, sometimes bold enough to confess its own attachments to them. The multilingual bibliography is comprehensive, though it might have benefited from separating primary from secondary texts. A transcription error in a translation on page 174 was a minor irritation. Afterlives must be judged a fruitful contribution to Bernhard scholarship.