Correction (Phoenix Fiction)

"Bernhard's prose is lapidary and translucent in its vocabulary, but sinuous and formidably dense in its phrasing. This prose enacts the essential motif of the novel: the notion that every 'correction' is also a negation . . . . The remarkable point is the extent to which the ascetic compactness of Bernhard's style turns these abstractions into a sensory presence . . . . [Bernhard's] connections, at once developmental and contrastive, with the great 'Austrian' constellation of Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Musil and Broch become ever clearer."—George Steiner, Times Literary Supplement

"Correction is something exceedingly rare among novels of recent years: a paradigm of consciousness and not simply a product . . . . Bernhard has said that 'the art we need is the art of bearing the unbearable,' and his novel joins that small group of literary works which nobly help us to do that."—Richard Gilman, The Nation

"It is high time that we keep Bernhard firmly in our mind, as European readers have been doing for many years now."—Peter Demetz, Christian Science Monitor