Speak. Words.

In chapter Seven of The Queen of Air and Darkness,  the second tome in  T. H. White's  Tetrology that retells  the King Arthur Saga in modern language, we find the four troubled  adolescent sons of  the sorceress Queen Morgause, Gawain, Agravaine, Gaheris, and Gareth,  vying for their mother's attention by attempting to surprise her with a special gift – a unicorn they set out to capture in the woods. It does not quite work out as planned. 

In The Human Stain, written in 2001, Philip Roth provocatively examines the drama of racial identity and identity politics in America through an intriguing lens.   The book is written as a reconstructed biography of Coleman Silk, a literature professor with a dark secret. In this scene, the publicly disgraced Silk has an epiphany as his lover, a survivor with a story of her own, opens herself up to him and sees him in a way no one ever has.

Tolkien wrote the Hobbit twenty years before  his famous trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. Conceived as a children's novel, chiefly to entertain his young children, it is quite different in style and tone from the trilogy, even though it introduces several key characters who will play major roles in it. the novel is charming and witty, much less serious than the grave Lord of the Rings books, and even repeatedly breaks the fourth wall by addressing the reader (or listener) directly. It was great fun to record its first chapter.

Vladimir Nabokov began writing  Pnin in 1954, around the time his Lolita was being finalized. It was at first published in period installments in The  New Yorker before a revised version came out in book form, in 1957, a year before Lolita, garnering him his first American success. The novella tells the story of Russian emigré, Professor Pnin, who teaches Russian at a fictional  American College  in New England. Much of the novella draws from Nabokov's own experiences as a professor at Cornell University.
This is the novella's first chapter.

Thomas Mann constructed Doktor Faustus as a chronicle of the life and tragedy of the composer Adrian Leverkühn, told by his childhood friend, Serenus Zeitblom. This excerpt  is taken from the eighth chapter, describing a music lecture by one Wendell Kretzschmar, an American-born composer and musician who, for a brief period, works as the local church's organist  in their provincial  hometown, Kaisersaschern. The theme of vividly described lecture is Beethoven's famous Piano Sonata Opus 111. 

This is the final chapter of the book.
If you are not familiar with the novel, the beginning of my excerpt probably won't mean much to you as it breaks down the murder mystery that wove itself through the story. But hang in there,  it's merely the beginning of one of the greatest argumentative showdowns between two adversaries that you are likely to ever come across, and it leads to a deeply engrossing philosophical debate that speaks very much to the challenges of our own  time and is well worth listening to even if you do not know the story line.

Here is an introduction:
The story takes place in the early 14th Century, in a Benedictine monastery in the mountains of North Eastern Italy. William de Baskerville, a Franciscan monk from Scotland and his young Austrian apprentice, Adson von Melk, who is the narrator of the story – writing it, as it were, as a confessional testimony in old age – have traveled there because the abbey is to host an important meeting between rivaling fractions of the catholic church – and members of the Inquisition – to discuss important matters that will determine the future of Europe’s religious institutions and their respective positions in the dominance hierarchy. As it happens, the abbey, which is not only exceedingly wealthy but also boasts a mystical, enormous, ancient library that is off limits to all but the designated librarian and his assistant, has been befallen by tragedy: several monks are found dead under rather strange and horrific circumstances, and the abbot asks William to investigate the case. All signs point to the secretive library and a mysterious book that somebody seems dead set on not letting anybody find or read. After a week of trials, secretive nightly explorations of the library that, it turns out, is laid out as a confounding labyrinth, and too many dramatic turns of events to mention here, William and his apprentice at long last manage to find their way into the even more secretive inner sanctum of the library, the so-called Finis Africae, a chamber hidden behind a mirror, the place where they expect to find not just the book but the clue to the murders. 

This is where my reading begins.  I am using my own translation.

Born in Holland in 1931 and raised in Austria and Germany, Thomas Bernhard was one of the most successful but also most contested writers of his generation. 

His writing style combined a highly musical approach, based on variations on a theme, with an excessively dark nihilism. Many of his novels, including Extinction, his last novel, published in 1986, are constructed as inner monologues, often described as long-winded rants about the monstrosity of humankind in general and the Austrian people and their culture in particular. His protagonists often seem to revel almost masochistically in the futility of any kind of ambition or, in fact, life itself.   

His novels are an acquired taste, a somewhat perverse pleasure to read, rendered all the more intriguing by his elegant use of the fugue technique that drags the reader further and further down into the vortex of his negativity, to a point where the narration becomes so absurd in its absolute denial of any possibility of happiness that the effect lands you at the other end of the spectrum where a sort of disturbed laughter may very well be your only recourse to protect yourself against the vitriolic – but always stylish – onslaught of attacks, putdowns and damning dissections of virtually all  characters, including the highly subjective –and thus unreliable – narrator. 

In Extinction, as often in Bernhard’s novels, the protagonist is obsessively trying to come to terms with a highly critical situation of the present by mercilessly dissecting his past. In this case, the narrator is the son of a wealthy land-owning Austrian family who left his family’s imposing estate, called Wolfsegg, and, now expatriated in Rome and working as a private tutor of literature, learns that his parents and older brother have passed away in a tragic car accident. This is taking place just as he has returned to Rome from a visit to Wolfsegg and had made up his mind to not go back for a long time or to possibly even cut all ties with his family. The unfolding inner monologue is not just a close analysis of his now dead parents and brother but also his two surviving sisters – and the trauma they all inflicted on him – but a damnation of his own incapability to overcome the trauma that he has been trying to explain to his one student Roman, named Gambetti, himself the son of a wealthy Italian family. The inner monologue unfolds as he is sitting at his desk in his apartment in Rome, examining three photographs he has kept of his family- one of his parents, one of his brother, and one of his twosisters.  The title Extinction points to the protagonist’s deep conviction that the only way to bring about a better world, is to burn down or, as it were,  extinguish, the old.