Gertrude Stein), as well as an obsessive use of the most common attributives, or tags, as in this remembered conversation between the narrator and his deceased friend: But everything we say is nonsense, he said, I thought, no matter what we say it is nonsense and our entire life is a single piece of nonsense. I understood that early on, I’d barely started to think for myself and I already understood that, we speak only nonsense, everything we say is nonsense, but everything that is said to us is also nonsense, like everything that is said at all, in this world only nonsense has been said until now and, he said, only nonsense has actually and naturally been written, the writings we possess are only nonsense because they can only be nonsense, as history proves, he said, I thought. In the end I fled into the notion of the aphorist, he said, and when asked my profession I actually once responded, so Wertheimer said, that I was an aphorist. But people didn’t understand what I meant, as usual, when I say something they don’t understand it, for what I say doesn’t mean that I said what I said, he said, I thought. I say something, he said, I thought, and I’m saying something completely different, thus I’ve spent my entire life in misunderstandings, in nothing but misunderstandings, he said, I thought. We are, to put it precisely, born into misunderstanding and never escape this condition of misunderstanding as long as we live, we can squirm and twist as much as we like, it doesn’t help. But everyone can see this, he said, I thought, for everyone says something repeatedly and is misunderstood, this is the only point where everybody understands everybody else, he said, I thought. That passage appears a little more than a third of a way through the novel. Part of Bernhard’s genius is in teaching us to read, and understand, his style; by the time we reach those lines, they are not particularly difficult to comprehend, and the novel is anything but nonsense. Although we are denied some conventional handholds and guardrails, those barriers that allow us to sidle up to the rim of a canyon without plunging in, others are offered in such number and prominence that they serve an unconventional end, like an infinitely ascending Escher staircase. “He said” and “I thought” are used not as transparent clarifying devices but as intrusions and as crucial components of the rhythm of the prose. We are forced to read more