The Discreet charm of the lugubriosie (or The art of tiding oneself over): Thomas Bernhard's Extinction, trans. David McLintock, Penguin Books, London, 1996, pp. 335, RRP $16.95 (paper). [Book Review]

It's all here – the escalating hyperbole, the grandiosity, the connoisseurship, the importuning of the witness – the unmistakeable voice of one of Thomas Bernhard's protagonists holding out, fittingly enough, on the topic of exaggeration. On the occasion of the publication of Bernhard's biography, reviewed recently by Murray Bail in The Age,[2] I look at his last novel, Extinction and its fine contribution to the sensibility of lugubriousness.