Having managed to avoid the garish theatrical milieu of Vienna for over a quarter of a century, the death of a mutual friend inadvertently plunges the narrator back into the artistic coterie he despised for its artificiality. An 'artistic dinner' is being given in honour of a Burgtheatre actor. He's beyond late. During an endless wait, from his wing chair in the grand dining room of the Auersbergers, the narrator sees how such a society comports itself and gives vent to a city that demolishes genius and to the guests who have nothing to offer but mediocrity. Best line ever: ‘to serve potato soup at a quarter to one in the morning and announce that a boiled pike is to follow is a perversion of which only the Auersbergers are capable.’ It's brilliant, compelling and hilarious and as far as I'm aware, due to the auto-fictional nature, was the subject of a legal battle as the real-life Auersberger - Austrian composer Lampersberg could be identified.
He's not so purblind as to let his own mendacity go unchecked, however, but Bernhard could be describing the kind of cultural dilettantism that exists in every city in the world: 'They’ve betrayed literature and art for the sake of a few ludicrous prizes and a guaranteed pension, kowtowing to the state and its cultural riffraff, churning out their derivative kitsch for the vilest of motives and spending their time going up and down the back stairs of the ministries that dole out subventions.' The repetitive prose creates a kind of anxiety or uncanny disquiet that put me in mind of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, written a decade later, about a pianist lost in a frustrating psychological drama.