The Lime Works - Thomas Bernhard

The Lime Works by Thomas Bernhard / ISBN 9781400077588 / 256-page paperback from Vintage *** For five years, Konrad has imprisoned himself and his crippled wife in an abandoned lime works where he’s conducted odd auditory experiments and prepared to write his masterwork, The Sense of Hearing. As the story begins, he’s just blown the head off his wife with the Mannlicher carbine she kept strapped to her wheelchair. The murder and the bizarre life that led to it are the subject of a mass of hearsay related by an unnamed life-insurance salesman in a narrative as mazy, byzantine, and mysterious as the lime works—Konrad’s sanctuary and tomb. “Bernhard’s prose is hypnotic, unstoppable, as rapid as thought itself. He makes you think, as all great writers do, that at any moment he can say anything.”—The Washington Post Book World “A superior book . . . deeply thought and felt. . . . Bernhard is a writer of great originality and fascination.”—The New York Review of Books Thomas Bernhard was bor