“Such a person who perceives everything and sees everything and who observes everything, moreover continually, is not popular, more often feared, and people have always guarded themselves against such a person, because such a person is a dangerous person and dangerous persons are not only feared but hated, and in that respect I have to describe myself as a hated person.”
[25 pages later…]
“Just because he had been despised by everyone, and actually even hated, I had been attracted to him, I have always had a predilection for the despised and hated.”
—Thomas Bernhard, Yes
s. d. stewart 
Anonymous
/ May 5, 2014I really need to read more Bernhard; Frost was somehow emotionally difficult to read and/or face, but in the best of ways– maybe because he feels so much like a modern.
birds fly
/ May 5, 2014Yes, he feels to me a little like Beckett though his characters feel different, tending more toward the monomaniacal, although sometimes similarly circuitous in their thinking to Beckett characters. If you’re interested in a recommendation, I am always talking up Bernhard’s memoir Gathering Evidence, even for readers who haven’t read much of his fiction. Reading it early on really helped inform my subsequent reading of more of his novels.
Your comment reminded me that I forgot to check back on your post, which I just did and saw your response. Sorry about that. There is a definite need for a cross-platform blog comment notification system! Anyway, I will dig out my notes and/or review of that book and get back to you. It’s been awhile since I read it. But yes, I do recall a feeling that some truth was getting through to me even in the midst of all the wrangling, as you say. I remember it making an odd sort of sense to me, at least in places.