The Lime Works

Bernhard is a master. It is a shame that his works are not more popular in the United States.

The book itself is like the lime works in which the reader finds him/herself lost, the walls constructed of bits of hearsay and rumor collected and disseminated by various neighbors and acquaintances of the strange old man currently living in the lime works with his invalid wife of whom he takes cursory care and on whom he conducts strange experiments (of the auditory type) because he is gathering information for the book he is writing, the book he has been writing for quite some time, well, actually the book that he has been preparing to write for years but which he has not actually started because he is afraid that he might get it wrong and he knows that it must be a brilliant work -- for his research is of the most brilliant nature -- and he is simply driving himself mad with it, though he seems not to notice anything unusual except for his exceptionally keen sense of hearing and the most amazing thing about the book, not the book in the book, but the actual book by Thomas Bernhard, is that it is about writing the book that the reader is reading and it is difficult to put the book down even for a moment, not just because the book is intriguing and complex and disturbing, but also because the book is composed (to resemble the workings of a madman's mind) of several hundred pages of run-on sentences