RODZEŃSTWO

Thomas Bernhard's Rodzeństwo is a work about love. Extraordinarily difficult love that traps the characters in a painful grip of regret, sense of injustice, and at times even anger and hatred. Despite the suffering it causes them, Bernhard's protagonists cling to each other, wanting to stay together and form a family. It is easy to get the impression that they derive a kind of perverse pleasure from mutually tormenting each other out of selfish motives, forcing sacrifices, and deliberately wounding. There is certainly a large dose of masochistic delight in how they view each other as victims of their remaining relatives. Yet it is better to think of this difficult relationship between three people differently. To see it as an act of extraordinary sacrifice, a desperate desire to maintain a bond that, while destructive, is also something...