Astonishingly original, a composition of strange new beauty

If against its own vision Correction offers us only a Teutonic injunction to take courage, we must do so from Bernhard's own example, from his determination to look more steadily than any who have come before into the perishing of the soul

Thomas Bernhard is one of the masters of contemporary European fiction. After Kafka's and Canetti's, his sensibility is one of the most acute, the most capable of exemplary images and gestures, in modern literature

He has created a body of work of luminous power: ironic, intellectually playful, dense and strange

Shows Saramago to be a novelist of the grandest sort...it is a dramatic work of great philosophical weight, filtered through a refined contemplative intelligence

A study in symmetry, possessing a peculiar charm, humour and wisdom uniquely its own