What an extraordinary little book, one of the most unique I’ve read in a long time. Over the course of 181 pages, the narrator relates an “artistic dinner” at the Auersbergers’ flat in Vienna, on the evening after the funeral of their mutual friend, Joana. The dinner was organized to feature the well-known Burgtheater actor currently playing Ekdal in Ibsen’s play ‘The Wild Duck.’ The narrator has recently returned from some years in London and now finds himself compelled by Joana’s suicide to renew friendships with his old crowd of artists, writers, composers, and actors. What follows is the narrator’s internal monologue of disdain for his fellow artists, their pretensions and ambitions, and the state of the arts in Vienna. This should be unpleasant, but the circularity of Bernhard’s style in this book draws the reader in; every thought is rolled around and examined from every angle, until the repetition of key words becomes almost hypnotic. What emerges is the artist’s love-hate relationship with Vienna and his fellow creatives. “Vienna is an ‘art mill,’ the biggest art mill in the world, in which the art and artists are ground down and pulverized, year in, year out,” he thinks. “Whatever the art or whatever the artists, the Viennese art mill grinds them to powder…. And the curious thing is that all these people jump into this art mill entirely of their own volition, only to be totally ground down by it” (158-159).