 But Bernhard wouldn’t be Bernhard if such a denigration, so relentless and ruthless, didn’t mutate in a vertiginous cascade of words with compulsive musical pitches of extraordinary beauty (and beautifully rendered by translator David McLintock) – a melodic "aria" whose lightness sharply contrasts with the gloomy character of Murau’s proclamations.It’s this very rhythm – an inexorable, spiralling mechanism of hyperboles and superlatives – which confers to the narrative the specific "vis comica" so characteristic of Bernhard’s work.Exaggeration changes into grotesque, tragedy into comedy.