He thought, "Thomas Bernhard is mentioned as the most important post-war writer in German, is credited with ownership of a particular style, and is frequently referred to." He thought, "I shall read Bernhard's novels, starting with his first." He thought, "Bloody hell."

The cover blurb proclaims Frost to be "A blast of raw feeling." It's a blast of something, all right. 350 pages mostly consisting of a steady rant of complaints and invective, described by its admirers here - its admirers, mind - with words like "impenetrable" and "increasingly incomprehensible", which leaves me wondering, "do you people want something totally different than I do out of literature?"

There's not a plot so much as a vague gesture in that direction. A medical internist is sent by his superior to observe the doctor's brother for a month. The text does not have exchanges of dialogue but rather a few lines of this brother's directly spoken rants alternating with the internist's summary of the next few lines of the man's rants, and, repeat. A better recipe for boredom if this is not done well is hard to imagine.

Sometimes you can sort of chuckle at the rants. Of his fellow villagers: "The children had lice, the grown-ups had gonorrhea, or the syphilis that finally overwhelmed their nervous systems... Almost all of them have cankered lung lobes, pneumothorax and pneumoperitoneum are endemic. They have tuberculosis of the lungs, the head, the arms and legs." On rural folk: "That whole simple, pitiless world of thought, where simplicity and low-mindedness get hitched and ruin everything! Nothing comes from country people! Villages, morons in short sleeves! The country is no source anymore, only a trove of brutality and idiocy, of squalor and megalomania, of perjury and battery, of systematic extinction!" On the nature of humankind: "Where there is putrescence, I find I cannot breathe deeply enough. I always want to breathe in the odor of humanity, you understand."

For me, the human imagination is an aspect of "God created man in his own image," the imagination and creative impulse acts that bring us closer to God. But it's seen rather differently here: "The imagination is an expression of disorder, it has to be. In an ordered world, there would be no such thing as imagination, order wouldn't tolerate such a thing, imagination is completely alien to it. All the way here, I was asking myself what imagination is. I'm sure imagination is an illness. An illness that you don't catch, merely because you've always had it. An illness that is responsible for everything, and particularly everything ridiculous and malignant."

But then amazingly, about exactly halfway through the book, I found a few lines that counter the entire novel's essence. It's about a hospital attached to a chapel, nuns working as nurses. The internist reflects: "The sisters perform astonishing feats. Never get to bed before eleven, and are back from church already by five, having been heard singing there at half past four. Everywhere, the great white tulips of their bonnets, which manage to flower where everything is dark with despair, where everything else is bleak and bare and inimical."

Well, how un-Bernhardian seeming! A lone bright ray, surrounded by darkness.

So you see why I can't give it just 1 star, despite the fact that I skimmed near the end, and I hate skimming, it's the antithesis of my entire being, and I can't imagine recommending this book. Now, I wonder how I'll like his second novel... ( )

I read somewhere this is "Possibly the bleakest of all Bernhard's books". This is more of a book to absorb, rather than read. There is a certain similarity between Frost and The Magic Mountain, it is easy to imagine the protagonist and artist as living in the village below the Berghof sanatorium of Mann's novel, I would have loved Settembrini to encounter the pair! There was not much of a plot, but more of one of those philosophical novels where you can allow your mind to wander amongst the author's thoughts, and ponder ideas on varying subjects; sex, memory, suicide, imagination, pain, funerals and infinity. The novels is full of observations of the protagonist removed from his setting, numb to any empathy of the villagers who surround him, describing their lives as mundane, pointless and unrewarding. It is full of negative adjectives; grim, ugly and corrupt. The style adopts a clever blurring of the painter's contemplations with the protagonist, as their relationship evolves like an infection. ( )

A medical student is sent to a small mountain town to spy on his bosses brother and diagnose his condition. This is all about depression and possibly madness. It uses a lot of gibberish to give you an impression of what despair is really like. While it does succeed to some degree, the effort isn't worth the return.
I thought it might get better towards the end especially when the protagonist sends his report home BUT this is written in such awful psycho-babble that it was even worse than all the preceding gibberish. ( )

I'm not sure what I expected, but it wasn't this: I've read most of Bernhard's later work, and always put this one off. I think I'm glad--this was an amazing book, but I was expecting something easier than Bernhard's usual, not more difficult. The rant form is here in nuce, but broken up, like a later Bernhard book smashed into tesserae and scattered before the reader. Allow me to explain the clear with the obscure: it's much more Wittgenstein or Nietzsche, and less Adorno. And I prefer Adorno in every possible way. ( )

"'You see,' said the painter, 'the brain is capable of nourishing itself on the inventions , the great inventions of little and lesser and infinitesimal dread ...it can make itself roar ...make itself a world, an original world, an ice age, a vast stone age of organization ...One proceeds from a very small and insignificant instance, from a little individual who falls into one's hands ...From the principle of some desecration, the justness of such desecration, into the desecration itself ...one leaves the victim lying there, one has snow fall on him, one has him decompose, dissolve, an an animal might dissolve that one once might have thought oneself to be ...Do you understand? Life is the purest, clearest, darkest, most crystalline form of hopelessness ...There is only one way to go, through the snow and ice into despair; past the adultery of reason.'" - pg 265

So the painter, Strauch, as you can tell, is really fun to be around and in this first novel by Bernhard you're around him a lot. He never goes away. His pain and suffering, his insanity, his desperate yearning for joy that can never exist, his sudden outbursts of miserable poetry, his disorganized mind - they never dissipate, come to a conclusion, enlighten or erupt. This is a novel of insistent suffering and the reader is left to find meaning wherever they can, amid the natural desolation of a snow covered village, Strauch wouldn't blame you if you decided there was nothing to find in the first place. The artfulness of this novel is captured in the nonsensical, poetic urge to go "past the adultery of reason." Unpacking that phrase is a waste of time, just as assessing a madman artist against the standards of medical norms is a waste of time, just as searching for meaning in the assessment of that student of medicine is a waste of time. It all amounts to no aims or conclusions. It exists in meaningless misery and deceptions layered with deceptions.

So, yeah, great book. Something to read the kids before bed. Bernhard's project came on strong and never let up. It is a difficult book, a painful book, and a necessary seedling for themes that resonate and develop throughout his career. Though this is Bernhard's first novel, I don't think it is the best place to start. In fact, I think this is a terrible place to start. I read Gargoyles first and it brought me here. I will likely read more of his work only because of the dialogue created between this and his other novels. ( )