Thomas Bernhard is evidently a writer who prefers great risks, like a swimmer who chooses to enter the water with a quadruple flip from the highest board rather than feet first from poolside. His performance may not be flawless. It isn't in Gargoyles,… [his first work] to appear in English. Nevertheless, his daring is remarkable, and the chances he takes pay off: for him, two literary prizes in his native Austria during 1968; for the reader, interest, suggestiveness, depth, and the realization that here is a novelist with uncommon talents of the sort possessed by Kafka, Musil, and Beckett, with whose visions of isolation and despair he has been associated by German critics.

Early one morning a doctor sets out on his daily rounds with his son. Even before their journey begins through a forbidding mountainous countryside, the father has visited a dying schoolmaster and a child who has...