SOURCE: A review of Der Schein trügt, in World Literature Today, Vol. 58, No. 3, Summer, 1984, pp. 408–09.

In the following review, Hoover offers a laudatory review of Der Schein trügt and compares Bernhard with the dramatists Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter.

With the play Der Schein trügt (Appearances Are Deceptive) Thomas Bernhard transcends earlier critical perceptions of his work (see WLT 55:4, pp. 603–607). His initial literary success, crowned by several prizes in the 1960s, rested on novels of gloom and morbidity stemming from his homeland, Austria. His first play too, Ein Fest für Boris (A Party for Boris; 1970), however comic, projected a grotesquely limited picture: a birthday celebration among about a dozen persons, all in wheelchairs and without legs. The party ends with the title character’s fatal collapse. Though Der Schein trügt is hardly more hopeful, it gives a broader view of, alas, likewise all...