Finished K.'s "Trial" and Have Moved Back to Bernhard

The Trial: sparkling in patches, dragged at times (or was it me?).

I liked the hyper-parabolic penultimate (doorkeeper, law, K. -- frontloaded in Orson's take) and the ending very much.

From the finale:

He saw how a light flickered on and the two halves of a window opened out, somebody, made weak and thin by the height and the distance, leant suddenly far out from it and stretched his arms out even further. Who was that? A friend? A good person? Somebody who wanted to help? Was he alone? Was it everyone? Would anyone help? Were there objections that had been forgotten? There must have been some. The logic cannot be refuted, but someone who wants to live will not resist it. Where was the judge he'd never seen? Where was the high court he had never reached? He raised both hands and spread out all his fingers.

But the hands of one of the gentleman were laid on K.'s throat, while the other pushed the knife deep into his heart and twisted it there, twice. As his eyesight failed, K. saw the two gentlemen cheek by cheek, close in front of his face, watching the result. "Like a dog!" he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.

***

Bernhard's The Woodcutters looks promising.

The epigraph (Voltaire):

Being unable to make people more reasonable,

I preferred to be happy away from them.

*

Something that made me smile:

I had once seen this actor at the Burgtheater, many years before, in one of those emetic English society farces the inanity of which is tolerable only because it is English inanity and not the German or Austrian variety, and which have been put on at the Burgtheater again and again with appalling regularity over the past quarter of a century, because during this time the Burgtheater has made a specialty of English inanity and the Viennese public has grown accustomed to it.