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As John Peel once remarked about The Fall, “always different, always the same��, and this applies to the dissonant pulveriser Thomas Bernhard too, with Correction his Perverted by Language. (In fact, a more studious Fall/Bernhard scholar might spend some time compiling a diverting buzzfeed pairing off Fall albums to Bernhard novels [and that person will be me—check back in 2018]). As remarked in the blurb, the protagonist Roithamer is based on Wittgenstein, but knowledge of that popular philosopher is not required to penetrate the cracked skull of this obsessive-depressive. At work for six years on a large dwelling for his sister in an Austrian forest known as The Cone, Roithamer’s plans unravel when that sister commits suicide, leaving him to chronicle his mania, madness, resentment in his friend Hoeller’s garret, offing himself afterwards. This sequence of events is described by an unnamed narrator in the first part, then in Roithamer’s own words in the second, at which point the novel ramps up a gear into the deranged brilliance stakes, as Bernhard’s maddening repetitions and claustrophobic blocks of text lock the reader into his protagonist’s fascinating and hilariously disturbed mind. Genius.