Books Magazine
There is no useful reason to compare Thomas Bernhard with Umberto Eco apart from the contingency of bedside book piles but, coming almost simultaneously to the end of Bernhard's Gathering Evidence and Eco's Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, I see for the first time how stark is the difference between them -- how writing means survival for the one just as it is the product of a leisured and highly erudite mind for the other -- and how in fact the relative position of their books on my bookshelves shows that I must have already evaluated these same thoughts, if only unconsciously, at least once before.
