Extinction takes the form of the autobiographical testimony of Franz-Josef Murau, the intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family.

Murau lives in Rome in self-exile, obsessed and angry with his identity as an Austrian, and resolves never to return to the family estate of Wolfsegg.

[citation needed] There's something utopian in this novel, underscored by the ending, where Wolfsegg’s entire estate is donated to the Jewish community of Vienna.

It's this very rhythm – an inexorable, spiralling mechanism of hyperboles and superlatives – which confers to the narrative the specific vis comica so characteristic of Bernhard's work.

"Everything is ridiculous when one thinks of death", Bernhard wrote, and very few other contemporary authors have demonstrated how thin the line is that separates the tragic from the comic.