The German title, Verstörung, translates as something like Confusion or Derangement, but the American publisher chose Gargoyles, perhaps in order to render the array of human freaks the novel depicts to its very end.

But when they meet the insomniac Prince Saurau in his castle at Hochgobernitz, his solitary, stationary mind takes over the rest of the novel in an uninterrupted obsessive paragraph.

It's a hundred-page monologue by an eccentric, paranoid man, a relentlessly flowing cascade of words that is classic Bernhard: the furious logorrhea is a mesmeric rant, completing the stylistic formation of his art of exaggeration, where he uses metaphors of physical and mental illness to explore the decay of his homeland.

Its owner - old prince Saurau - is the expression of the best (or worst) Bernhardian values: the Habsburg stand-in who steals the show with a hundred-page monologue about his own descent into madness and his fraught relationship with his own son.

While the external surface of life is unquestionably grim, he somehow suggests more – the mystic element in experience that calls for symbolic interpretation; the inner significance of states that are akin to surrealistic dream-worlds; man’s yearning for health, compassion, sanity.