From "The Crime of a Merchant's Son from Innsbruck" published in 1960 to "At the Ortler," released in 1971, the spectrum of stories gathered here by Thomas Bernhard is vast. In these works, the linguistic creativity of this author becomes evident—in sentences that play out every possible thesis and antithesis against each other, turning them back and forth until any semantic core is dissolved. Thus, despite the decline, despair, and death that are depicted, there is an impression that language is a means of survival in this world, and not just survival, but also of comedy.