Personally, he was a most amiable presence, tall, with the bearing and the ruddy complexion of an alpine mountaineer, a handsome, boyish face with a sailor's long, greenish, narrowed eyes trained on the far distance. He lived in Ohlfield, a village near Gmunden-on-the-Traunsee in alpine Austria, in a stately farmhouse with a huge square inner courtyard which had taken six years out of his writing life, he said, to restore singlehanded from the decayed ruin filled with mountains of refuse parked there by the neighbours who, resenting the loss of their garbage dump, had sabotaged his efforts with persistent ingenuity. Inside, he had painted the floors a black lacquer, the walls all white, had installed green-tiled stoves and wall-length bookshelves, a bare table, a few wooden chairs, a bed in the centre of the upstairs bedroom that held virtually no other furniture. The tall windows let in much green-tinged light from the surrounding trees. The effect was serene, monastic …

Sophie Wilkins on Thomas Bernhard, from the Introduction of her translation of On The Mountain