It's hard for characters to get a word in through Thomas Bernhard's novels. Goldschmidt, a bookseller, manages to tell Koller, the novel's protagonist, 'Booksellers were to be pitied more than anyone else, because on them, more than on anyone else, rested the whole hideousness and meanness of human history and the whole helplessness and pitifulness of art and because they had to be permanently afraid of being crushed by that anti-human load. The bookseller who takes his trade seriously was to be pitied more than any other human being because day after day and ceaselessly he was confronted with the absolute pointlessness of everything that was ever written.'
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