Plot Summary
The Austrian main character Roithamer, lecturer at Cambridge, after years of paroxystic projects, builds for his sister, the only person he ever loved, a house in the shape of a cone, right in the geometrically precise middle of the Kobernausser forest. Her answer to the present is death, her traumatic death on entering the Cone. This cone (see it as you will—a multitude of symbols, such as a refuge, a mausoleum, a phallic icon, the perfect mathematical centre of existence and thought, etc.) is then destined to disappear, absorbed by an invading Nature, eternal nemesis. A typical Bernhardian maniacal character, Roithamer corrects his building project ad infinitum, and ultimately corrects it to its extreme self-correction: suicide. Correction unravels between love and spite, humanity and degradation, hypocrisy and violence, sickness and death, in a crescendo that brings madness to a dramatic threshold of absolute lucidity.
Read more about this topic: Correction (novel)
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