Fiction. This fiction is "a lyrical work based on autobiographical elements, a kind of encyclopedia of Bernhard's world, and precedes those extraordinary novels which have secured his reputation as one of the very greatest of this century's writers in German. ON THE MOUNTAIN, a most exceptional and unusual book, the last one to be prepared for publication during the author's lifetime, in view of Thomas Bernhard's will, according to which not a word of his may be published, played, or even publicly read in Austria in the future, will occupy an even more solitary position. It becomes the last prose work of Bernhard, who died in 1989, yet it really marked his debut in fiction, since it was written in 1959. ON THE MOUNTAIN should be read and seen as the frail foundation of a literary universe."--Erich Wolfgang Skwara, from World Literature Today.