Thomas Bernhard’s excellent novel, Old Masters, is a streaming narrative that often goes several levels (narratives) deep. Bernhard, despite ignoring breaks for chapters or paragraphs or dialogue does provide attribution in the midst of the narrative: the pattern is often like “I’m telling you that He said that She said that her Mother told her that her Father said, etc. Maybe not that complex since there are few main characters in the novel: the music critic (musicologist) that visits the art gallery every other day and sits before a famous painting to do his best thinking,  a museum guard who watches over the critic more than the museum itself, and a young author (philosopher) who is also the apparent narrator.

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