Bernhard, Kafka, and the comedy of horror

Thomas Bernhard, the late Austrian writer, one whom I've heard mentioned from time to time but had never read, till now, turns out to be so dark and strange and mysterious as to be comical - in the same way that Kafka can be comical. Everyone remembers hearing with some surprise that when Kafka read his stories aloud to a group of fellow literati they would laugh out loud at some of the stories that most of us tend to find frightening and even terrifying - Metamorphosis, for ex., or In the Penal Colony - and I imagine it would have been the same from Bernhard. I'm reading his first novel, Frost, from the early 60s but not in English till about 10 years ago: it tells of a medical student (he begins by describing in gruesome detail some of the medical routines and procedures, which he says don't bother him at all) who is asked by his supervisor to go on a special assignment out to a remote town and give a report on the well-being of his long-estranged brother, Strauch, a well-known artist - but he must go undercover. The med student heads off and meets Strauch at a very odd inn in what seems to be the most desolate and foreboding town on the planet: everyone is malnourished or malformed, violent and crude, the landscape is awfully, there are frightful sounds and scents everywhere, and there are huge mounds of snow that nobody seems able to clear. Strauch likes to go for long walks in this snow, and it seems that what Strauch really wants is to be separated from his past and from any or all of the comforts and pleasures of civilized life. What's so funny? You just have to read some of the passages and almost think of them as poems in prose: the passage on p 29 describing the village, or p. 70, to give two possibilities if you get the book. So this dark and dour vision of society could, in other hands, seem a pose - but think of the context. Bernhard was born in 1931; I would think the war years are something he and his generation would want to obliterate from memory, bury under the "frost" that pervades their moral and geographical landscape - but that others - investigators, lawyers (he poses as a law student so as not to blow his cover), artists, writers - cannot leave frozen in time, buried. They - Bernhard - recognize the potential horror of our world, they've seen it and lived through it powerlessly - and write not about beauty but about ugliness and despair, approaching the horrors of their history only through indirection, so that we will not forget. BTW he never mentions the war, or really anything to give the book a direct historical context, at least in first 100 pp or so.