“Frost” (Alfred A. Knopf, 342 pages, $25.95), Thomas Bernhard’s first novel, was published in German in 1962, when he was 31. Bernhard, an Austrian, died in 1989. His debut, translated into English for the first time, resembles an old man’s novel. Bleak and confident, it reads like a suicide note. It is strange and exhilarating to think that Bernhard went on after this to write nine novels, several plays, stories, and poetry.

The narrator of “Frost” begins this intellectual novel with a bracing dose of physicality:

A medical assistantship consists of more than spectating at complicated bowel operations, cutting open stomach linings, bracketing off lungs, and sawing off feet; and it doesn’t just consist of thumbing closed the eyes of the dead, and hauling babies out into the world either … An assistantship isn’t just an academy of scissors and thread, of tying off and pulling through.

In this aggressively realistic opening, Bernhard nods at one kind of novel, the kind that, figuratively, consists of “tying off and pulling through,”guiding the reader through a well-plotted and carefully resolved narrative. Bernhard shows that he has comprehended the vivid pertinence of stories about palpable suffering.But his own “assistantship,” or apprenticeship, has consisted of something more: Kafka, and fellow Austrian Hermann Broch, constitute for Mr. Bernhard a tradition of writing about inner experience.

The protagonist of “Frost,” the surgeon in training, has received an odd assignment from his mentor. He is sent to observe his mentor’s estranged brother, the painter Strauch, who is living in unproductive isolation in the miserable mountain village of Weng.

“Weng is the most dismal place I have ever seen,”he notes in his first day’s journal.Bernhard gives his narrator a robust, clinical voice that seldom addresses the most obvious questions in the plot: Why is his assignment tolerable? What will it mean for his career? These things do not matter; the narrator is a conduit through which the painter Strauch speaks.

On their first meeting, Strauch volunteers a relatively rosy summary of the isolated life he has been leading: “If you walk the way I’m pointing with my stick, you’ll come to a valley where you can walk back and forth for hours, without the least anxiety,” he says.

By the next day, however, he is displaying quite a bit of anxiety. The narrator, taking notes in his journal, paraphrases and sometimes quotes Strauch: “He referred to his condition as ‘expeditions into the jungle of solitude. It’s like having to make my way through millennia, just because a couple of moments are after me with big sticks,’ he said.”

“Frost” can almost be read as a book of aphorisms. The artificial plot makes an unconvincing but also inoffensive device for delivering them.Meanwhile, the narrator’s gradual corruption is almost meaningless, as we know little of what he was before he met Strauch. Bernhard’s later novels would develop richer, more compelling relationships between the analogous narrator and subject. What is notable about “Frost” is the early toughness of Bernhard’s pessimism.

Strauch’s speeches belong to a fully adult despair; his voice is seldom self-indulgent or bitter. Sometimes he hits a universal note that would sound noir, were it not so unironic:

“One day you get home, and you know that from now on you have to pay for everything, and from that moment on you’re old and dead. One day, everything is finished, though life itself might go on for a while.You’re dead, and beauty and whatever happiness is and wealth, everything has withdrawn from you, forever.”

Though Strauch’s case transcends the “complicated bowel operations” of the narrator’s more palpable experience, his suffering does originate in experience. He is able to speak about “the unthinkable raw material of [his] episodes,” whatever that may be.

The narrator, on the other hand, has only Strauch’s speeches to feed on, and so his own thinking takes on a highflown, cracked manner. He reports to Strauch’s brother:

It seems to me your brother is an instance of something it occurs to me to call a precipitous fantasy. My thinking immediately arrows through such a notion toward its aim.The question is, how possible is it to advance into the incommensurateness of your brother….And this assignment has not yet entered the outer courts of reality. In view of which, and lastly, whatever I may have said in the past, I would urge you not to expect overly regular bulletins from Weng.

Though Bernhard surely enjoys writing this voice, he serves it up as an example of weakness, compared to the authority of Strauch. The comparison says something impressive about Bernhard’s early ambitions as an experimental writer. He wanted to be stay close to the tough, complicated ground of mental experience. The chief drama of “Frost,” reading it after Bernhard’s career, is the story of a writer finding a way to present his difficult ideas in a meaningful narrative form.