Concrete (Beton)

Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) wrote the novel 'Concrete' in 1982, in a single breath: like the narrator, he begins work on the manuscript in winter in Austria and completes it in spring in Palma de Mallorca. Scattering transparent autobiographical allusions throughout the text, exposing some fears (the primal fear of suffocation, freezing, the fear of a blank page) and obscuring others (poverty, intimacy), he transformed the confession of a hero suffering from sarcoidosis into a truly baroque farce, in which death and melancholy converge in a final dance. This relentless, narcissistic speech can be read as a confession on a psychoanalyst's couch, as a typically Austrian logical-philosophical monodrama, a family romance of neurotics, or a bourgeois story of the death of a family—music remains the primary theme. A book about the impossibility of writing a book about the composer Mendelssohn is Bernhard's musical offering to modernism, placing him on a par with the masters of the 'inexpressible' - Beckett, Pessoa, Celan, Bachmann.