Concrete (Vintage International)

Any one who has every done any writing will appreciate this book. The author's struggles with THAT first sentence in any creative writing will laugh all the way through especially the first section. Ordering the desk top, shaping the pencils, arranging the chair--all to inspire that first sentence. Loved the book!

I can't say enough about the perfect condition this book was in when it arrived. The read however, is a little more complicated. It's about a man who spends years of his life in isolation in attempts to write his masterpiece, however, ends up writing the subjective story of his victimization by everyone and everything around him, primarily by the maltreatment he receives from his sister who is his only real window to the outside world.

For most of the way, this book is superb. An absolutely riveting and often bitterly funny portrait of what my ancestors would call a "kvetch"---but a kvetch on a cosmic scale. This man, who can't begin (and has never begun) his magnum opus, a study of Mendelssohn, complains about everything---his health, (hilariously) dogs, Vienna, his sister, the state of journalism and music---you name it, he dislikes it and curses his fate because he is forced to endure it. Intensely. Moreover, he's not so happy with himself, either. He says he is a decisive person---but he's not---he procrastinates about going on a trip, and, of course, he never does write that first sentence for his study of Mendelssohn. A wonderful and very funny book......and yet, on the very last few pages, when he is confronted by someone who has genuinely suffered, there is a (possible) goof---suddenly, the plot doesn't make sense, and the story veers into melodrama. What made this a very dark and very funny comedie noir, vanishes, and we are left with a kind of sickly pathos. Perhaps on purpose. Asi es la vida.

it is perfect

Thomas Bernhard's "Concrete" is a concentrated, excessive and disturbing stream-of-consciousness monologue by Rudolf, a reclusive, wealthy Viennese music critic who lives alone in a large country house. Rudolf suffers from sarcoidosis, a disease not described in the narrative, which is characterized by inflammation of the lymph nodes, lungs, liver, eyes, skin, and other tissues. Physically miserable and obsessively fearful of death, he also is a man paralyzed by his misanthropic, conflicted, exhaustingly relentless thoughts. Trapped in his own mind, Rudolf is a literary creation directly descended from Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Beckett. Rudolf has been working for ten years on a biography of Mendelssohn, yet has failed to write even the first line of his work. "I had been planning it for ten years and had repeatedly failed to bring it to fruition, but now had resolved to begin writing it on the twenty-seventh of January at precisely four o'clock in the morning, after the departure of my sister." It is an intention to begin writing that recurs again and again throughout Rudolf's narrative, an intention to begin writing at a specific time in a specific location after the completion of specific preparatory tasks. And in each instance, Rudolf fails to begin, a sign of procrastination bred by obsession or of extreme writer's block or of extreme mental imbalance. When Rudolf's sister leaves the house, he still cannot begin to write. Despite her departure, her aura remains: "Although she had gone, I still felt the presence of my sister in every part of the house. It would be impossible to imagine a person more hostile to anything intellectual than my sister. The very thought of her robs me of my capacity for any intellectual activity, and she has always stifled at birth any intellectual projects I have had . . . There's no defense against a person like my sister, who is at once so strong and so anti-intellectual; she comes and annihilates whatever has taken shape in one's mind as a result of exerting, indeed of over-exerting one's memory for months on end, whatever it is, even the most trifling sketch on the most trifling subject." This theme, Rudolf's hatred for his older, worldly sister, runs throughout his narrative, the sister becoming one among many reasons (or excuses) for Rudolf's intellectual paralysis, his inability to write, even his inability to function in day-to-day life. But it is not merely his sister that Rudolf despises. He also despises Vienna, the city where he once lived (and where his sister continues to live). "Vienna has become a proletarian city through and through, for which no decent person can have anything but scorn and contempt." A complete recluse, his mental world bordering on solipsistic isolation, Rudolf no longer has any interest in social life of any kind. "To think that I once not only loved parties," he reflects, "but actually gave them and was capable of enjoying them!" Now he sees no reason or need for the company of others, for the people Rudolf spent years trying to "put right" but who only regarded him as a "fool" for his efforts. As Rudolf thinks, in a long, discursive interior response to his sister's claim that his desolate, morgue-like house, "is crying out for society": "There comes a time when we actually think about these people, and then suddenly we hate them, and so we get rid of them, or they get rid of us; because we see them so clearly all at once, we have to withdraw from their company or they from ours. For years I believed that I couldn't be alone, that I needed all these people, but in fact I don't: I've got on perfectly well without them." Rudolf is isolated in his own mind, a man who cannot accept the imperfections of others and of the world, but also cannot accept his own imperfections. And it is perhaps this, more than anything else, which explains his inability to get along in the world, his inability even to write the first sentence of his Mendelssohn biography. "Once, twenty-five years ago, I managed to complete something on Webern in Vienna, but as soon as I completed it I burned it, because it hadn't turned out properly." As Rudolf says, near the end of his short, but exhausting, narrative: "I've actually been observing myself for years, if not for decades; my life now consists of self-observation and self-contemplation, which naturally leads to self-condemnation, self-rejection and self-mockery. For years I have lived in this state of self-condemnation, self-abnegation and self-mockery, in which ultimately I always have to take refuge in order to save myself." "Concrete" leaves the reader exhausted from Rudolf's excessive and relentless narrative, giving truth to the remarkable power of Bernhard's literary imagination and narrative voice. It is a stunning literary achievement, perhaps the best work of one of Austria's greatest twentieth century authors.

"But naturally we do need someone, otherwise we inevitably become what I have become: tiresome, unbearable, sick - impossible, in the profoundest sense of the word. I always believed that I could get on with my intellectual work if only I were completely alone, with no one else around. This proved to be mistaken, but it is equally mistaken to say that we actually need someone. We need someone for our work, and we also need no one. Sometimes we need someone, sometimes no one, and sometimes we need someone and no one. In the last few days I have once more become aware of this totally absurd fact: we never know at any time whether we need someone or no one, or whether we need someone and at the same time no one, and because we never know what we really need we are unhappy, and hence unable to start on our intellectual work when we wish and when it seems right. ... On the one hand we overrate other people, on the other we underrate them; and we constantly overrate and underrate ourselves; when we ought to overrate ourselves we underrate ourselves, and in the same way we underrate ourselves when we ought to overrate ourselves. And above all we always overrate whatever we plan to do, for, if the truth were known, every intellectual work, like every other work, is grossly overrated, and there is no intellectual work in this generally overrated world which could not be dispensed with, just as there is no person, and hence no intellect, which cannot be dispensed with in this world: everything could be dispensed with if only we had the strength and the courage." "..., and even Schopenhauer was ruled in the end not by his head, but by his dog. This fact is more depressing than any other. Fundamentally it was not Schopenhauer's head that determined his thought, but Schopenhauer's dog. It was not the head that hated Schopenhauer's world, but Schopenhauer's dog. I don't have to be demented to assert that Schopenhauer had a dog on his shoulders and not a head." "...my life now consists only of self-observation and self-contemplation, which naturally leads to self-condemnation, self-rejection and self-mockery. For years I have lived in this state of self-condemnation, self-abnegation and self-mockery, in which ultimately I always have to take refuge in order to save myself." "It actually makes us ill if we always demand the highest standards, the most extraordinary, when all we find are the lowest, the most superficial, the most ordinary. It doesn't get us anywhere, except in the grave. We see decline where we expect improvement, we see hopelessness where we still have hope; that's out mistake, our misfortune. We always demand everything, when in the nature of things we should demand little, and that depresses us. We want to achieve everything, and we achieve nothing. And naturally we make the highest, the very highest demands of ourselves, completely leaving out of account human nature, which is after all not made to meet the highest demands. The world spirit, as it were, overestimates the human spirit." etc., etc. ...

My first book by Thomas Bernhard. I picked it up after reading about him in a Karl Ove book. I felt bad that I had not heard of him before. Very fascinating, and humorous book with a dark, sad twist at the end.

The book arrived with the pages cut and some taped back together. I don’t know how this is considered “acceptable” as the book description said.

Diary of a pseudo-scholar. Everyone who thinks he is wise should read to avoid the usage of [what he thinks is] logic in his selfcentred purpose.

Concrete by Thomas Bernhard is one of the most curious pieces of work I’ve read. It’s also one of the most compelling. Existentially bleak, and neurotically funny it pulls you in, and once submerged the reader finds himself with no choice other than to be drawn downstream to an ‘estuary’ of a tragic climax, and out into the sea of an ambiguous ending. It’s a novel, but with ‘none of your character and plot malarkey’ as Michael Hofmann, author of my Faber & Faber edition’s twelve-page Afterword and one who immediately endeared me by referring to Bernhard as ‘an Alpine Beckett.’ puts it. There is, actually, a main character called Rudolf, and the narrative – in the form of a single 158pp internal monologue (with neither chapters nor paragraphs) charts his ditherings and deliberations over his intention to write a book on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. If Concrete has a main dramatic question, then this is it, and I have to say that it will be no spoiler to you to tell you right now that he never starts work on the book. But what intervenes is a tragedy so grim that it overwhelms Rudolf and cannot fail to affect the reader, and of this I shall say no more. To unearth the nature of the tragedy and its real effects, you will have to purchase or acquire a copy of this extraordinary book. It’s also the key to the book’s title. Amazingly enough, the novel also has a conventional inciting incident, that is the departure of Rudolph’s domineering – and business wizard of a - sister who has been staying, or according to him taking over his house in Peiskam. This will, he is convinced – together with his further intention to take a holiday in Palma – be the catalyst which will provide the necessary intellectual stimulation for his work to begin. The subject of Rudolph’s sister reoccurs throughout the text like a chorus which comes after a variety of verses ranting about Austrian cities, politics, philosophers, dogs, charities, woodcutters, and an old man in the vicinity who he sometimes visits. It is a rant, but far from being tedious I found it touching, sad, funny and unsettlingly perceptive. As well as the recurring chorus about his sister, there’s another hook which riffs away on the subject of Rudolf’s health. Bernhard was diagnosed with sarcoidosis before his death aged 58 in 1989, evidently wasn’t one for ‘making things up’ in his novels, and the justification for having no pauses for breath in the narrative couldn’t be better put by Hofmann when he says it’s as if Bernard daren’t stop writing for fear of having a coughing fit. I can’t help thinking here of Lawrence Sterne’s references to his own health (TB) in Tristram Shandy, and there is an odd parallel here in that Sterne is also noted for his numerous digressions. But as Hofmann points out, what appear to be digressions on dogs, charities, and woodcutters are really deft pieces of literary weaving. If the whole construction is a song with choruses and refrains then the verses are dance steps moving backwards and forwards. Concrete and Bernhard is not the book and author for the conventionally minded, nor for those who depend upon cliches in humour. I’m an ardent fan of Iris Murdoch’s writing and to my shame, I confess that I came upon Bernhard by googling ‘writers and works similar to Iris Murdoch.’ This is what came up, so all I can say is viva algorithma!

Thomas Bernhard is not the easiest of authors to read but with perseverance the reader will find his book archly amusing. Be prepared for some eccentricities and you will be rewarded handsomely.

I quite like this book- it is not for everyone. It is torturous and suffocating, a first person detour in the mind of a neurotic music writer who basically drives himself crazy trying to write the perfect article.

Difficult to translate. 4**** for the translation.