Concrete. Bernhard T.

Roman "Concrete" was written by Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) in 1982 in one breath: like the narrator, the author begins work on the manuscript in the winter in Austria and ends in the spring in Palma de Majorca. Having scattered transparent autobiographical hints in the text, exposing only fears (animal fear of suffocating, freezing, fear of clean leaf) and extinguishing others (poverty, proximity), he turned the confession of the hero’s sarcoidosis into a truly baroque farce, in which death and melancholy come closer to the latter dance. You can read this non-stop narcissistic speech as recognition on the couch psychoanalyst, as a typically Austrian logical-philosophical monodram, a family novel of neurotics or the bourgeois history of the death of one family, the main topic is still music.

A book about the impossibility of writing a book about the composer Mendelsson is a musical offer of Bernhard to modernism, putting him on a par with the masters of “inexpressible” Becket, Pessoa, Celan, Bakhman.