Concrete

The novel "Concrete" was written by Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) in 1982 in one breath: like the narrator, the author begins working on the manuscript in winter in Austria and completes it in spring in Palma de Mallorca. Scattering transparent autobiographical hints throughout the text, showcasing some fears (the primal fear of suffocating, freezing, the fear of a blank page) and obscuring others (poverty, intimacy), he transforms the confession of a hero suffering from sarcoidosis into a truly baroque farce, where death and melancholy converge in the final dance. This relentless narcissistic speech can be read as confessions on a psychoanalyst's couch, as a typically Austrian logical-philosophical monodrama, a family novel of neurotics, or a bourgeois tale of the downfall of one family; however, the main theme remains music. The book about the impossibility of writing a book about the composer Mendelssohn is Bernhard's musical offering to modernism, placing him alongside the masters of the "inexpressible" Beckett, Pessoa, Celan, Bachmann.