Concrete

Thomas Bernhard wrote the novel “Beton” in 1982 in one sitting—like the narrator, he begins his work on the manuscript in winter in Austria and completes it in spring in Palma de Mallorca. By scattering transparent autobiographical hints throughout the text, laying bare some fears (a primal fear of choking, freezing, fear of a blank page) and muffling others (poverty, closeness), he turned the confession of the hero suffering from sarcoidosis into a truly Baroque farce, in which death and melancholy draw close together in the final dance. You can read this nonstop narcissistic tirade as a confession on the analyst’s couch, as a typically Austrian logical-philosophical monodrama, as a family novel of neurotics, or as a bourgeois story of the destruction of one family—but the main theme remains music.

A book about the impossibility of writing a book about the composer Mendelssohn—Bernhard’s musical offering to modernism, placing him in the same row as masters of the “ineffable” such as Beckett, Pessoa, Celan, and Bachmann.