Concrete     by Thomas Bernhard, Translated by D Mclintock Original title: Beton Original language: German Published by Knopf Alfred A Pub. Date: 1984 Format: Hardcover, 154 pages ISBN: 0394537815 Edition: 1st USA Edition List Price: $12.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £8.23 Published by University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: 1990 Format: Paperback, 160 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.47 x 7.89 x 5.22 ISBN: 0226043983 Edition: REPRINT List Price: $14.00, £8.90 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £8.90 Buy online from Amazon.com for $11.20 Published by Quartet Pub. Date: 1989 Format: Paperback, 154 pages List Price: £5.95 Not available for ordering Published by Dent Pub. Date: 1984 Format: Hardcover, 154 pages Not available for ordering

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Thomas Bernhard’s work has been labelled ‘gloomy’ or ‘bilious’ or ‘pessimistic’ and not out of keeping with a tradition of what the Germans call Weltschmerz or ‘world despair’, a notion with roots in Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. But this denies the value of Bernhard’s work because he is also preoccupied with the notion of perfection and his characters not only exhaust themselves with the relative absurdity of the human condition, but also obsess about perfecting something which they perceive is dear to them. This tack is found in much, if not all of Bernhard’s work, and Concrete is no exception.

In Concrete the protagonist, a wealthy yet sickly forty-five-year old independent scholar, steeped in Austrian angst, suffers dreadfully from his mid-life crisis and insists on producing the ‘penultimately perfect’ work on Mendelssohn. What we discover is his total inability to ever begin this book on Mendelssohn let alone complete it. While he is attempting to discover just how to begin the work, which he has begun and abandoned numerous times, he is constantly ‘digressing’ on things that annoy him — most of which concern the social manners of the Austrians — and also on whether or not to take a trip to Spain to avoid the chill of an Austrian winter. In a manner not unlike Thomas Mann in Death in Venice, Bernhard finally takes his protagonist to Palma, a place he has visited before, at which point he meets a woman who tells him the most tragic story about her life and how her husband, whom she convinced to quit his job as a civil engineer and begin an independent business, was found dead, lying on the concrete sidewalk of their hotel the apparent victim of either a suicide or an accident. At that point, concrete itself becomes a kind of character and is constantly referred to in relation to death. The protagonist muses about this woman and whatever became of her and the climax of the novel reveals that in her despair and guilt over her husband’s death, she committed suicide and was buried, in concrete, along with her husband in the Palma cemetery.

This book, like many of Bernhard’s novels, is written in the first person, as a reminiscence, and in one long paragraph which lends a kind of raving, ‘mad’ quality to the work, something which Bernhard often alludes to. Certainly, Bernhard is not reading for the ‘faint of heart or spirit’ as his work can be both a diatribe and didactic, but the writing is superb and his vision of the human condition is exceedingly persuasive.

‘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 the 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 his world: everything could be dispensed with if only we had the strength and the courage’. p28