CONCRETE

by Thomas Bernhard ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 29, 1984

Rudolf, 48, is seriously ill (sarcoidosis), financially independent, a would-be musicologist who has never finished much of what he's begun. He lives alone in his dead parents' house in the Austrian countryside, and is visited by his sister, a realtor in Vienna, on whom he blames his lethargy, his eternal block. He both loathes and needs her, as he does his medicines: it's her fault he can't get going with his book on Mendelssohn, Rudolf thinks. Or perhaps it's the fault of Vienna itself, with its ruined culture and vulgarity. . . or maybe the fault of his town of Peiskam. Then, hopelessly quagmired, Rudolf takes it into his mind to travel, to go to Palma in Mallorca, where he's gone before--even though he's been no more successful at getting anything done there. And, after much mental sparring with himself, he ultimately does go to Palma. But, once there, Rudolf is haunted by the memory of an acquaintance he'd made on his last visit: a pitiful young German widow who compelled him to listen to her tale of amazingly black misfortune--money woes, her husband's accidental death from a too-low balcony at their Palma hotel, the problems involved in getting him decently buried. Bernhard (Correction) places this widow's tale--a piece of genuinely piteous horror--in the last few pages of Rudolf's single-paragraph, book-long, churningly indriven whine. By contrast, then, Rudolf's tiresome complaint (with its echoes of similarly paralyzed characters in Beckett, Kafka, and Svevo) is made to seem even more flimsy, self-indulgent, pretentious. Can Bernhard have desired this effect? Perhaps. But the result is a novel that reads like an annoying exercise, with ever less emotional impact than the half-alluring Correction (1979).

Pub Date: May 29, 1984

ISBN: 1400077575

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1984

Categories: FICTION