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    Concrete (Beton) : Chapman University Digital Commons

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    This summary provides high-level information about the document in 3 sentences: This document discusses the novel Concrete by Austrian author Thomas Bernhard. It summarizes the plot, which follows a middle-aged man obsessed with writing the "penultimately perfect" work on Mendelssohn who is unable to start the book. The man meets a woman who tells a tragic story that leads him to associate the idea of concrete with death. The document evaluates Bernhard's style of writing as superb and his vision of the human condition as persuasive.

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    Concrete (Beton) : Chapman University Digital Commons

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    xelamixam
    56 views2 pages
    This summary provides high-level information about the document in 3 sentences: This document discusses the novel Concrete by Austrian author Thomas Bernhard. It summarizes the plot, which follows a middle-aged man obsessed with writing the "penultimately perfect" work on Mendelssohn who is unable to start the book. The man meets a woman who tells a tragic story that leads him to associate the idea of concrete with death. The document evaluates Bernhard's style of writing as superb and his vision of the human condition as persuasive.

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    Literature

    Original Title

    Concrete [Beton]

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    This summary provides high-level information about the document in 3 sentences: This document discusses the novel Concrete by Austrian author Thomas Bernhard. It summarizes the plot, which follows a middle-aged man obsessed with writing the "penultimately perfect" work on Mendelssohn who is unable to start the book. The man meets a woman who tells a tragic story that leads him to associate the idea of concrete with death. The document evaluates Bernhard's style of writing as superb and his vision of the human condition as persuasive.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    56 views2 pages

    Concrete (Beton) : Chapman University Digital Commons

    Uploaded by

    xelamixam
    This summary provides high-level information about the document in 3 sentences: This document discusses the novel Concrete by Austrian author Thomas Bernhard. It summarizes the plot, which follows a middle-aged man obsessed with writing the "penultimately perfect" work on Mendelssohn who is unable to start the book. The man meets a woman who tells a tragic story that leads him to associate the idea of concrete with death. The document evaluates Bernhard's style of writing as superb and his vision of the human condition as persuasive.

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    Chapman University

    Chapman University Digital Commons


    English Faculty Books and Book Chapters

    English

    1997

    Concrete [Beton]
    Mark Axelrod
    Chapman University, axelrod@chapman.edu

    Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/english_books


    Part of the Fiction Commons, and the German Literature Commons
    Recommended Citation
    Axelrod, Mark. "Concrete [Beton]." Babel Guide to German Fiction in English Translation. Eds. Ray Keenoy, Mike Mitchell, and
    Maren Meinhardt. London: Boulevard Books, 1997. 24-25. Web.

    This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the English at Chapman University Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in
    English Faculty Books and Book Chapters by an authorized administrator of Chapman University Digital Commons. For more information, please
    contact laughtin@chapman.edu.

    in a haircut or a shave.
    said he let his red hair grow so long out
    of
    but I know better, it was out of
    else.Ah
    well never mind, mustn't
    ill of the dead, Balabusne
    had a good
    sele~tion,
    pipes, cigarette cases with little flowers, gold-tipped cigarettes for the rich, always tried to persuade us to take a more expensive
    brand but we stuck with 'Excelsior'.And the stand with the little gas flame and
    the cigar cutter on the counter, the brass stand he was always polis~ing :"h.en
    one went into his shop, it's that brass stand one always remembers 1n thmkmg
    back to the old days, though we only bought tobacco from him once a week
    at most and never used the stand: p91-2

    Concrete [Beton]
    Thomas Bernhard's work has been labelled 'gloomy' or 'bilious'
    or 'pessimistic' and not out of keeping with a .~adition. of w~at
    the Germans call Weltschmerz or 'world despa1r , a nonon With
    roots in Goethe's Sorrows ofYoung 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-fiveyear old independent scholar, steeped in Austrian angst, .suffers
    dreadfully from his mid-life crisis and insists on product.ng the
    'penultimately perfect' work on Mendelssohn. What we dtscover
    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 num.erous
    times, he is constantly 'digressing' on things that annoy ~1m """"-:
    most of which concern the social manners of the Austnans ___,
    and also on whether or not to take a trip to Spain to avoid
    chill of an Austrian winter. In a manner not unlike Thomas
    in Death in Venice, Bernhard finally takes his protagonist to
    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
    husband, whom she convinced to quit his job as a civil .
    and begin an independent business, was found dead, lymg
    the concrete sidewalk of their hotel the apparent victim of
    a suicide or an accident. At that point, concrete itself bec::orne~u

    kind
    and is
    referred to in relation to death.
    The
    xnuses about this woman and whatever became
    of her and the climax of the novel reveals that in her
    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
    as a reminiscence, and in one long paragraph which
    lends a kind of raving, 'mad' quality to the work, something which
    for
    Bernhard often alludes to. Certainly, Bernhard is not
    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. M R A
    '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
    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

    BERNHARD
    Thomas

    [Holzfallen]
    Cutting
    Bernhard is magnificently sour and in a self-confessedly 'artistic'
    milieu ofVienna, a city that grew to be far too big for its boots,
    provincialism piles upon pretension and Bernhard etches it all
    set
    down with the acid of his gaze. In this extraordinary
    almost
    over two succeeding events; a funeral and a dinnerparty, he utterly takes apart a little world of idlers who exist on
    the fringes of any professional achievement but who nevertheless
    espouse enormous artistic and social snobbery. The curious and
    fascinating thing about Bernhard's work is how he puts over his
    profoundly bilious viewpoint with such an enjoyable humour and
    narrative drive - he's been called 'both repellent and addictive'
    for this accomplishment.
    '
    Unfortunately though the dinner party at the salon of the
    shiftless Auersbergers - who live entirely off the proceeds of
    inherited money - is also an accurate microcosm for the larger
    world and these 'perfidious social masturbators' with their false
    lives and false goals seem quite a widely spread type anywhere
    money, laziness and snobbery coexist. Amongst the guests at
    BABEL GUIDE TO

    !Seeman

    FICTION IN TRANSLATION

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