Hux's Reviews > Concrete

Well, I tried.

After having read The Loser and being less than impressed, I chose to wait before going back into the world of Thomas Berhard. Unfortunately, I essentially had the same experience again, his bland prose presented as a wall of text representing the mundane rambling thoughts of a man ranting about the mediocre trivialities of life. The interesting thing about Bernhard is that he has a style which suggests stream-of-consciousness but never actually is. His prose is very prosaic, possessing no meaningful flourishes, no Proustian beauty, not even the staggered scattergun stream of thoughts I tend to dislike and which one associates with this kind of writing; but instead he produces a very standard, almost perfunctory, level of writing and grammar. It's somewhat bewildering that he has such an impressive reputation when the writing is, for all intents and purposes, no more creative than what you'd expect from an accountant who works at Dixons. It isn't challenging, it isn't difficult, it's just very basic. 

PAGE 29 - "I believed fervently that I needed my sister in order to be able to start my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. And then, when she was there, I knew that I didn't need her, that I could start work only if she wasn't there. But now she's gone and I'm really unable to start. At first it was because she was there, and now it's because she isn't."

PAGE 50 - "We must commit ourselves one hundred per cent to everything we do, my father always said. He said it to everybody - to my mother, to my sisters, to me. If we don't commit ourselves one hundred per cent we fail even before we've begun. But what is one hundred per cent in this case? Haven't I prepared for this work one hundred per cent?  

PAGE 60 - "How long it is since I last took these cases out of the chest! I said to myself. Far too long. In fact the cases were dusty, even though they had been in the chest ever since my last trip, that is my last trip to Palma."

PAGE 124 "At two o' clock in the afternoon, when the car came to collect me, it was still eleven degrees below zero in Peiskam, but on my arrival in Palma, where I am writing these notes, the thermometer showed eighteen degrees above."

Does any of the above strike you as difficult? Not really. And yet Bernhard has this reputation as a writer above the commonplace herd, a writer of difficult prose and challenging works. But why? It doesn't make sense. Well, I've come to the conclusion that it's for the same reason that Jon Fosse also gets endlessly praised. Because they both engage in what I like to call "Manic Monologue." It essentially involves being endlessly repetitive until you feel dizzy with swirling madness. While Fosse will literally just repeat sentences OVER AND OVER again to manufacture this dire sense of being inside a man's anxious mind, Berhard uses a slightly different yet equally irksome approach. Bernhard will write standard, uninteresting (non-repetitive) prose, but will return to the same handful of themes again and again. So in this book, for example, the narrator, Rudolf, talks about his sister, then a few pages later talks about the book he's working on about Bartholdy, then a few pages later talks about going to Palma, then a few pages later talks about his sister again, then a few pages later talks about Bartholdy again, and so on, and so forth. It's slightly less deranging than Fosse but it's ultimately the same technique -- just cover the same ground relentlessly ad nauseam until you're so befuddled and mesmerised that you completely forget that what you're reading is actually... not very interesting.

Apparently, this is great literature to many of you. To me, it's time wasted. Aside from the fact that I don't believe this is actually how people think (even when manic) -- the lack of personal context or abstract thinking, the lack of visuals or incoherent notions incapable of being turned into expressions of thought -- there is also the fact that it's just not very fun to read. Where is my reward for enduring this false, slightly self-congratulatory style? 

I once heard someone say that Berhard doesn't have chapters because life doesn't have chapters. To which I would respond, it's a book, dear, not life.

So yeah, this isn't for me.