Szplug's Reviews > Concrete

It is always a pleasant experience to be able to immediately recognize one's surroundings when you enter into a literary work by an author you are familiar with. In Concrete this was provided by the opening announcement of the narrator, Rudolf, that [a] he was suffering considerably from the effects of an illness, one for which he thankfully was in possession of the requisite pharmaceuticals required to ameliorate the condition; [b] a family member of a decidedly malicious bent who seemed to function as the bane of his existence had recently departed his premises, a fact which lead to [c] the glorious opportunity to finally take the vital-but-long-delayed first step of actually putting to paper the first sentence of the important and intellectual magnum opus on a somewhat obscure subject - (Felix) Mendelssohn Bartholdy - that has been gestating in various stages of completion within the tortured confines of Rudolf's mind for a decade. I contentedly settled myself into this spartan-but-comfortable setting and leaned back to let the Bernhardian torrent stream forth in manic energy the single paragraph of solipsistic and obsessive railing against a world singularly configured to put the narrator through trials of an enduring severity that would make those of Job look like elementary school pranks by comparison that I knew would be coming. And I'll tell you, folks, Tommy B. delivered the goods like he always does. That's how he rolls.

It's not like I give Bernhard's books five-stars in the same manner that I do, say, gorgeous character pieces like Joseph Roth's Austro-Hungarian heavyweight. Rather, I consider him the best at what he does - the pulverizing digressions that follow one upon the other from the maze-form mind of a narrator who delicately treads that fogbound border between neurosis and madness, delivering the goods in a mixture of razor-blade rage and strangled despair that is at once hilarious, compelling and troubling. This is a drive along narrative streets hemmed in by tall, dark buildings where the vehicle will suddenly and sharply veer right and left down previously unseen lanes, entering new territory and discovering new neighborhoods that all share the same lack of healthy sunlight and expose the rather disturbing denizens and decrepitude that line the way: and at the end of the journey, you realize that you have somehow wound up right back where you started. This is the dialectic as plot point, where sisters are loved and then hated, harmful and helpful, dogs are cherished and now despised, narrators are global travelers and now housebound, neighbors are shunned before visited, and so on. This constant progress by negation is always upheld by the narrator's - in this case Rudolf's - inability to take the prime obsession of their life - in this case a musicologist study of the composer Mendelssohn Bartholdy - from the mental labyrinth where it has long been trapped and release it onto the page; the inability to take the perfect cerebral idea and allow it to become imperfect by being actualized in the world. It's a forceful tour through the exquisite intellectual and physical - because the body always let's down the mind, just as the latter always disappoints or betrays the former - pain of a self-obsessed loner who seemingly lives only to suffer, and can look forward only to a premature death by illness or suicide.

Concrete, being at the midpoint of Bernhard's novelistic output, shows Rudolf as being slightly more aware of the complex web of paranoia, compulsions, and half-truths or misapprehensions that he has spun to cocoon himself off from a hostile and cruel world - and the haunting final pages, wherein Rudolf, always eager to take on new troubles to torment himself with and impede his ever beginning his grand study, recounts the sad tale of a young German woman who possessed far less natural advantages in life than were given to the narrator, close the book with a slightly different slant than was to be expected. This is Bernhard really excelling at what he does, and with each book doing so in a way I find to be more troubling, in that I increasingly come to recognize myself in so many of those despairing and tortured plaints emitted in endless succession by his literary voices. Is this a common feature amongst those who love Bernhard? That he augments their own dissatisfactions and misgivings and obsessions and mental agonies in a manner that proves cathartic while it entertains and amazes? At one point early in the book, Rudolf admits that his sister might be right when she says that his work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy is just a pretence to justify my absurd way of life. It makes me wonder how many pretences I have created.