Concrete

ISBN-13: 9781400077571 / Angielski / Miękka / 2010 / 160 str.

Thomas Bernhard

Opis

Instead of the book he's meant to write, Rudolph, a Viennese musicologist, produces this dark and grotesquely funny account of small woes writ large, of profound horrors detailed and rehearsed to the point of distraction. We learn of Rudolph's sister, whose help he invites, then reviles as malevolent meddling; his 'really marvelous' house, which he hates; the suspicious illness he carefully nurses; his ten-year-long attempt to write the perfect opening sentence; and, finally, his escape to the island of Majorca, which turns out to be the site of someone else's very real horror story.

A brilliant and haunting tale of procrastination, failure, and despair, Concrete is a perfect example of why Thomas Bernhard is remembered as "one of the masters of contemporary European fiction" (George Steiner).

Recenzje

Certain books few assert literary importance instantly, profoundly. This is one of those a book of mysterious dark beauty.
Los Angeles Times

A masterpiece. . . . [Bernhard s] world is so powerfully imagined that it can seem to surround you like little else in literature.
The New Yorker

Something of a tour-de-force.
The Washington Post
 
Where rage of this intensity is directed outward, we often find the sociopath, where inward, the suicide. Where it breaks out laterally, onto the page, we sometimes find a most unsettling artistic vision.
Sven Birkerts, The New Republic

O autorze

Thomas Bernhard was born in Holland in 1931 and grew up in Austria. He studied music at the Akademie Mozarteum in Salzburg. In 1957 he began a second career, as a playwright, poet, and novelist. The winner of the three most distinguished and coveted literary prizes awarded in Germany, he has become one of the most widely translated and admired writers of his generation. He published nine novels, an autobiography, one volume of poetry, four collections of short stories, and six volumes of plays. Thomas Bernhard died in Austria in 1989.