Concrete (novel)

Concrete is a short story by Thomas Bernhard from 1982.

content

Rudolf, the narrator suffering from Boeck's disease , lives secluded in his house in Peiskam, a district of Ohlsdorf (Upper Austria) , where Thomas Bernhard owned a square farm . For ten years, Rudolf has been preparing a scientific paper on his favorite composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy , collecting vast amounts of material, but fails at the very beginning. At first he feels hindered by the presence of his sister, but the work does not succeed even after her departure. He decides to go to Palma , where he remembers “the young Härdtl”, a young woman he met on his last visit to Mallorca. Her husband died in a tragic accident. When Rudolf now visits the cemetery where the man is buried in a concrete box, he also reads the name of the woman who committed suicide.

shape

The narrative is a breathless monologue without paragraphs, the author of which is determined in the first and last sentence by the inset "writes Rudolf".

expenditure

• Thomas Bernhard: Concrete. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 1982. ISBN 978-3-518-37988-2
• Thomas Bernhard: Concrete. A self-laughter. Abridged version, DHV - Der Hörverlag 2006. ISBN 978-3-89940-776-1

Audio production

In a joint production between Deutschlandfunk and Österreichischer Rundfunk , a radio play version of the novel was created in 2005 under the direction of Ulrich Gerhardt and with speaker Peter Simonischek .