Concrete

Description

Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) has been hailed by Gabriel Josipovici as 'Austria's finest postwar writer' and by George Steiner as 'one of the masters of contemporary European fiction.' Faber Finds is proud to reissue a selection of four of Bernhard's finest novels. Concrete (1982) is a brilliant and haunting tale of procrastination, failure, and despair: the story of Rudolph, a Viennese musicologist, who neglects the work he is meant to be producing in favour of this dark and grotesquely funny account of small woes writ large, of profound horrors detailed and rehearsed to the point of distraction: from a meddling sister and a house that he hates, to an 'illness' he carefully nurses, his own very real writer's block, and an 'escape' to Majorca which brings him no release from himself. 'Masterful... A book of mysterious dark beauty.' John Rechy, Los Angeles Times A masterpiece.' New Yorker

Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) won many of the most prestigious literary prizes in Europe, including the Austrian State Prize, the Breman and Bruchner Prizes and Le Pix Seguier. Among his novels are The Loser, Concrete, and Extinction, all of which are available in Faber Finds.