For years I have lived in this state of self-condemnation, self-abnegation and self-mockery, in which ultimately I always have to take refuge in orderFor years I have lived in this state of self-condemnation, self-abnegation and self-mockery, in which ultimately I always have to take refuge in order to save myself.
I find it a bit ironic that I’ve been having such a difficult time beginning this review, a review for a book narrated by an aging man who has watched ten years flick by as he has attempted to write the first sentence for his own book. Thomas Bernhard’s Concrete is a darkly comical, spiraling plunge into the mind and soul of it’s narrator as he gripes and groans about his lot in life. He manages to create blockades for himself everywhere he turns, always perceiving the world around him as threat to him and as stifling his creative genius. In a sublime balance between grumpy and gorgeous, Bernhard exquisitely details a tortured mind as it projects it’s own self-dissatisfactions outward, latching on to every corner of society possible to avert any horrific inward gaze, while constructing a portrait of confined genius and giving voice to the dismay felt by those who hold the arts in high esteem.
I’d always cared extremely little for public opinion because I was obsessed with my own opinion and hence had no time at all for the public’s.
Berhard brings such a richness of voice and character that nearly screams off the page in all the narrator’s self-righteous fury. Rudolph is aging and bitter at everything and everyone around him, viewing anything aside from the purest of intellectual pursuits to be vapid trifles. These trifles, he fears, are the objects that the general public finds the most interest in, and he rages against a society that is progressively becoming oversaturated with philistines masquerading under a guise of artistic merit.
The scene today is dominated by baseness and stupidity, and by the charlatanry which makes common cause with them. My Vienna has been totally ruined by tasteless, money-grubbing politicians and become unrecognizable.
While he often seems like a mind that is being shorn from it’s hinge, it would be wrong to dismiss him as an utter madman (as he suspects all his acquaintances have); Bernhard manages to give birth to an eloquent voice that resides in the ambiguous region where madness and genius overlap, bestowing Rudolph with a cunning insight and a silver tongue of vast literary magnitude. I’ve always been fond of insufferable narrators, the type of people that I accept would probably be unbearable as a friend or to encounter in person, but I can’t help but loving their bitter, volatile personalities on paper. Perhaps that is one of the many gifts of literature; through books like this we come to understand the character and why they present a thorn of a personality and in turn learn tolerance and acceptance of others. Rudolph seemed reminiscent of many of my other favorite insufferable narrators, especially the one found in Hamsun’s Hunger.
Rudolph’s vitriolic rants help him avoid writing the music study he has been intending to write for ten years. These rants are not only mere digressions, but often digressions of digressions to the point where it seems there is little to no forward motion to the novel. However, it is through these circuitous ravings that Bernhard is able to reveal the insight into his narrator piece by piece while still bestowing an infectious desire to press on in the reader. This book is extremely hard to put down. Rudolph gripes about everything around him, from his sister, his house, publishing, society, and spitting acidic condemnations of his current residence in Peiskam as well as his former residence in Vienna.
Only a few people have the strength to turn their backs on Vienna soon enough, before it is too late; they remain stuck to this dangerous and poisonous city until, finally, they become tired and let themselves by crushed to death by it, as by a glistening snake. And how many geniuses have been crushed to death in this city? They simply can’t be counted.
Rudolph finds faults everywhere he casts his gaze, and finds them unbearable and suffocating. Each annoyance in the world builds to stifle his self-professed creative genius, a genius his is unable to reveal to the world due to, what he believes to be, strangling stupidity and sheer blindness towards what is truly brilliant. ‘I can’t expect simple people to take me seriously anymore,’ he writes, detailing his excuses for his self-removal from society. However, no matter how hard he tries to remove himself from anything distressing, he is always able to find a new matter that is such a heavy burden to him that he cannot begin writing. Also, much like Dostoevsky’s narrator from Notes From Underground, he believes he is deathly ill. The world around him is so dissatisfactory and vile that it has planted a terminal illness in him, one that can be used at any moment to forego any progression in his work or life. ‘I don’t know which came first—my illness or my sudden distaste for society.’
Rudolph must inevitable come to terms that it is his jealousy that leads to his spiteful nature, jealousy of his sister’s prosperity, jealousy that society can thrive without him, and jealousy that others can fake their happiness through the world. Not long after he rages against Vienna, Rudolph writes ‘Today I envy my sister only one thing: that she can live in Vienna. That’s what constantly rouses me to anger against Vienna – envy.’ It is easy to hate something that we envy, something we cannot obtain, something that makes us feel inferior. We all do it. It is so easy to hate a popular musician when we feel we have our own musical talents, or to hate an author that becomes a best seller when we appreciate what we feel is better, more worthwhile literature. William H. Gass mentions in an interview how bitter he was towards the literary world at a young age, seeing what he considered mediocre writers making the best sellers while hearing the thump of his rejected manuscripts being returned to his front doorstep. Rudolph cannot begin his great work, so he finds excuses in everything else to sidestep any personal responsibilities. He projects his distaste towards himself onto the world at large, and while it is highly comic, it is truly tragic.
After leaving his home to vacation in peace and in hopes of beginning his book, Rudolph is flooded with memories of a poor woman who faced true hardships of life. It creates an illuminating juxtaposition: Rudolph who fears the outside world is crushing him instead of recognizing his own self-defeating perceptions and actions, and Anna who is trying to make an honest, self-motivating go of it in the world and is constantly thwarted on all sides by outside forces. Initially, Rudolph views her as a muse to make himself feel better, ‘The fact is that we immediately use someone who is still more unfortunate than we are in order to get ourselves back on our feet,’ her cruel fate sends him plummeting into throes of anxiety and fear that it is uncertain if he will ever be able to begin the book he has traveled so far to start work upon.
While Rudolph is a voice for all our inner discontent with what we find around us, he is a cautionary tale, or perhaps even a metaphorical yellow canary, that we must alter our self-defeating behaviors, claim responsibilities for our actions and shortcomings, and take charge of our lives if we ever wish to do anything great. We cannot waste our years and youth away wishing for ideal conditions, we must cut our own path through the dense foliage of reality to capture the treasure of our goals. We cannot blame others for our own failings, and the world would move much more smoothly if we could all accept who we are, learn to love ourselves even for our faults, and not project it outward into the cosmos. Bernhard displays a masterful skill over his prose and through his creation of such a cantankerous, yet charming, narrator. While this book spins itself in circle of self-defeat, it is one that will have you flipping pages, fully engrossed, entertained and desiring to know what venomous line Rudolph will spit next. This is the sort of book that really charms me, and reading it with such an enlightened and intelligent goodreads friend such as Garima (please read her incredible review found here) made this all the more of an incredible book. Bitter and beautiful, Bernhard is a master that should find his way into your bookshelf and heart. 5/5
‘There ought to be only happy people—all the necessary conditions are present—but there are only unhappy people.’
‘The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particul‘The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.’ *EDIT 12/20/21* Chess, the ‘Royal Game’, ‘regally eschews the tyranny of chance and awards its palms of victory only to the intellect, or rather to a certain type of intellectual gift.’ Stefan Zweig plunges the reader into this cold, calculating world through a simple premise of a chess match between the reigning world champion and a mysterious doctor who reveals an incredible knowledge of the game’s strategy despite his claims that he hasn’t touched a chessboard for over twenty years. In a mere 80 pages, Zweig’s Chess Story, reaches an emotional and psychological depth that leaves the reader shivering with horror through a haunting allegory of Nazi Germany where human lives are mere wooden pieces to be strategically moved and sacrificed by an indifferent hand.
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Zweig’s grasp on human nature is chillingly accurate, and the few characters presented come alive through such simple descriptions of their psychology, made easily accessible through having a psychologist serve as the narrator. Czentovic, the reigning world chess champion, quickly develops into a lifelike monomaniac through the brief summary of his life. This apathetic, uneducated youth miraculously develops a keen intellect for chess, being described as ‘Balaam’s ass’ when his talents are revealed, and quickly defeats chess masters across the world which ‘transformed his original lack of self-confidence into a cold pride that for the most part he did not trouble to hide.’ Zweig presents us with a highly unlikeable adversary, a wealthy, self-important man who looks upon all those around him as if they ‘were lifeless wooden pieces’ despite his vulgar manners and ‘boundless ignorance’ towards anything intellectual aside from chess (there is a wonderful aside where the narrators fried remarks ‘isn’t it damn easy to think you’re a great man if you aren’t troubled by the slightest notion that Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante, or Napoleon even existed?’). We can all put a face to this character, we’ve all encountered someone vain and offensive who, despite our disdain, will always be able to sneer down upon us because we are no match to the one talent they hold most dear. While aboard a steamship, the passengers arrange a chess match with the great Czentovic, him versus all others, in which he crushed them in the first game without hiding his arrogance of being the superior.
Enter our hero, Dr. B, an immediately likeable, shy and nervous man with an immense intellect that bestows a method for forcing a draw with the great chess master. For the majority of the novella, the reader must face the horrors of Dr. B’s pas to understand where his talents grew, somehow blossoming in the cracks of soul-crushing interment in the Gestapo headquarters. Often relaying the story in the second-person, the use of ‘you’ brings the reader into maddening solitude of Dr. B, enduring his pain along with him, and even the most calloused of readers must come away with a residue of unbearable horrors and madness forever coating their consciousness. Zweig, having fled his home in Austria in fear of the Nazis, forces the reader to witness and endure a fate worse than the sickening dehumanization and deathly labor of a concentration camp, but to share in his solitude, emphasized in frightening proportions by Dr. B’s torment that is ‘a force more sophisticated than crude beating of physical torture: the most exquisite isolation imaginable’.
The allegory presented in the novella is sickening enough to rot any heart. We have Germany ruled by an inhumane, obdurate hand, cold and calculating in each move it makes, and we have the artistic mind going mad in solitude. Creativity and art is trampled by the sinister, calculating powers that march forward seeking victory, unshaken by the countless lives that must be sacrificed to achieve it. Chess, however, is a game of two sides, black and white, and Zweig pushes his allegory even further to represent this duality. As in the ‘blind’ games played in Dr. B’s head, Germany undergoes schizophrenia of sorts, declaring war on itself by seeking to exterminate those within, be it for their religious or political views. While chess becomes a solace to Dr. B, it can also be observed as a metaphor of National Socialism – what had roots as something empowering, something to cling to in order to rise up from the depth of depression (ie. his solitude or the state of Germany post-WWI), can become something fierce, violent and destructive as history has revealed and as is seen in the mania that grips our hero in this tale. [image] Zweig displays a mastery over his writing much as his characters do over chess. While the subject matter is sure to weigh heavy on the mind¹, the writing comes across effortlessly and pleasingly, almost as if it were intended to purvey an uplifting, humorous tale. I had a laugh as Zweig probed my own literary pretentions, casting Czentovic’s vain disinterest and quick removal from the vicinity of a chess match between two ‘third-rate’ players as being ‘as naturally as any of us might toss aside a bad detective novel in a bookstore without even opening it, he walked away from our table and out of the smoking room.’ The language flows and manages to embrace the reader through its simplicity, although it drags along a heavy burden with it. There was one aspect of the narrative that specifically caught my attention, and as I am still just a blind child testing the waters of literature, I would like to present to those of you whom I look up to this query of mine. Zweig often has his narrator connect the dots for the reader, such as when Czentovic states that he allowed the draw to happen, saying ‘I deliberately gave him a chance’, a few lines later the narrator asserts that ‘as we all knew, Czentovic had certainly not magnanimously given our unknown benefactor a chance, and this remark was nothing more than a simple-minded excuse for his own failure.’
In my initial read of the book I had written that I found some elements to seem overly explanatory, though as Traveller so eloquently pointed out (see comments below), Zweig uses a nested-narrative style and the author and characters point of views are separate, with many of the dot-connecting moments being rational details the narrator would add. Something I enjoy about this website is the ability to connect and discuss books with people and gain a new perspective. Another thing I enjoy is being able to revisit my own thoughts and see how they have changed/developed/etc over the years. Thanks to everyone who has ever engaged on book chat here, it makes for a really fulfilling experience.
Chess Story is a tiny powerhouse of depth. The conclusion had me pacing back and forth in the snow smoking a cigarette to calm the ever-increasing beating of my heart. It is horrific, it is harrowing, it is pure brilliance floating from the page. Despite it’s small size, this is not a novella to be taken lightly, as it will leave a dark cloud over your thoughts once the final page has found its way into your heart. Zweig is a master of the human psychology, and a master and condensing such potent messages into a tiny novella. The clash between an uncaring, calculating intellect and the manic but human mind of a hero will grip you until the end, which comes both mercifully soon (this book is easily read in an hour), yet far too soon. The allegory is ripe and shakes you to the core. 4.5/5
¹ The fact that Zweig eliminated his own map shortly after completion of Chess Story will come as no surprise, for the darkness this story wallows in is something that an optimistic mind wouldn’t dare approach. As Nietzsche said: ‘ if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you’. When I was at the edge of my teenage years, a former English teacher and close friend of mine warned me of wallowing in the darkness of literature and philosophy, telling me ‘the longer you flirt with darkness, the more it seeps into your soul’, which, while being a spin on the Nietzsche quote, has never left the back of my mind. From that I learned to climb out from the depths and appreciate things that satisfy a lighter side of myself, the white side of the chessboard, without spending all my time feeding the darker side. Without such guidance I wouldn't be here to write this today.
‘But is it not already an insult to call chess anything so narrow as a game? Is it not also a science, an art, a unique yoking of opposites, ancient and yet eternally new, mechanically constituted and yet an activity of the imagination alone, limited to a fixed geometric area but unlimited in its permutations, constantly evolving and yet sterile, a cogitation producing nothing, a mathematics calculating nothing, an art without an artwork, an architecture without substance, the only game that belongs to all peoples and all eras, while no one knows what god put it on earth to deaden boredom, sharpen the mind, and fortify the spirit? Where does it begin, where does it end?’...more
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