Beton

So as not to be alone Otto read a book that had been given to him by someone he lived with for two months in a foreign city, where Otto was now. The book was called Beton, and it was about a lonely old man who cannot bring himself to write the first sentence of a book he has been working on for years about Mendelsohn-Bartholdy. The man is a misanthrope and suffers from loneliness. The loneliness he suffers from is not the adolescent kind that is actually a longing for the company of others. It is an illness. The man suddenly dreams of traveling, the one thing he has real passion for, besides Mendelsohn-Bartholdy, he believes, but he is too ill, he says. Otto was surprised, with both pleasure and fear, at how similar he was to the lonely, ill misanthrope, and he felt less alone although he was not any less alone. Otto didn't understand why the book was called Beton, which in German means "concrete," but any book called Concrete Otto would have at least picked up at a bookstore to look through.