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Gathering Evidence

Written with a dark pain and drama that recalls the novels of Dickens, Gathering Evidence is a powerful and compelling memoir of youth by one of the twentieth century's most gifted writers.

A writer of great originality and fascination

Breathless, relentlessly compulsive... A remarkable literary contribution

Thomas Bernhard was born in Holland in 1931 but grew up in Austria.  His interest in music and theatre led him to study at the Akademie Mozarteum in Salzburg.  He wrote a quantity of poetry, several novels, short stories and plays and three volumes of autobiography.  He died in 1989.

Born in 1931, the illegitimate child of an abandoned mother, Thomas Bernhard was brought up by an eccentric grandmother and adored grandfather.  Tormented as a young student in a right-wing, catholic Austria, Bernhard ran away from home aged fifteen.  At eighteen he contracted pneumonia.  Placed in a hospital ward for the old and terminally ill, he observed with unflinching acuity protracted suffering and death.  From the age of 21, everything he wrote was shaped by the urgency of a dying man's testament - his witness, the quintessence of his life and knowledge - and where this account of his life ends, his art begins.

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'Thomas Bernhard is one of the masters of contemporary European fiction. After Kafka's and Canetti's, his sensibility is one of the most acute, the most capable of exemplary images and gestures, in modern literature.' George Steiner, Times Literary Supplement

Astonishingly original, a composition of strange new beauty

If against its own vision Correction offers us only a Teutonic injunction to take courage, we must do so from Bernhard's own example, from his determination to look more steadily than any who have come before into the perishing of the soul

Thomas Bernhard is one of the masters of contemporary European fiction. After Kafka's and Canetti's, his sensibility is one of the most acute, the most capable of exemplary images and gestures, in modern literature

Thomas Bernhard was born in Holland in 1931 but grew up in Austria.  His interest in music and theatre led him to study at the Akademie Mozarteum in Salzburg.  He has written a quantity of poetry, several novels, short stories and plays and three volumes of autobiography.  He died in 1989.

Roithamer, a character based on Wittgenstein, has committed suicide having been driven to madness by his own frightening powers of pure thought. We witness the gradual breakdown of a genius ceaselessly compelled to correct and refine his perceptions until the only logical conclusion is the negation of his own soul.

Thomas Bernhard

A Comedy

'I hate walking, he says, it seems so pointless to me. I walk, and while I am walking I keep thinking how I hate walking' 
 
Old Masters (1985) is Thomas Bernhard's devilishly funny story about the friendship between two old men. For over thirty years Reger, a music critic, has sat on the same bench in front of a Tintoretto painting in a Viennese museum, thinking and railing against contemporary society, his fellow men, artists, the weather, even the state of public lavatories. His friend Atzbacher has been summoned to meet him, and through his eyes we learn more about Reger - the tragic death of his wife, his thoughts of suicide and, eventually, the true purpose of their appointment. At once pessimistic and exuberant, rancorous and hilarious, Old Masters is a richly satirical portrait of culture, genius, nationhood, class, the value of art and the pretensions of humanity.

Old Masters

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