'Gathering Evidence' by Thomas Bernhard

I am currently reading Thomas Bernhard’s memoir of the first two decades years of his life. The extent to which the account is ‘true’ is unimportant, rendering questions such as how-certain-circumstances-could-produce-the-kind-of-person-who-would-write-the-kind-of-novels-that-Bernhard-wrote extraneous. Given the similarities in tone, substance and approach between the novels and the memoir – the supercharged ambivalence, the nihilism shot through with tenderness and humour, the simultaneously monstrous and pathetic characters, the terrible circumstances that give rise to something resembling nostalgia – what is interesting is the relationship between this book and the others: to what extent is this memoir a sort of petri dish in which the novels were seeded, or to what extent has Bernhard rewritten his life as a kind of adjunct to, or reflection of, the concerns developed in his novels?

May 2015