Gathering Evidence

Powerful, engrossing, written with a dark pain and drama that recall the novels of Dickens, Gathering Evidence is a compelling memoir of youth by “one of the century’s most gifted writers” (Philadelphia Inquirer).

Born in 1931, the illegitimate child of an abandoned mother, Thomas Bernhard was raised by an eccentric grandmother and an adored grandfather. Tormented as a young student in right-wing, Catholic Austria, Bernhard ran away from home at age fifteen. At eighteen, he contracted pneumonia. Placed in a hospital ward for the old and terminally ill, he observed first-hand, with unflinching acuity, cruel, protracted suffering and death. Upon his discharge, he learned that his grandfather had died and that he himself had contracted tuberculosis.

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.