He was also a judicial reporter and poet, but achieved fame as a novelist and playwright. 90 years after his birth, Thomas Bernhard is considered one of the great European authors of the second half of the twentieth century. Despite the series of his 5 autobiographical books, also in this first part of 2021 two new volumes very different from each other, both for the types of Suhrkamp, probe his life.
The first bears the signature of Peter Fabjan, Thomas Bernhard’s half-brother, who as a doctor followed the complex disease especially in the last years of his life and as a relative became more and more an irreplaceable support for the author with a thorny and not infrequently contemptuous character.
With the death of Thomas in 1989, Fabjan also became his testamentary executor, a function that he carried out with the headwind of the world of culture and theater and that ten years later convinced him to disregard the prohibition, among other things, of new masses. staged in Austria for the duration of the copyright: “An author cannot stand a silence of 70 years. Today Thomas would think so too ”he justified himself.
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Already the title of the volume, “Ein Leben an der Seite von Thomas Bernhard. Ein Rapport “(A life alongside Thomas Bernhard. A relationship) reveals long years of affection but also of infinite patience, of mortification (” Two is company, three is none “Hedwig Stavianicek had once told him, while Fabjan was driving the strange couple around the Engadine) and often bitter disagreements, which lead Fabjan to wonder if that life was “stolen” from him by Thomas. The 82-year-old’s answer, however, is in the belief that it was “a destiny with the gift of numerous opportunities” and “an honor”.
Also from “Die unkorrekte Biographie” (An incorrect biography) by Nicolas Mahler emerges a great admiration for the author, not without an affectionately critical gaze. The acclaimed cartoonist Mahler is not new to immerse himself in the Bernhardian universe to derive visual distillates. He had already done so effectively in 2012 with the novel “Ancient masters” and two years later with the comedy “The reformer of the world“. Now he proposes a biography through 99 illustrations and a large number of quotes from works, notes, conversations, interviews. A witty and meaningful choice, a synthesis at times comic, as exquisitely comic as Bernhard knew to be, and which is not silent either the furious, hyperbolic tirades that brought the author to life on a collision course with the Austrian establishment or the dramatic aspects of a life inside and outside hospitals, nursing homes and healthy places, nor the merciless self-irony: “I don’t have arms to hug, but to write and tie my shoes”.
Peter Fabjan: A life at the side of Thomas Bernhard. A report, 195 pagine, Suhrkamp Verlag € 24