Thomas Bernhard was a 'demon', half-brother reveals in bestseller

Memoir by Peter Fabjan, an acclaimed hit in Bernhard’s native Austria, describes a tormented man who flitted between ‘affection and icy contempt’

In public, he could be gregarious. His charm was legendary. For the great Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard, life was a kind of production. But as his half-brother Peter Fabjan remembers him in his new book, A Life Alongside Thomas Bernhard: A Report, published in German in January, there was another side to Bernhard. “My life was a life with a phantom – indeed a demon – at my side,” he writes.

A Top 10 bestseller in Austria, and labelled a must-read by Germany’s Die Welt, Fabjan’s book marks what would have been Bernhard’s 90th year, were it not for his premature death in 1989 at the age of 58. It has been widely acclaimed by critics; behind Fabjan’s sentences, Marc Reichwein wrote in Welt am Sonntag, one feels “the wounds of a sibling’s entire life”.

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