The description of a life as the invention of a life: these pages hide the key to understanding how Bernhard became the writer he was.

The five volumes of his autobiographical writings are brought together here, the publication of which began with The Origin (1983), followed by The Basement, The Breath, The Cold and A Child. As Miguel Sáenz, the great translator of Bernhard's work into Spanish, states in the prologue written for this edition, with the appearance of The Origin "the incorporation of Bernhard into Spanish literature really began, a literature that would not again be the herself."

The reader of these autobiographical stories will discover - in addition to a style that is difficult to imitate in which the repetition of words and entire groups of words articulates, in the manner of a musical theme, an obsessive and haunting thought - how, against the current and sometimes bordering on the last frontiers of life, Bernhard managed to conceive and build a work that is an "exaltation of survival."

"All these years we have wondered what the New would look like... Here is the New" (Ingeborg Bachmann, 1969).

«The autobiography is the richest and most mature work of Thomas Bernhard» (Marcel Reich-Ranicki, FAZ).

«For Bernhard, these years of learning are the most important time of his life. In it were laid the foundations of a literary work that, due to its radicalism, is the only one in the German language that can be placed alongside that of Samuel Beckett" (Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt).

«The best possible (and indispensable) introduction to getting to know Thomas Bernhard» (Miguel Sáenz).