The World As I Found It
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
This “wicked, melancholy, and . . . astonishing” novel reimagines the lives of three wildly different men adrift in the 20th century: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore (Newsday).
When Bruce Duffy’s The World As I Found It was first published, critics and readers were bowled over by its daring reimagining of the lives of three very different men, the philosophers Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. A brilliant group portrait with the vertiginous displacements of twentieth-century life looming large in the background, Duffy’s novel depicts times and places as various as Vienna 1900, the trenches of World War I, Bloomsbury, and the colleges of Cambridge, while the complicated main characters appear not only in thought and dispute but in love and despair. Wittgenstein, a strange, troubled, and troubling man of gnawing contradictions, is at the center of a novel that reminds us that the apparently abstract and formal questions that animate philosophy are nothing less than the intractable matters of life and death.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Improbable as it may seem, this long, sometimes complex first novel featuring the influential Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and his colleagues/friends/rivals, Cambridge philosophers Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, is abundant with life and almost unflaggingly interesting. Deviating only when it must from the record, the lightly fictionalized work progresses chronologically through the convolutions of Wittgenstein's career: his early life in Austria; his arrival in Cambridge; his experiences in the first World War; his unhappy memories of his brilliantly gifted older brothers, both homosexual, both suicides; his relations with a rich, powerful, autocratic father; and his succession of young male friends. All the while Russell is reeling from Lady Ottoline Morrell (of Bloomsbury fame) to a series of wives and other wandering women and the good Moore, already far from young, is marrying happily. The enigmatic Wittgenstein could imagine the unimaginable, but never would he have imagined it possible that he would one day appear as the protagonist of a noveland a delightful one, at that.
