Wittgenstein's Nephew
A Friendship
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Publisher Description
LRB BOOKSHOP'S AUTHOR OF THE MONTH
ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019
WITH A NEW AFTERWORD BY BEN LERNER, AUTHOR OF THE TOPEKA SCHOOL
'If you haven't read Bernhard, you will not know of the most radical advance in fiction since Joyce ... My advice: dive in.' Lucy Ellmann
'I absolutely love Bernhard: he is one of the darkest and funniest writers ... A must read for everybody.' Karl Ove Knausgaard
It is 1967. Two men lie bedridden in separate wings of a Viennese hospital. The narrator, Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of Ludwig Wittgenstein, is suffering from one of his periodic bouts of madness. As their friendship quickens, these two eccentric men discover in each other an antidote to their feelings of despair on the unexpected strength of what they share - a spiritual symmetry forged by their love of music, black humour, disgust for bourgeois Vienna, and fear of mortality.
A restless blend of fiction and memoir, Wittgenstein's Nephewis not only a haunting meditation on the artist's struggle to maintain a foothold on reality, but an impassioned eulogy to a real-life friendship - newly illuminated by Ben Lerner's afterword.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A ``partly autobiographical novel'' with the subtitle ``A Friendship,'' Bernhard's ( Woodcutters , The Lime Works ) 1984 work delineates the unusual relationship between the narrator, a writer not unlike Bernhard, and the brilliant but mad nephew of the phil- osopher Wittgenstein. Both men are confined to beds in the same hospital, the narrator in the pulmonary ward and Paul Wittgenstein in the asylum. Both are plagued with fears and doubts about the terminal nature of life. Acquaintances beforehand, they reach out now and build a friendship based on mutual support and respect that somehow thrives in this bleak and hopeless environment. Bernhard's style relies on ponderous repetition of words and ideas, which may be more natural in the original German. When successful this technique has the effect of a musical composition that reiterates a theme in variations. More often, though, it palls and results in maddeningly convoluted sentences that tend to numb the mind.
