| Wittgenstein's Nephew: A Friendship Contributor(s): Bernhard, Thomas (Author) |
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ISBN: 1400077567 ISBN-13: 9781400077564 Publisher: Vintage OUR PRICE: $13.50 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: October 2009 Annotation: From the Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard, a partly autobiographical novel that is also a stunning portrait of Paul Wittgenstein--the great philosopher's nephew. It is 1967, in a Viennese hospital. In separate wards, two men lie bedridden: the narrator lies stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul is suffering fromone of his periodic bouts ofmadness. Bernhard traces the growth of an intense friendship between two eccentric, obsessive men who share a passion for music, a strange sense of humor, brutal honesty, and disgust for the bourgeois of Vienna. Bernhard's evocation of the fear and longing for intimacy he and his truest friend share in the face of death chronicles both the spiritual symmetry that bonds them for twelve years and the emotional betrayal that elicits Bernhard's eulogy. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Fiction | Literary - Fiction | Visionary & Metaphysical - Fiction | Historical - General |
| Dewey: FIC |
| LCCN: 2010291041 |
| Series: Vintage International |
| Physical Information: 0.36" H x 5.18" W x 8" (0.29 lbs) 112 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: It is 1967. In separate wings of a Viennese hospital, two men lie bedridden. The narrator, named Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of the celebrated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, is suffering from one of his periodic bouts of madness. As their once-casual friendship quickens, these two eccentric men begin to discover in each other a possible antidote to their feelings of hopelessness and mortality--a spiritual symmetry forged by their shared passion for music, strange sense of humor, disgust for bourgeois Vienna, and great fear in the face of death. Part memoir, part fiction, Wittgenstein's Nephew is both a meditation on the artist's struggle to maintain a solid foothold in a world gone incomprehensibly askew, and a stunning--if not haunting--eulogy to a real-life friendship. |