num_pages: 101
description: It is 1967. In separate wings of a Viennese hospital, two men lie bedridden. The narrator, 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, a strange sense of humor, disgust for bourgeois Vienna, and 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 an eulogy to a real-life friendship.
language: German
title: Wittgenstein's Nephew
titlecomplete: Wittgenstein's Nephew
characters: Paul Wittgenstein, Thomas Bernhard
genres: 20th Century, Philosophy, Novella, Literary Fiction, Novels, Literature, German Literature, Classics, Fiction, Contemporary
ratings_count: 5582
places: Vienna, Austria
publisher: University of Chicago Press