Wittgenstein's Nephew: A Friendship (Phoenix Fiction)
An autobiographical prose work that follows the friendship between the narrator and Paul Wittgenstein, framed around two men bedridden in separate wings of a hospital. Its sharp humor brings music, illness, and loneliness into focus.
Work Information
In the stillness of a hospital, friendship emerges through memory and monologue.
Wittgenstein's Nephew looks back on the friendship between the author and Paul Wittgenstein in Vienna in 1967. Moving between autobiography and fiction, it draws together hospital memory, music, and mortality in a compressed and intimate form.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Univ of Chicago Pr
- Published
- 1989-12-01
- Pages
- 108 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.97 x 1.27 x 20.32 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780226043920
- ISBN-10
- 0226043924
- Price
- 6443 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Contemporary
It is 1967, in a Viennese hospital. In separate wards: the narrator named Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of Ludwig Wittgenstein, is suffering fom one of his periodic bouts of madness. 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 a disgust for bourgeois Vienna. "[ Wittgenstein's Nephew is] a meditative fugue for mad, brilliant voices on the themes of death, death-in-life and the artist's and thinker's role in society . . . oddly moving and funny at the same time."--Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune "Mr. Bernhard's memoir about Paul Wittgenstein is a 'confession and a guilty homage to their friendship; it takes the place of the graveside speech he never delivered. In its obsessive, elegant rhythms and narrative eloquence, it resembles a tragic aria by Richard Strauss. . . . This is a memento mori that approaches genius.'"--Richard Locke, Wall Street Journal
Reviews
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overrated
On the edge of being boring. The beginning was most promising but then developed into a dull and depressing soliloquy. The observations I found commonplace without one surprising perspective on life. Disappointing.
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Short words
Great book for insight into the mentally unstable and their closest friends.
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chewy read, and a lot to learn - personalisaton ...
chewy read, and a lot to learn - personalisaton of the characters really well done - reads in an idiosyncratic way Bernard made his own - a form of writing that is Austrian to its core.literary and valuable.
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I wonderful, easy-to-read book written in Bernhard's usual one paragraph ...
Quite simply a book about friendship and art. But as usual Thomas Bernhard uses it as a vehicle for illumination. Of all the writers that I have recently read Thomas Bernhard hits the spot more times than not. This is a book that I will come back to again and again I can see. I wonderful, easy-to-read book written in Bernhard's usual one paragraph style.
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READ IT.
Possibly a life-changing book, a great introduction to a difficult and rewarding author, master.
Related Literary Awards
- Georg Büchner Prize Edition 45 (1970) ・Winner