9780226043920

Your Satisfaction is Guaranteed:

• 30 Day Return Policy
• Bookseller Guarantee
• Privacy & Security Policy

It is 1967, in a Viennese hospital. In separate wards, 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. Beginning with his memory of the hospital, 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 honestly, and a disgust for bourgeois Vienna.

"An English reader coming to Thomas Bernhard's autobiographical writings for the first time through this translation might well find the tone scurrilous, the content exaggerated, the perspective haughty. To understand the relentless invective against the whole sweep of Austria's institutions, the reader should first be acquainted with the history of Bernhard's incarceration in his country's schools, clinics and terminal wards, recorded in his five volumes (to date) of autobiography. Wittgenstein's Nephew is as much a coda to these volumes as it is a tribute to Bernhard's late friend Paul Wittgenstein."

Stephen Plaice, Times Literary Supplement, 08/28/1987

"David McLintock...successfully reproduces the breathtaking energy and swing of Mr. Bernhard's sentences, often pages long; one has a sense of the musical structure of this book, which depends on repeated phrases rather than chapter or paragraph breaks or even chronology to orient the reader. But Mr. McLintock misses the author's finer moments of rhetorical buffoonery."

Leigh Hafrey, New York Times Book Review, 02/19/1989

Wittgenstein's Nephew: A Friendship: Search Results