Wittgenstein's nephew
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, strange sense of humor, disgust for bourgeois Vienna, and fear in the face of death. Part memoir, part fiction, Wittgenstein's Nephewis 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.
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What Hacker News says
- I like Bernhard. I also recommend The Lime Works and wittgenstein’s nephew if you like correction. I found Bernhard through Thomas Ligotti. For Ligotti I recommend teatro grottesco and if you want to dive off the deep end the conspiracy against the human race.
- You'll love Correction if you have a taste for experimental literature. I've have all of Bernhard's novels. They are (mostly) uninterrupted walls of text. They can also be quite depressing. You'll likely either love them or hate them. Correction is probably the most exemplary instance of his style and experimentation, and maybe his best novel, but Concrete and Extinction fall into this category as well. Wittgenstein's Nephew, Frost, and Woodcutters are more approachable if you want to ease into it. Starting with Correction might be a bit off-putting and intense depending on how often you read more experimental/stylistic literature.
He also wrote poetry.
- > to award someone a prize is no different from pissing on him. And to receive a prize is no different from allowing oneself to be pissed on, because one is being paid for it.
- Thomas Bernhard, _Wittgenstein's Nephew_
