Wittgenstein's Nephew: A Friendship

Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) has been hailed by Gabriel Josipovici as 'Austria's finest postwar writer' and by George Steiner as 'one of the masters of contemporary European fiction'. Faber Finds is proud to reissue a selection of four of Bernhard's finest novels. "Wittgenstein's Nephew" (1982) opens in 1967 as two men lie bedridden in separate wings of a Viennese hospital. The narrator, Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of Ludwig Wittgenstein, is suffering from one of his periodic bouts of madness. As their once-casual friendship quickens, these eccentric men begin to see in each other a possible antidote to their feelings of hopelessness and mortality, on the unexpected strength of what they hold in common. "Furious, obsessive, scathing, absolutely hilarious and oddly beautiful". (Claire Messud, "Salon"). "A memento mori that approaches genius". (Richard Locke, "Wall Street Journal").