The World As I Found It

Turn-of-the-century Vienna. The trenches of World War I and the dark slide to Nazi Europe. The intellectual lights of Cambridge University and the nabobs on the outskirts of Bloomsbury. Marriage and domestic life. These are just a few of the worlds entered in this exhilarating novel of ideas, romance, and imagination. Irreverently trespassing into the orchards of history, biography, and philosophy, The World As I Found It is the tale of three wildly different men adrift in the twentieth century. At center is Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most magnetic philosophers of our time -- brilliant, tortured, mercurial, forging his own solitary path while leaving a permanent mark on the lives of all around him. Playing in counterpoint are Wittgenstein's two reluctant mentors: Bertrand Russell, the gadabout, philandering freethinker; and G. E. Moore, the great Cambridge don, wide of girth and pure of thought until, late in life, he discovers the joys of passion, marriage, and fatherhood. Bruce Duffy nimbly braids these lives together, interweaving telling glimpses of such contemporaries as Freud, D. H. Lawrence, Lady Ottoline Morrell, and Karl Kraus. The result is fiction that illuminates life, an atmospheric novel rich in humor and tragedy, lust and violence, spirit and striving.