Wittgenstein's Nephew: A Friendship
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ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019
WITH A NEW AFTERWORD BY BEN LERNER, AUTHOR OF THE TOPEKA SCHOOL
'If you haven't read Bernhard, you will not know of the most radical advance in fiction since Joyce ... My advice: dive in.' Lucy Ellmann
'I absolutely love Bernhard: he is one of the darkest and funniest writers ... A must read for everybody.' Karl Ove Knausgaard
It is 1967. 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 friendship quickens, these two eccentric men discover in each other an antidote to their feelings of despair on the unexpected strength of what they share - a spiritual symmetry forged by their love of music, black humour, disgust for bourgeois Vienna, and fear of mortality.
A restless blend of fiction and memoir, Wittgenstein's Nephew is not only a haunting meditation on the artist's struggle to maintain a foothold on reality, but an impassioned eulogy to a real-life friendship - newly illuminated by Ben Lerner's afterword.
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Thomas Bernhard was born in the Netherlands to Austrian parents in 1931. He was raised in Austria and studied dramatic arts at Mozarteum University in Salzburg. His writing first appeared in newspapers in the early 1950s, and he published his first book, a poetry collection, in 1957. His first novel, Frost, was published in 1963, and his first full-length play, A Party for Boris, premiered in 1970. In total he published nine novels, five autobiographical stories, around ten short story collections, eighteen plays and five volumes of poetry. His works were awarded numerous German and European literary prizes. He died in Austria in 1989. Bernhard is one of the most widely translated and admired European writers.
Ben Lerner has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, among other honors. His most recent book is The Topeka School.
