Book details

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.