Customer Reviews

THE WORLD AS I FOUND IT.

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Outstanding. Given the premise-opaque Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's life adventures, I feared this would be dry as dust. Happily this is first and foremost splendid story telling. Wittgentein's career at Cambridge, his relationships with Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, his wartime experiences in WW1 and after are rendered beautifully. Indeed his Vienna boyhood, growing up privileged yet emotionally bereft, is chillingly described. The characters are so perfectly drawn one can't help but be pulled into a wonderfully imagined world.

Also interesting is the ongoing description of the conflict of "philosophy" versus everyday living. Philosophers are human beings first and foremost and life events, circumstances and other people conspire together to thwart the life of the mind. It is interesting to read the compromises, adaptations and concessions the characters must make in order to bring their philosophies into actual daily existence. Occasionally successful, often not, the struggles depicted are so genuine and believable that one can't help but moved by their efforts, painful though they often are.

Surprisingly readable, given the subject matter, and from an author who obviously loves to write. This quality seems less than apparent in many books, but Duffy, I felt, took great time and applied careful skill in making his characters emerge on the page as recognizably full-fledged people. Whether the clumsy and appealing, if fanatic and mysterious Max; Ottoline's bony limbs; Wittgenstein's trench nemesis Grundfeldt; Russell's liberated flapper DD and her dentist father from the Illinois prairies the philosopher visits in a wonderful chapter; DH Lawrence's fulminations about blood knowledge; Moore's gustatory enthusiasm when dining at Hall; or Russell's attempts to write an article for Parents' Magazine on "Are Parents Bad for Children" while trying to seduce yet another lissome lass and take care of his failing marriage, faltering children, and chaotic progressive school--this book's most engrossing.

Especially noteworthy are Duffy's depictions of trench warfare as Wittgenstein might have experienced it in WW1. I didn't expect that the relatively brief part of the philosopher's life would be so much a part of this novel. It serves, once you finish and can see the whole work completed, as the titular centerpiece and the fulcrum for so much of his subsequent reactions to the middle of the 20c. I had recently read Sebastian Barry's Booker Prize-nominated novel "A Long Long Way From Home," and while Duffy spends less than his whole novel on the hell endured on the Western Front, he gives a variety of vividly rendered scenes that match Barry at his best--no mean feat for Duffy's not a professional full-time writer, apparently, and this was his first novel. The depictions of war are simply and terrifyingly superb.

While I had difficulty even with the simplified explanations of Wittgenstein's thought, I confess, full comprehension of them may well be beyond any of us. W's own battles with his homosexuality, his family history of suicide, and his Christian ideals vs. his Jewish heritage make for engrossing material that eases the challenge of keeping up with W's ratiocinations. Duffy shows dramatically W's refusal to start a circle of fawning disciples or imitators of his notoriously challenging thought-experiments and investigations into what does and does not underly logic. Perhaps even Moore and Russell, as shown when they conduct the viva voce doctoral exam of W., cannot understand their candidate either.

The novel is not perfect; the latter chapters especially after WW2 appear rushed and the author seems winded by so much previous exertion on behalf of his complicated characters. The first section takes place around 1912; the wartime is largely early in WW1, and the latter part is around 1938 for the most part. Appended to this are detours back and forward in time that expand W's family history. It may sound cumbersome, yet it gives you enough of a context for each period to feel that you can find your way around.

Somehow over so many thousands of sentences, Duffy manages to avoid cliche, to write fresh and efficient prose, and to take the reader into a series of realms that would have seemed the least likely areas that a novelist would want to explore, let alone re-create over 500 densely printed pages. It took me most of a week's free time to read this, and it flows best when you have a few hours straight to immerse yourself in it. It's a novel that works by association, accruing patiently the rewards that pay off for the thinkers if not always their long-suffering supporting casts of lovers, relations, colleagues, and spouses.

The reason for so much reasoning gradually grows as the novel continues; you will begin to understand at least a bit how everyday life impinges upon and stimulates rarified speculation. This happens subtly, as it does in reality, and may take the space of hundreds of pages to connect, but it will cohere--for the most part, which is quite an accomplishment for a book that aspires to not only enlightenment but sophisticated entertainment. The novel does take its slow time to warm up; get beyond the first hundred pages, and know that with the middle section, part two, "The World as I Found It" will start to deepen its spell.

I certainly wasn't hampered in my enjoyment of this book by a lack of familiarity with (or, until now, interest in) twentieth-century philosophy. "The World as I Found It" taught me what makes a great fictional characters: such compassion and detail that I feel I know them as I know myself. Duffy's Wittgenstein, Russell, and Moore are forged from such different materials and live such different lives. But their struggles and motivations are painted in such rich detail that I intimately recognized the humanity in each of them. Great writing.

This is a novel about the three famous Cambridge philosophers: Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and G.E.Moore. Duffy states firmly in his Preface that his "is a work of fiction: it is not history, philosophy or biography, though it may seem at times to trespass on those domains." He admits that he has taken some liberties with dates, and even that he has given Wittgenstein two sisters rather than three. On the other hand, one does recognize actual quotations from letters, as well as incidents which certainly did happen. When an author describes what type of book he is writing, it is not for a reviewer to say that he should have written a different type of book; but I must say that, whilst I do not regret that he has invented dialogue and thought processes, I found the mixture of distorted and actual facts a little unsettling, and, I venture to say, artistically unnecessary.

But the book is very well written and immensely enjoyable. The title comes from a sentence in Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Wittgenstein is the central character of the book, but Bertrand Russell and G.E.Moore figure in it as characters of almost equal weight with Wittgenstein's, andwe have a vivid and well researched picture of the personalities and incidents in their lives. The backgrounds against which they lived are beautifully described: the Vienna into which Wittgenstein was born; the oppressive atmosphere in the home of his immensely wealthy father; the horrific battlefields in Poland where Wittgenstein distinguished himself during the First World War; the coarse villagers whose children Wittgenstein taught in Austria; the spartan Norwegian settings; and then the introverted Cambridge of the Apostles. We are invited to Garsington and enter into the relationship between Bertrand Russell and Lady Ottoline Morrell. There is an excellent description of the atmosphere of the school at Beacon Hill in Sussex where Russell's lofty educational theories rub shoulders with his seedy sexual antics. One of the special delights of Duffy's book is how he brings alive the less well known third member of the trio, G.E.Moore - described as a mild, ungainly man who had little confidence in himself until he was, as it were, Surprised by Joy when he sank into the placid bliss of a happy marriage.

According to Duffy, Wittgenstein, too, was in the end Surprised by Joy. Duffy is exceptionally good on death scenes - not morbid or mawkish, but with the sense that a death is a moment of truth and tells us a good deal about the life that preceded it. Wittgenstein met his death of cancer with the honesty that he had always practised, and there were no regrets for his tormented past. This is how Duffy's novel ends:

"Just before he died, Wittgenstein said to Mrs Bevens, Tell everyone that I have had a wonderful life. Of course, it wasn't like him to exaggerate, and his friends found it troubling that he would say this. To them, Wittgenstein's life seemed many things, but not wonderful, and in the end they did not know if he had merely been trying to put them at ease or if in fact he had found his troubled life wonderful. But this, in any case, is what he said."

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." In this astounding first novel about the philosopher Ludwig Wittengenstein, published in 1987, Bruce Duffy manages to include an impressive number of the things on earth (enough to make WW1 and the Holocaust appear mainly as interludes), and quite a few of those in heaven also. But writing about a man who, for all his stature as a philosopher, was also a very private individual, Duffy is forced to do quite a bit of dreaming himself. After descending on Cambridge like a thunderbolt in 1911 and almost immediately challenging the basic philosophical tenets of his mentor, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein returned to Austria to fight on the Russian front in the First World War, after which he gave away his vast fortune and worked for many years in seclusion as a village schoolmaster. This so-called "lost period" before the philosopher returned to Cambridge in 1929 (to take in short order his doctorate, a fellowship, and the university chair) is only one area where Duffy has had to guess. But he guesses very engagingly, inventing for example a fellow veteran called Max as a companion for the philosopher, a "natural man" who acts impulsively upon his beliefs and desires and serves as a foil to the late-Tolstoyan cast to his life at that time. This is also one of the many ways that Duffy touches upon Wittgenstein's probable sexuality, still a sensitive subject at the time he was writing.

In his magnificent introduction to the NYRB edition, David Leavitt hails Duffy's foray into biographical fiction as opening the door to many similar novels published later, such as Pat Barker's REGENERATION (about Siegfried Sassoon) and Penelope Fitzgerald's THE BLUE FLOWER (Novalis). He might also have added his own THE INDIAN CLERK, about the mathematician Ramanujan, which also depicts Cambridge in those heady years before the War and contains many of the same characters. For one of the things that Duffy does especially well (especially for someone who had barely visited Europe at the time) is to fill out the settings and the dramatis personae quite thoroughly. So we get wonderful portraits of Vienna at the height of its cultural hegemony, and of the dining tables and debating societies of Cambridge where the important discussions take place. We meet Wittgenstein's talented but tragic family (three of his brothers committed suicide) and a whole gallery of the English intellectual elite: Bertrand Russell, GE Moore, Lytton Strachey, Lady Ottoline Morrell, and many many others. And all in language that is always vivid and often surprising. Here is Wittgenstein, for instance, in the Viennese Prater, contemplating the possibility of some rough trade: "No, Wittgenstein did not have to go as far as the firs that day. The point was to go just far enough to singe himself without tasting, to smudge his nose against the window of that world." What a superb phrase!

Duffy never does follow Wittgenstein into the firs; he prefers to hint at the possibility. But he cannot follow Wittgenstein very far into the forests of his soul either. Perhaps part of the reason he spends so much time on the secondary characters is that the primary one is so unknowable. Wittgenstein is impressive in his brilliance and his absolute refusal to make an intellectual compromise even as a social nicety. But he is sculpted from granite and snow. Russell, by contrast, is much more colorful, more the stuff of novels, with his outspoken views on marriage, his philandering, his pacifism, and his general readiness to accept the role of public intellectual. There are many times when he simply eclipses his younger colleague. But I never get any sense of his own greatness; out of interest, I looked at a bit of Russell's vast, systematic and well-nigh opaque PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA, and could see almost no connection between the author of that magnum opus and Duffy's portrait. Similarly, I finished the book with only the vaguest notion of what Wittgenstein actually said. I admit, though, that when it comes to philosophy I am virtually tone-deaf, so the fact that Duffy could keep me returning eagerly to his book over an exceptionally busy three-week span is testament in itself. His ability to connect heaven to earth, the universe of ideas to the world of everyday life, and to do so over such a turbulent swath of history, is a small miracle.

This rich, comic, poignant portrait of three of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century will, if nothing else, make you understand the spell cast by Ludwig Wittgenstein on so many people during his lifetime and after. Though the second half of the book is not quite as compelling and revelatory as the first (it could have done with some tightening), it is still better than 90% of the novels out there.

Every time I reread it, I am struck anew by just how remarkable it is that a Christian American heterosexual should have entered so completely and sympathetically into the mind of the tormented, homosexual Viennese madman-saint who was Wittgenstein. That is, of course, what novelists are supposed to do but so rarely manage. Bravo.

Mark Twain once said, in so many words, that the difference between fiction and non-fiction is that fiction has to be absolutely believable. This is an apt maxim for Duffy's novelistic biography of three celebrated philosophers of the early twentieth-century--Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and G.E. Moore, three men whose variances in the study of logic created both mutual admiration and adversarial polarity.

When Duffy wrote this novel in 1987, there had yet to be a biography of Wittgenstein's life (now there are two). But Duffy was drawn to Wittgenstein's persistent aim to comprehend how facts (and pictures of facts) and words refer to actual "things" in the world, and puzzled by how statements of fact don't relate to reality. It is these indeterminacies that lead to distortions of communication (I find that these concerns, however invisible or unknown, are the fundamentals of many misapprehensions between people). Logistic and linguistic conundrums plagued Wittgenstein his whole life; he dwelled in his logic problems to the point of despondency.

Russell: "He himself had worked WITH logic, but until Wittgenstein, he had never had the sense of someone locked INSIDE logic, struggling to escape like Houdini shackled inside a trunk. For Wittgenstein, logic was not merely a problem, it was the problem OF HIS LIFE."

Moore and Russell could distinguish their scholarly aims from their personal lives, at least enough to pursue other goals and distractions.

Duffy brings these three distinct personalities to life with an almost impressionistic brio, yet as credible portraits based on his research. Sure, he changed some facts and dates, and invented and imagined and created others. But, factual accuracy and putative recreations of concrete events aren't what is relevant or brilliant about this book. I did read Ray Monk's bio, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, but Duffy's book gave me an even deeper understanding of Wittgenstein's melancholia--as well as Russell's egotism, and Moore's passivity--and their relationship to the world as they lived it.

This book is evidence that novels can often convey more truth than non-fiction can. And how much of Monk's bios of Russell and Wittgenstein are "truth?" Information still had to be culled, predicated, and assumed from secondary sources. Plus, if you wrote a biography of your own life, how much would be accurate? It is amazing what the fallibility of memory and subjectivity can activate, deactivate, and twist. Memories are intangible, and chronicles derived from memories are often unreliable. More importantly, fact and truth are two different concepts.

If you are looking for facts, read dry testimonies. Duffy made tangible the world that these men lived in through the elegant dialectics of language, and by running recondite wires through luminous emotional sockets. He assimilates and entwines fact and fiction, and takes part in shaping ideas. Ideas shape history. These three philosophers comprehended a solitary truth, that we tend to view life from the inside, "peering out through crabstalk eyes."

Of the three men, it was Russell who achieved the most fame. Duffy penetrates the hollow halls of hallowed erudition, however, to illuminate the vanity and speciousness of celebrity. For example, Russell's best work was behind him by the time he got famous. He was resting largely on his laurels, or cynically penning slogans out of his treatises that were churned out daily in the newspapers. He craved popularity and was instrumental in politicizing his ideas. His Nobel Prize was more of a lifetime achievement award, and Russell knew it. Russell was jealous of Wittgenstein's superior talents, for his lofty morals, for his intractable nature, and scorned Moore's "lack of vanity."

The World War I combat scenes with Wittgenstein were expressed so vividly and psychologically brutal that I could hear the reports of weapons and smell the carnage. And the hand-to-hand combat scenes were so palpable and gritty, so thoroughly scorching, that I felt and heard bones crushing next to my body. Duffy's images are seared into you; it is more like inhabiting Wittgenstein than reading about him. But even more searing than the Austrian battlefield was the battlefield at home, and his relationship with a tyrannical father. The deathbed scenes between Wittgenstein and his father are blistering, harrowing, unrivaled by any other literary account of mortal curtains.

This is my ideal book, one that falls in the category of "Desert Island" reads. The narrative inseminates space, knocks down walls, opens windows to the world. It induced a chemical reaction in me, reminiscent of the verbal, labyrinthine stretches of tripping on hallucinogens. This book is manna and mojo for my deepest reader demands and desires.

At over 550 pages on the life of the philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, I wondered whether I would be able to finish the book and was agreeably surprised when I found I was hooked after the first 12 pages. Duffy's narrative is, as he admits, not factually accurate but whatever discrepancies there are, Duffy portrays an intriguing Wittgenstein set against the intellectual cloisters of Cambridge; the trenches of the first world war; the rise of Nazism in Vienna in the 30's; to its final section shortly after the second world war. Central to the narrative is the evolving conflict amongst the three central characters: Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell and G E Moore. This I found very entertaining as Duffy conjures a delightful series of events depicting their vanities, jealousies and changing philosophies. Duffy intersperses several humourous anecdotes including an unforgettable description of the Cambridge professors' eating habits. Wittgenstein's homosexuality is not left out entirely but is seldom mentioned.
Overall, an enlightening and enjoyable account about three of the 20th Century's most prominent intellectuals.

Whether this work perfectly parallels the expoits of the character's real lives, should not be of concern. This book is beautifully written, with a literary gem on almost every page. It is one, if not the best book I have read in 10 years. What a shame it has not gotten more attention.

It's hard to believe that a book about a small group of philosophers could be so funny and beautiful. I'm thrilled it's back in print; I read it years ago and it's almost ruined me for other books. Read it!