Customer Reviews

Wittgenstein's Nephew

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2 star:		(1)
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I am once again reading _Wittgenstein's Nephew,_ after having read it ten or so years ago. Now, years later, this slim book offers an even richer experience. I started it tonight and regret that I didn't begin it earlier in the day. It's short enough to be read in a rainy afternoon, yet its brevity belies writing that is simply astounding and straightforward in its honesty and beauty. (By "honesty," I don't mean the cesspool of lurid detail that many of today's writers wallow in and which I find totally repugnant. Bernhard had too much class for that.)

Truth be told, the reader has to like Bernhard's style to get far with him. Bernhard's rephrasing of mundane thoughts and incidents may seem tedious at first to the uninitiated, but he turns the same phrases over and over as if assessing their content and structure. Is it better to write the thought *this* way? That way? Both? Neither? All? How many writers do *that*!?

Bernhard had a genuine love of words (which I share), phrases, sentences and the way they all form an imposing BLOCK that fills the pages (no paragraph breaks). It doesn't seem to matter much that his topics are mundane: I sense he knew that, despite the adventures most of us have, a large part of life is spent alone with our thoughts. Who was it that said, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." Bernhard expands upon this bleak thought and comes up with art of very high order, indeed.

I have read all of Bernhard's work that has been translated into English, and I can recommend them all with 5 stars. I think this book (or perhaps _Concrete_) is the best starting point for those unfamiliar with this author. I especially love this book because the topic - friendship - is so touching and sensitively handled. Not a word seems wasted.

Thomas Bernhard is a wonderful wordsmith. He weaves his story in riffs like jazz motifs or the most beautiful of tapestries. In a tapestry, there may be repeat stitches but the colors and gauge change, the dynamic conspires to grow and become something else just as it is being created. Like a weaver or jazz musician, Bernhard repeats the essence of his message in many ways, giving the reader a marvelous opportunity to see into the protagonist's mind. He is a natural story teller.

This book is considered a novel but it is very autobiographical in nature. The novel opens up in 1967 in a Viennese hospital. It is about the author's friendship with the nephew of the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ludwig's nephew's name is Paul and he is considered a madman, a 'lunatic' in his day. He is also considered a great lover of opera and music, perhaps a bit of a dandy at times.

The story starts out as the author is recuperating in a hospital that has two pavilions, one for pulmonary patients and one for psychiatric patients. The author is in the pulmonary wing. He has just had a huge tumor removed from his thoracic region and is expected to die. Paul Wittgenstein is in the psychiatric unit for one of his regular stays. He suffers from an unnamed ailment but his relatives find him a burden and suspect he is harmful to others so they have him committed. The author is no friend of psychiatry. He states "Psychiatrists are the real demons of our age, going about their business with impunity and constrained by neither law nor conscience."

Paul Wittgenstein was born to great wealth and prestige but used up all his money and now lives on the hand-outs of family and friends. He has a loyal wife who stands by him through thick and thin. The author is a writer who met Paul at a mutual friend's home and they became "difficult" friends from the start. There was nothing they could not talk about, be it music, philosophy, literature, politics. Paul is an opera lover, a lover of music in general and also a lover of race car driving. He is a man of anomalies and paradoxes. In a sense, we learn much more about Paul in this book than we learn about the author. The book seems to be an homage to Paul and to a great friendship.

The author is appalled at the state of psychiatric care in Vienna. He believes that Paul is hospitalized to drain him of his life forces. Paul is given electro-convulsive therapy, medications, treatments and put in an environment designed to sap the life out of him. When he is as close to death as he can be, he is discharged until he gets sick again, usually in four or five months. The symptoms that plague Paul sound very much like manic depressive disorder - pressured speech, volatile moods, strange movements, serious depression, obvious mania, narcissism.

The story plays out in the author's telling of multiple vignettes and thoughts about the nature of the friendship. He repeats aspects of the stories over and over in different words in order to get to the essence of what really was or what he truly believes. It is as if he is trying to reach the Platonic ideal of truth in his telling the story of his friendship with Paul. Some of the stories are tragic and others are laugh-out-loud funny. There is one vignette about the two of them driving hundreds of miles throughout Austria to find a particular newspaper. They can't find it and determine that Austria is barbaric. It is like the country, not civilized urbanity. Both men hate the country.

The author discourses a lot about health and death. He has lived his life near death for a long time and compares death of the body to death of the spirit or mind. He resents healthy people who he feels are hypocrites and truly hate sick people.

Here are two men, both misanthropic and narcissistic, carrying on the grandest of activities together - going to literary ceremonies, award banquets, operas, sitting together at coffee houses. They ebb and flow in the friendship, always trying to stay on the other's good side. Each is opinionated and difficult and the friendship is as different and wonderful as any I've read about.

Bernhard is a word weaver and he creates his book as an art form in itself. There are no paragraphs. The book slips as easily from idea to idea and story to story as an Olympic ice skater. One has to be able to relate to Bernhard's style of writing. I certainly could. I loved the book and found myself completely entrenched in it.

Towards the end of his life, when Paul was dying, the author abandoned him. This book is his way to seek forgiveness for that, to pay homage to the great and difficult man that was his friend.

"Wittgenstein's Nephew" is a reflection on friendship and loss, a remembrance of a dear friend, and a regret for a missed eulogy. It is written by Thomas Bernhard, about Paul Wittgenstein, who were good friends for over a decade. It ranks unquestionably among Berhnard's finest works. (The book was written in 1982. Bernhard was Austrian, 1931-1989, and met Wittgentstein (1924-1979) in 1967).

The book holds to no fixed plot, but is a series of discursive episodes about the author and his friend engaged in various episodes: meeting in a hospital, attending the opera, visiting a once-cosmopolitan friend now living in the remote rural lands of Austria, frequenting the same literary clubs and cafes, and many similar tales.

Every vignette is a jewel, and they are plenty, but few are about Paul directly, or reveal Thomas's feelings explicitly. Each time Bernhard begins talking directly about Paul, or his inner feelings, he diverts attention quickly to another story. His heart is so obviously broken he cannot bear to talk about his friend, but only their good times together. Still, it is abundantly clear from his story-telling, Thomas loves Paul like a brother, truly a "best friend."

Paul was a brilliant man, like his famous uncle Ludwig, the philosopher, and musically talented, like another Paul Wittgenstein (Ludwig's brother, the pianist) but also emotionally unstable, and financially irresponsible. After a late-life divorce, in his usual ill health, Bernhard describes Paul crying, in his dark and empty apartment, in rough condition despite its prime city location, but tells us he left Paul alone in his misery, to go sit in the park. Thomas cannot face his emotions at all. He cannot express himself this way, and to this day it eats him up inside. As an author, and a man of erudition and education, he does his best to express himself in the only way he understands, which is through intellectual discourse.

During their friendship, Paul asked Thomas to speak at his funeral of an optimistically projected "two hundred friends." "Wittgenstein's Nephew" is essentially that eulogy, delivered with loving tenderness, and heartaching apology. It is not melodramatic, it is always in intellectual control, but it communicates its tragedy effectively clearly nonetheless. It begins unremarkably, and seems to wander thereafter without much direction, but by the end it has proven itself compelling and interesting. We are delighted to read the personal tale of two best friends, yet also sympathetic toward Thomas's need to unburden his soul. It is undoubtedly one of Bernhard's superior works, like "Yes" before it (1978), and "Extinction" afterward (1986).

An entertaining, albeit thin and superficial novella by Thomas Bernhard about an unlikely friendship between two sick patients in Vienna. The narrator-Bernhard's doppelganger-befriends Wittgenstein's enigmatic nephew despite their improbable arrangement. There are enjoyable portraits of Viennese culture and thought in this brief text-and Bernhard takes plenty of time to write wonderfully about music as he so often does-but there is also a bitterness to this narrative that drags it down. Furthermore, Bernhard uses an extended sequence to berate the Viennese theater culture for the disastrous premier of his play at the Burgtheater-the passage is meant to be funny but it is merely arrogant and petty. Unfortunately, Bernhard has not been able to do much with his admittedly clever conceit in this one.

Thomas Bernhard is no lover of humanity, but this is a very compassionate book. It is a sympathetic portrait of Paul Wittgenstein as well as of Bernhard himself. Bernhard comes across as rather crotchety, rather irritating, but quite stubborn in getting his point across. His ability to repeat himself - which intially leaves the reader wondering - is ultimately hilarious and endearing. This book is poignant, touching and eventually, sad.

Bernhard does a good job of showing how his friend's and his own physical/psychological illnesses and their disgust with Austria in general resonate and reflect off of each other. In other words, you can see why they are friends. But beyond their status as a couple of alienated, unhealthy and misanthropic outsiders, I had a hard time really getting much out of it. Aside from the fact that Austria is (according to Bernhard) evidently full of the most servile, willfully ignorant, culturally dead people on earth. His capacity for anti-Austrian spleen seems bottomless, hell, it might even be justifiable. I couldn't say, as I don't know much about Austrian cultural history. And I'm not sure how singular a problem it is when he talks about Austrians demonizing or just outright mocking some of their most celebrated cultural figures. That seems to happen almost everywhere. I think I'd need to read more of his stuff before I could say anything else

I seem to be running against the current here; in part I think there are cultural factors at work.

I decided to read Bernhard because of his mention at several points in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. I didn't enjoy this 100-page long novella (which is said to be representative of his fiction and the best point of entry into his work). It is one long paragraph of internal ruminations by a character who shares the author's name (and experiences)--a man who is a sour, supercilious, arrogant misanthrope. This kind of long internal monologue from a disturbed and socially-alienated individual seems a form that Europeans like more than North Americans: I would think its tradition is rooted in Notes from the Underground. And, though I do admire Dostoevsky's version of this, it is rarely something I enjoy. (I did at least like this book better than Michel Houellebecq's extremely sour Elementary Particles, but Bernhard and Houellebecq share in their general world view.)

On sunny afternoon towards the end of June 96 I met a famous Austrian-American psychoanalyst in a bookstore near St Stephan's Dome in Vieanna. I am almost a fan of this analyst/author,after introducing myself (a psychiatrist attending an international conference where he was lecturing),he asked me what I was reading from Austrian authors and I mentioned the only name I knew -Arthur Schnitzler, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud. He said it was OK but had I heard about Thomas Bernhard ? That was the beginning of my relationship with T.B.. The only English title from T.B.'s works was "On the Mountain"; I bought a copy and as soon as I started reading I was in touch with a conglomerate of emotions- anger,"boredom", pain, sorrow, "emptiness" and a very skillfull reflection of probing the realm of self and others in terms of various levels of self representations. As for W.'s Nephew, I should admit it is rather an easy reading title amongst T.B.'s works. Here we have the extremes; body and psyche, mental "disorder" vs medical disease, living upto all or none... W.'s Nephew tries to undo wrongs by helping paupers to the extent of becoming peniless himself (which leads to another episode of "institutionalization" with his relatives' more than willing consent) or is able to mark an opera work with his applause (or silence) as fabulous (or kill it) at the end of a premier. While W.'s Nephew might be perceived as pure emotionality the protagonist represents the "rational mind". Their relationship is based on a very true friendship and conveyed on a stage of Vieennese cafes (Sacher, Havelka..), suburbs and hospitals. I recommenf this book for those who are interested in reading about human relations in a cotext of self and others during post modernity.

I'd heard about Thomas Bernhard's 'rant like novels' for years, but had dosed myself with so much literary pessimism that I needed a break. After reading the first few paragraphs of "Wittgenstein's Nephew", I knew I had misjudged the man's writing beforehand. This is not so much Schopenhauer or Cioran as it is Ionesco or Gombrowicz; there is an element of humor in Bernhard's work (although not overt) which exposes the comedy of human existence in a comedic, rather than depressing and foreboding, way.

Bernhard's narrator is a close friend with Paul Wittgenstein, nephew of the famous philosopher. Paul, while as brilliant and analytical as his prestigious nephew, is unfortunately quite insane and completely misanthropic. Bernhard takes pains to highlight the fact that Paul, despite his pronounced writers' block and inability to produce anything (except a few scattered memoirs, which are apparently destroyed before his death), is as much of a giant as his nephew. The absurdity of life surrounds the two friends, as they are both incarcerated for more-or-less terminal illnesses, the narrator's being physical, Paul's being mental. We watch the sad deterioration of this once outgoing genius to a raving maniac, unable to pass a homeless man without giving away his life savings. The narrator describes his nearly inescapable feelings of hopelessness as his troubled friend Paul responds to everything with a disturbing:
"Grotesque, grotesque."

The narrator hates nature, and here we are reminded of Huysmans. His descriptions of the 'walks' he is recommended to take ("I was never a walker") arouse in him nothing but the most repulsed feelings. Bernhard's writing sometimes reminds one of Schopenhauer's essays; once he or his character voices an emotion or thought on human existence, they feel the need to repeat it five thousand times in five thousand different ways. In Schopenhauer, this is merely annoying. In Bernhard, it is funny.

The ending is the saddest part of the novel. The narrator, out of a "sickening instinct of life preservation," avoids his friend. He appears psychotic and talks of nothing but death. Paul, hated by his family (along with his nephew, the two are the familial outcasts), decides to play a "prank" which does not go over well. The last line by the narrator is crushing: "I have not visited his grave to this day."

i am a 23 old from austria, and like reading bernhard for a couple of years now. but its not just his books, but the person itself that fascinates me (and many others) a lot. i actually live 30min from bernhards farm near gmunden/ohlsdorf in upper-austria, which i visited a couple of times. is bernhard a missanthrop, or not? is he a pessimistic, or not? i came to the conclusion that he is not. in many times and ways he was fooling medias, newspapers and interviewers, he had his fun, he sold lots of books, he made a point, lots of money and he is a legend. his books are translated in over 30 lanuages. if you want to learn about bernhard you might read the book from karl ignaz hennetmair called "ein jahr mit thomas bernhard". that hennetmair is b. neighbour, and close friend for some 10 years until they disbanded for some reasons, nobody knows. actually, i tried bernhard in english, but, its not meeting the spirit of b. at all. maybe the meaning is still there but in german, the text reads like music. its unique...
"wittgensteins neffe" is a good bernhard starter, including the musical writing, and the bernhard world, without digging too deep (if you wanna dig really deep, choose "frost").
my favourite bernhard book is "das kalkwerk", and "der untergeher". - any emails are welcomed.