The World as I Found It (New York Review Books Classics) [Paperback]

Bruce Duffy (Author), David Leavitt (Introduction)

Book Description

Release date: October 12, 2010 | Series: New York Review Books Classics

When Bruce Duffy’s The World As I Found It was first published more than twenty years ago, critics and readers were bowled over by its daring reimagining of the lives of three very different men, the philosophers Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. A brilliant group portrait with the vertiginous displacements of twentieth-century life looming large in the background, Duffy’s novel depicts times and places as various as Vienna 1900, the trenches of World War I, Bloomsbury, and the colleges of Cambridge, while the complicated main characters appear not only in thought and dispute but in love and despair. Wittgenstein, a strange, troubled, and troubling man of gnawing contradictions, is at the center of a novel that reminds us that the apparently abstract and formal questions that animate philosophy are nothing less than the intractable matters of life and death.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Said PW of this first novel about the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: "The enigmatic Wittgenstein could imagine the unimaginable, but never would he have imagined it possible that he would one day appear as the protagonist of a noveland a delightful one, at that."
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

"This," asserts the author, "is fiction." Though a detailed narrative of the life and times of eminent 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, "it is not history, philosophy, or biography." Duffy's first novel is not for the reader looking to understand contemporary philosophy; indeed, philosophers may object to its use as a gloss on a young man's private anguish. And some readers may wonder whether the many characters borrowed from real life are being fairly represented. But readers who like a broad canvas will find this work appealing, moving as it does from uppercrust Vienna to pre-war Cambridge to the battlefields of World War I and World War II. Alas, there is some infelicitous phrasing here, and the discussions of what's doing in philosophy can read like an encyclopedia. But in scope and ambition this work is finally compelling. Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 592 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics; Reprint edition (October 12, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590173600
• ISBN-13: 978-1590173602
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 1.2 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #511,314 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Vivid and believable. June 20, 1998

By Richard Thurston

Format:Paperback

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.

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars At its best, an exciting novel about philosophers! February 13, 2006

By John L Murphy TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

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.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars forging flesh and blood out of the artifacts of history September 4, 2001

By Ben Gilworth

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

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.