It is 1967. In separate wings of a Viennese hospital, two men lie
bedridden. The narrator, named Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung
ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of the celebrated philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein, is suffering from one of his periodic bouts of madness. As
their once-casual friendship quickens, these two eccentric men begin to
discover in each other a possible antidote to their feelings of
hopelessness and mortality--a spiritual symmetry forged by their shared
passion for music, strange sense of humor, disgust for bourgeois Vienna,
and great fear in the face of death. Part memoir, part fiction,
Wittgenstein's Nephew is both a meditation on the artist's struggle to
maintain a solid foothold in a world gone incomprehensibly askew, and a
stunning--if not haunting--eulogy to a real-life friendship.