"Wittgenstein's Nephew" by Thomas Bernhard
Wittgenstein’s Nephew
by Thomas Bernhard
The fictional narrator, an author called Thomas Bernhard, is writing a memoir of Paul Wittgenstein – in real life the nephew of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and a man whose passion for music and whose touch of madness made him the narrator’s dearest friend.
The book begins with the memory of a hospital where the narrator is recovering from an operation. Paul Wittgenstein is in a different building of the hospital during one of his countless stays as a mental patient. The narrator, in the Hermann Pavilion for chest patients, sets off to visit his mad friend in the Ludwig Pavilion (a grotesque touch in names, he says).....
A book review from Amazon:
This is one of my favourite Bernhard novels. It is both funny and pessimistic at once, slamming the borgeois and literary worlds of Vienna, while examining the themes of mental and physical illness and the artistic temperament. And although this is a portrait of Paul Wittgenstein, nephew to Ludwig, it is also a largely revealing portrait of the artist. It is short, like most of his works, but naturally presented in the one-paragraph format that hypnotizes you and simply does not let you put the book down. This I would almost recommend as the perfect introduction to Bernhard … either way, a cracking good read.