The World As I Found It

New York: New York Review Books, 2010. First Printing [Stated]. Trade paperback. Very good. xv, [9], 558, [10] pages. Originally published in 1987. Introduction by David Leavitt. [ David Leavitt (born June 23, 1961) is an American novelist, short story writer, and biographer.] Signed by author on blank page preceding the Introduction. Cover has slight wear and soiling. Bruce Michael Duffy (born June 9, 1951) is an American author. He is best known for his novel The World As I Found It, a fictionalized account of the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a prominent 20th century philosopher. In 1988, Duffy won a Whiting Award and received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Joyce Carol Oates named "The World As I Found It" as one of "five great nonfiction novels," calling the book "a bold and original work of fiction" and "one of the most ambitious first novels ever published" (Salon). In October 2010, "The World As I Found It" was republished as a Classic by the New York Review of Books. Duffy has also contributed to Harper's Magazine, Time Magazine and Life magazine, among others. When Bruce Duffy's The World As I Found It was first published 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. Derived for the initial Kirkus review: Stunning, bold first novel very loosely based on the erratic career of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In a buoyant style, Duffy imagines Wittgenstein's life as a series of collisions, beginning with his turbulent family life and especially with his arrival at Cambridge and his rocky friendships with Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and Lytton Strachey and the Cambridge Apostles. While Russell and Moore vie for Wittgenstein's loyalty, Strachey and the Apostles see a star on the ascendant and move in quickly to enlist him within their ranks. But precisely those qualities that make Wittgenstein a recognizably brilliant student--the exactitude, the elimination of unnecessary detail--render him incapable of a soft berth in academe. In the meantime, Russell has problems of his own, what with the demands of a mistress, the maintenance of reputation, and the dirty but necessary chore of fending off intellectual and sexual pretenders to the throne. Somewhat off to the side, a perfect foil for the bombastic Russell, stands the ever-tactful Moore, acting as a buffer between Russell and Wittgenstein. Then WW I intrudes, separating Wittgenstein and his friends, who find themselves on opposite sides of the conflict, and we later see Wittgenstein languishing as a schoolteacher in a slovenly Austrian town before going through a spiritual renewal and finally returning to Cambridge to become one of Europe's reigning philosophers. Duffy has concocted letters, rearranged biography, toyed with language and philosophy, and come up with an idiosyncratic tale that, line after line, crackles with sharp wit. A spectacular first showing.