1967. In different buildings of a Vienna hospital, two men lie bedridden. The narrator, named Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung disease; his friend Paul, nephew of the famous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, suffers from one of his periodic bouts of insanity. As their once casual friendship grows stronger, these two eccentric men begin to discover in each other a possible antidote to feelings of hopelessness and mortality—a spiritual symmetry forged by their shared passion for music, a strange sense of humor, a distaste for bourgeois Vienna, and a great fear of facing death. . Part memoir, part fiction, Wittgenstein's Nephew is a meditative image of an artist's struggle to maintain a foothold in the world—a stunning eulogy of real-life friendship.