The World as I Found It [Paperback]

When Bruce Duffy’sThe World As I Found Itwas 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.“The World As I Found Itis both thought-provoking and hard to put down—a good read. It should be fascinating not only to Wittgenstein buffs, but to anyone who is curious about the ways philosophy and life both arise from each other and wage war on each other.”
—Vicki Hearne

“Bruce Duffy's novelThe World As I Found It, published in 1987, was one of the more astonishing literary debuts in recent memory. In defiance of common practice, Mr. Duffy gave the world not a tender, autobiographical coming-of-age story or a slim collection of finely wrought tales of family dysfunction but more than 500 pages of dazzling language and dizzying speculation on the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein.” —A.O. Scott,The New York Times

“A novel constructed out of the lives, thoughts, appetites, egos, the very toenails and pocketwatches of Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and G.E. Moore…astonishing.” —Los Angeles Times

“Duffy has sustained a miracle. A rich, eloquent, poised masterlƒE