The World As I Found It

August 4, 1987
Improbable as it may seem, this long, sometimes complex first novel featuring the influential Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and his colleagues/friends/rivals, Cambridge philosophers Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, is abundant with life and almost unflaggingly interesting. Deviating only when it must from the record, the lightly fictionalized work progresses chronologically through the convolutions of Wittgenstein's career: his early life in Austria; his arrival in Cambridge; his experiences in the first World War; his unhappy memories of his brilliantly gifted older brothers, both homosexual, both suicides; his relations with a rich, powerful, autocratic father; and his succession of young male friends. All the while Russell is reeling from Lady Ottoline Morrell (of Bloomsbury fame) to a series of wives and other wandering women and the good Moore, already far from young, is marrying happily. The enigmatic Wittgenstein could imagine the unimaginable, but never would he have imagined it possible that he would one day appear as the protagonist of a noveland a delightful one, at that.