Like Lars Iyers’s Spurious trilogy (which I’ve only read two-thirds of, though I do plan to rectify that), Wittgenstein Jr is a funny book, and by funny I mean amusing and also strange. It’s partly a satire of academia, and partly a coming-of-age story, but saying that doesn’t give a proper sense of Iyers’s distinctive style, which you can see on his blog that contains notes toward this book. Wittgenstein Jr is narrated by Peters, who’s in his final undergrad year at Cambridge. He’s signed up for a philosophy class that soon turns intimate, going from forty-five students down to twelve in the first month. Peters and his friends call the professor Wittgenstein, and are simultaneously fascinated by him and utterly confused by him. Wittgenstein is paranoid, seemingly on the verge of a breakdown: his brother, who was also an academic at Oxford, committed suicide, and he worries that he, too, will go mad. Their class goes for walks, “to wash off their brains,” and Wittgenstein makes impenetrable statements about logic and rants about academia in general and Cambridge in particular. We get glimpses of Peters and his (all male, mostly white, mostly well-off) classmates/friends both in and out of class, often hilariously. I think my favorite part of the whole book is this, from a scene in which the students don’t know what to do with themselves in the absence of their teacher:
We look up the Wittgenstein entry on Wikipedia. Very long! We search for pictures instead. A glum Wittgenstein, standing by a blackboard. A dour Wittgenstein, walking with a friend. Wittgenstein, gloomy in tartan. Wittgenstein in profile—clearly suicidal.
We google cheery Wittgenstein. No results (130)
Leave a Reply