What's an underrated/unknown novel or series that you think deserves more attention?

In 2010, The World As I Found It got republished as a NYRB Classic, with an introduction by David Leavitt. I think it is a bit of a modern classic.

The basic shape of the book mostly follows the basic shape of Wittgenstein’s life, growing up in a rich and immensely cultured family in Vienna, with a father, Karl, who is one of the great, monstrous patriarchs of fiction. Karl Wittgenstein was the son of a successful businessman, but he rejected the education his father bestowed upon him and ended up in New York City in his late teens, with hardly any money and only a violin to make more with. He worked a variety of odd jobs before coming back to Austria aged 20 and studying engineering, thereafter working his way up to being a major steel tycoon. Given such a self-made background, fictional Karl is understandably immensely self-confident and sure of himself, to the ruin of at least some of his children (two of his sons committed suicide and another one probably did).

Ludwig is understandably intimidated by his father, who seems to have an opinion on literally everything, including the superiority of Viennese baked goods to those of other countries. Young Ludwig makes his way to Manchester to follow his father and become an engineer, but while he’s there, he gets the bug for mathematics and then philosophy, and he rather quickly turns into into the frighteningly uncompromising philosophical hunter-killer that so spooked his original tutor, Bertrand Russell.

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The World As I Found It, by the late Bruce Duffy.

But also, there’s the suggestion that Russell, the great rationalist, is the emptiest of them: he’s unable to stop chasing women, for example, and he rationalises his own skirt-chasing tendencies as a joint commitment by himself and his second wife Dora to free love, ignoring the fact that she’s a lot less free to indulge in it than he is because he sticks her with raising the kids while he’s off giving lecture tours and shagging women who attend them.

The fictional Wittgenstein’s sexuality is a bit more tortured than that of the real man, I think. This is a Wittgenstein who, from time to time, helplessly can’t do without sex, but I think the real man found sexual desire to be more of an irritating inconvenience than anything else, as well as something he could periodically feel vaguely guilty about. I don’t actually mind the fictional Wittgenstein having a rather dramatic sex life, though, because it makes the novel more vivid and, well, visceral than it would otherwise have been.

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Moore, the least sparkling of them but the most likeable, is associated with images of earth, water and food and drink. He’s a basically decent, uncomplicated, highly intelligent man with a great gift for analysis, and there’s a fantastic episode early on when he’s a young student at Cambridge and Russell decides that he’s simply too naive for his own good, and needs to be shown what the world is really like. They go on a walking tour in the Lake District, and in the pub one night, Russell deliberately tries to school Moore by striking up a conversation with a middle-aged man, a cynical Classicist with a love of naughty Roman literature and raffish stories. The man tells them a particularly sleazy anecdote about having rather kinky sex in a Hong Kong brothel, but rather than be shocked at human depravity, Moore instantly sees through what Russell was trying to do and explodes with contempt at him for having the presumption to think what he, Moore, ‘needed’: What has filth to teach?, he shouts at Russell.

Bruce Duffy (1951–2022) only wrote three novels in 35 years, and I’ve read only one of them, his first, the subject of this answer, but it had a huge impact on 20-year-old me.

The Beacon Hill episode does, however, contain the bit where Russell’s more human side comes out: the schoolchildren are off on a school outing while he and Moore are interviewing Wittgenstein, and a storm is brewing, and Russell becomes more and more anxious that something bad will happen to the kids.

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In a similar way, Russell is almost subliminally associated with air and emptiness. He talks a lot, very fluently, and his talk is described as a form of combat—he ‘fends’ and ‘stabs’ with words—because he’s more concerned with asserting his superiority over others than he is about the search for truth, and he can’t help wounding people just out of habit.

The World As I Found It has been described as a fictionalised account of the life of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, but I think it’s more useful to think of it as a historical novel about mostly real people. Wittgenstein is the principal character, but he’s a fictional version of Wittgenstein, and the novel is organised more by narrative rhythm and associations and themes than by strict accuracy. It’s both rich in detail, and extremely fleet and readable.

Throughout the novel, and subtly, so that I didn’t notice until my third or fourth reading of it, Wittgenstein is associated with images of light and darkness. When we first meet him, in the opening pages, he’s at the cinema with one of the young male students who used to function as his disciples, practically bathing in the reflected light from the cinema screen. Wittgenstein is constantly seeking light and clarity, and is constantly confounded by finding darkness and inconsistency, especially in people. He is haunted by lots of things, and driven by impulses that the people around him don’t really understand.

Hi everybody! I have been looking at posts on narcs and narc abuse on here and if has really helped me out a lot. I am currently struggling with my situation and need some advice/support. I met a narc last year, everything seemed to good to be true. Love bombing, always texting calling and taking me on dates. Everything changed when someone warned me about him out in public in front of him and who he is. This caused a conflict with us and the love bombing seized. he would tell me that everything is okay and i can come and talk. He would set a time limit on me and kick me out after that. he would then text me like everything was fine and we hung out again and after that he completely ghosted me for one week. He came back and texted me a week later laughing about the ghosting and acting like nothing had happened. he continued to text me ( not like in the beginning) make plans with me, then on the day of the plans he would just ghost me. One day he would act interested the next silence. i contacted him a month later and he acted like nothing happened. He was on a vacation and sent me a picture of another woman ( someone he allegedly met on the trip) to strike a reaction but i never gave him one. After the trip he came to my place and was extremely rude, accusing me of going on dates with a bunch of men. The next day he accused me of being an alcoholic and that he wanted nothing to do with me but said well maybe we can be "friends" then ghosted me i assumed at this point it was over and i would never hear from him again. He contacted me on the holiday a month later acting like everything was great. We ended up hanging out a month or so later and when we hung out it went well, i thought things were going in the right direction. after we hung out.. silence. I would try to text him and if he replied it would be very short then he just stopped replying. He ghosted me for almost three months. I thought he was done this time and of course he popped up again like nothing happened. At this point i was getting sick of if so i questioned him as to why he dissapeared and always does this. Of course he had some sob story about a injury and family member dying of cancer. I felt pity for him and he gave me an apology.. so i took him back stupidly. things seemed to be going smooth for a couple months, of course until his family member died and his injury got better he never contacted me and was distant. Menawhile, i was there for him during the difficult time for him. He lied to me about the funeral and never wanted to chat. I was chasing him and he would always claim nothing was wrong but when i said i thought he used me when he was down he could not handle it and would always tell me he didnt care and to go away. I would get so upset i would try texting him to work it out he would barelt respond and if he did he would not be nice about it. we did hang out a couple times after that, he would ignore me after. One day i was like hey i think you are seeing someone else, and i was like well ixam seeing someone so no problem if you are he said " buy bye good luck with your new guy stop contacting me" i was devastated and tried to get into contact with him for weeks then i just gave up and accepted it was over. He ended up contacting me a month later acting like everything was fine. He wanted to go out and have drinks i told him i would. He and i both seemed to have a great time. He ends up ignoring me again. I kept texting him trying to figure out what was wrong. He kept saying everything was fine and i said ok can we hang out again? He said maybe i was like why? He just kept saying maybe … our last conversation we had… i said what is wrong ? He said nothing is wrong everything is fine. I asked him why he keeps saying maybe. He said " maybe but i dont want to see you right now" i said why? He saix " im just not feeling it, if i wanted to date i would" i said why did you contact me less then a week ago wanting to go out? He said i didnt.. even though he did. So i said should i just move on or what? He said whatever you want to do. So i said that he was really confusing me and asked him if he had anything more to say before i move on? My messages were turning green so i panicked he blocked me and reacted irrationally. I said " omg did you block me? My messages are not going through. Even texted him on my work phone asking what was up. And called him twice ( please dont judge me i know it is pathetic i never was this type of girl before him) so he replied and said " Ok I'll block you now" then immedietly blocked me. He has never blocked me before since I have met him he will just ghost. Is this ths final discard aka " grand finale? Did i just push him too far? this has upset me so much its hard to even function.

A memorable episode happens about halfway through: Russell comes to realise that his student Wittgenstein has the insight and energy as an original thinker that he no longer has, and that his treasured theory of judgement is no good, because Wittgenstein doesn’t like it (Wittgenstein can’t even articulate exactly why he doesn’t like it, but Russell has so lost confidence in himself that he trusts Wittgenstein’s mistrust of the theory.) On being told by his dentist that he may have cancer of the gums, an end-of-his-tether Russell sits down to write a letter to his mistress, but it morphs into first a sort of Socratic dialogue, and then an incredibly cheesy philosophical novel called The Perplexities of John Forstice, which he nevertheless greatly enjoys writing and feels certain is a masterpiece. For several weeks he is buoyed up by this sense of becoming a whole new author, but then he rereads the manuscript and is mortified to see that it’s actually garbage.

A good chunk of the latter part of the novel is an extended episode set in 1931, when Wittgenstein is obliged to go through the formality of passing the oral examination for his PhD so that he can be a Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. This takes place mostly at the school Russell and his wife had founded, Beacon Hill, and it features afaik a wholly invented character, a German ex-soldier friend of Wittgenstein’s named Max, who’s all brawny and outdoorsy and so Christian that he refuses to accept money in return for hard labour.

Max serves as a sort of fulcrum around which the concerns of Wittgenstein, Russell and Moore revolve: to Wittgenstein, he begins as an example of someone who Wittgenstein perceives as sort of naturally good, except that Max has undercurrents of anger and more than a hint of violence. To Russell, Max is the guy who has sex with a young woman he’s got his eye on, Lily, which infuriates him. And to Moore and Dorothy, he is simply this inexplicable, hulking guest who they have to deal with because he’s Ludwig’s friend. (Max shows up later in the book in a much more sinister capacity.)

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One of the great pleasures of the book is the triple characterisation of the three main philosophers in it: Wittgenstein, Russell and G.E. Moore, who is now the least famous but who was enormously influential in his day, and friendly with both of them.

Wittgenstein proceeds on his lonely journey, while Russell and Moore negotiate their own never tremendously solid friendship, which fractures irreparably when Russell pulls a characteristically passive-aggressive trick on Moore concerning some notes of Wittgenstein’s conversation that Moore had passed to him.

This may make Moore sound rather prissy, but one of the other great stories in the book is his comically bumbling courtship of, and ultimately happy marriage to, a woman twenty years younger than him: Dorothy Ely, one of his students. The proposal almost goes sideways when, he having proposed to her, she confesses that, yes, she does love him, but she can’t marry him because she really dislikes his first name, George. (‘You don’t even look like a George,’ she observes, to his considerable bafflement.) Desperate for her to say yes, he perseveres, and after some thought she decides that she’ll just call him ‘Bill’ instead, and accepts his proposal.

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Bruce Duffy only wrote two other novels. The last one, Disaster Was My God, was about Arthur Rimbaud, and I actually had a copy of it at one point, but somewhere between flats, it got lost. Pity, as I am a big Rimbaud fan as well as a Wittgenstein fan.