last fall, "House of Wittgenstein" portrays a troubled family. In 2004, Auberon's son Alexander, a former record producer, agent, and opera critic, who had tossed off books on classical music, properly broke into the family business with a five-generation family history, "Fathers and Sons." In his latest effort, Alexander Waugh casts his gaze into the darker thicket of another storied clan. The author and publisher Arthur Waugh begat two novelists, Alec, and Evelyn Evelyn, who attained fame with "Brideshead Revisited" (1945), begat Auberon, the journalist. Greek dramatists rooted in the houses of Cadmus and Atreus contemporary novelists can find predecessors among Émile Zola's "Rougon-Macquarts," Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks," or William Faulkner's "Snopeses." In England, the Waughs have held real-life literary eminence for over a century. Through the bleak despair of a Siberian prison camp and the terror of a Gestapo interrogation room, one courageous and unlikely hero emerges from the rubble of the house of Wittgenstein in the figure of Paul, an extraordinary testament to the indomitable spirit of human survival.Tragic literature abounds with dynasties. In this dramatic historical and psychological epic, Alexander Waugh traces the triumphs and vicissitudes of a family held together by a fanatical love of music yet torn apart by money, madness, conflicts of loyalty, and the cataclysmic upheaval of two world wars. Three of his sons committed suicide Paul, the fourth, became a world-famous concert pianist, using only his left hand and playing compositions commissioned from Ravel and Prokofiev while Ludwig, the youngest, is now regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. He bought factories and paintings and palaces, but the domineering and overbearing influence he exerted over his eight children resulted in a generation of siblings fraught by inner antagonisms and nervous tension.
Karl Wittgenstein, who ran away from home as a wayward and rebellious youth, returned to his native Vienna to make a fortune in the iron and steel industries. The Wittgenstein family was one of the richest, most talented, and most eccentric in European history.
From Alexander Waugh, the author of the acclaimed memoir Fathers and Sons, comes a grand saga of a brilliant and tragic Viennese family.
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