Wittgenstein's Mistress
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Wittgenstein's Mistress is a novel unlike anything David Markson or anyone else has ever written before. It is the story of a woman who is convinced and, astonishingly, will ultimately convince the reader as well that she is the only person left on earth. Presumably she is mad. And yet so appealing is her character, and so witty and seductive her narrative voice, that we will follow her hypnotically as she unloads the intellectual baggage of a lifetime in a series of irreverent meditations on everything and everybody from Brahms to sex to Heidegger to Helen of Troy. And as she contemplates aspects of the troubled past which have brought her to her present state--obviously a metaphor for ultimate loneliness--so too will her drama become one of the few certifiably original fictions of our time. "The novel I liked best this year," said the Washington Times upon the book's publication; "one dizzying, delightful, funny passage after another . . . Wittgenstein's Mistress gives proof positive that the experimental novel can produce high, pure works of imagination."
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Wittgenstein's Mistress is a book that I had virtually no idea whether I'd love or hate even while reading because I wondered at what point the long strings of fun facts- well, actually, fun lies, I guess- and completely stream of consciousness narrative that presents little story would begin to annoy me. Markson is a brilliant author; it never does. Wittgenstein's Mistress is a story about an insane woman who lives on a beach, used to live in museums, used to know William Gaddis (depending on how much of her stories you believe), burned down her own house, and is slowly deconstructing another one plank by plank. Not in that order, though, and even if you were to ask me the order, I would admit defeat and walk away with my head hung in shame. This book veers dangerously close to Pale Fire and Ulysses in terms of its nonsensicality and sense that you, the reader, have become a victim of trolling by the very author whose book you hold in your hands. Maybe it's just this book being more modern and not nearly as gruelingly obtuse as Pale Fire or Ulysses, but there really is something here. Sure, the book can be silly at times, but instead of feeling like an elaborate prank, it feels like you're actually listening to someone talking to herself after years of isolation. This book can be interpreted in many ways, however it can be broken down into two big categories for means of interpretation that both seem equally plausible by the end of the story: Kate is mentally insane and she's not the only person left on Earth (the bit about her wanting to write an autobiography at the end could suggest this, too, and suggest that Kate is the author instead of David Markson), or all of this is actually happening and her insanity is caused by not being surrounded by any human beings. The constant repetition of lines reminds me of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. Sometimes Kate says things that are very very astute, sometimes she says things that are funny, sometimes she says something truly confusing and seemingly off color. A brilliant, sometimes funny, sometimes perplexing, sometimes deeply philosophical work that serves as the modernist Pale Fire's postmodernist counterpart.
