Wittgenstein's Mistress
David Markson
Language: English
Pages: 248
ISBN: 1564782115
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.”
been burned to the ground, nonetheless the fact that I am doing exactly that would appear to be indisputable. One day that house, too, will look as if Robert Rauschenberg had gotten to it. There is the house that I dismantled board by board and erased to the ground, I will think in walking past. Doubtless by then I will also be erasing another house. Naturally I have been leaving out such things as stone chimneys when I have spoken about houses as still being houses even when they are no
matter of fact, whom I do not believe I have mentioned at all in these pages. I have just realized something else. On the front seat of the vehicle in which I turned on the air-conditioning, after having gotten sweaty from hitting the tennis balls, there was a paperback edition of The Way of All Flesh, by Samuel Butler. Which presumably answers the question as to where I came upon the footnote about Samuel Butler having said that it was a woman who wrote the Odyssey. Or perhaps the book
actually. Well, or vice versa. But the point being that even with a page torn out of an atlas, instead of maritime charts, the entire trip took me only two unhurried days. In spite of having been frightened half to death by that ketch, near Lesbos, with its spinnaker taking noisy wind, even. But which in either case still scarcely comes close to making it a distance that calls for the sacrifice of anybody over, obviously. Let alone one's own child. And which is additionally not even to bring
1984, met him shortly after, and in the autumn of 1987 was allowed to read the manuscript of the novel. I loved it, and since I was just then talking with John O'Brien about joining his Dalkey Archive Press, I suggested that Markson send it there. That he did and, with no aesthetic obtuseness or commercial considerations hindering the process, the novel was immediately accepted and published the following May. It was widely and favorably reviewed, went through two printings in hardcover, then
Maupassant, for example, it is not to allude to one of his stories but to remember that he liked to row and ate his lunch at the Eiffel Tower because that was the only place in Paris from which he couldn't see the monument. The first half of the novel is filled with such trivia, but midway Kate's references begin to take a different turn and emphasize the darker side of the lives of cultural figures, noting those who went mad, were forced into exile or poverty, who committed suicide, went blind,