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.¿
