Wittgenstein’s Mistress

　　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, 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 in 1988; "one dizzying, delightful, funny passage after another. . . . Wittgenstein's Mistress gives proof positive that the experimental novel can produce high, pure works of imagination."

　　"Addresses formidable philosophic questions with tremendous wit . . . remarkable . . . a novel that can be parsed like a sentence; it is that well made." (New York Times Book Review 5-22-88)

　　"Unsettling, shimmering . . . compelling." (Publishers Weekly 12-15-89)

　　"A work of genius . . . an erudite, breathtakingly cerebral novel whose prose is crystal and whose voice

　　rivets and whose conclusion defies you not to cry." (David Foster Wallace)

　　"Brilliant and often hilarious . . . Markson is one working novelist I can think of who can claim affinities with Joyce, Gaddis, and Lowry, no less than with Beckett." (San Francisco Review of Books)

　　"In a just world, Wittgenstein's Mistress would be offered notice on the cover of the New York Review of Books. Let good readers therefore come and make up the difference." (Gordon Lish)