Wittgenstein’s Mistress

Wittgenstein's Mistress is one of the strangest novels I've ever read, and one of the most absorbing.

Kate may be the last person on Earth. Or she may be profoundly unreliable. Either way, we're trapped inside her head as she jumps between art, philosophy, old memories and whatever else surfaces. She repeats herself, corrects herself, forgets what she's already told us. That repetition is part of the point, and at times it got exhausting. But slowly, the fragments add up to a devastating portrait of loneliness.

And somehow Markson makes it funny. Where else will you find a sentence like “While I was peeing, I thought about Lawrence of Arabia”?

If you need a plot, skip it. If you've ever wondered what a novel can do after it throws out almost everything novels usually depend on, read this one. My edition includes David Foster Wallace's essay on the book as an afterword.

I love books where the experiment isn't a trick but the only way the story could be told. This is one of them, and I'm already looking forward to rereading it.