Convince Us: Wittgenstein's Mistress

By Jess D'Amico in Arts & Entertainment on Jul 6, 2007 7:26PM

We're still all barbeque and firework burns, but we managed to finish Wittgenstein's Mistress.

And we have to say . . . wow. Being fairly pretentious ourselves, we like to think that we've garnered a fair amount of high brow trivia. But this book pushed the boundaries of our art school education.

Sometimes when we read experimental fiction, we wonder if its not experimental simply because an author got sick of writing a traditional narrative, but in Mistress, it feels completely natural and in fact necessary, in order to tell her story. Especially since Kate is herself an unreliable narrator.

Wittgenstein's Mistress is, most simply put, the collected missive ramblings of a woman who believes herself to be the last person on earth. She writes about the only things she seems to remember, which happens to be not her family or friends or life, but instead on rennaissance painters and Greek philosophers.

The cultural references are at first dizzying and sometimes overwhelming, but only when Markson wants them to be. The book is summed up many times and restated through different lenses as it progresses.

"In any event all that any of these stories would appear to add up to, one suspects, is that many more people in this world than one's self were never able to shed certain baggage." Although she is referencing the personal lives of authors and painters and Greek heroes; Kate herself is able to shed the baggage of her former "real" life much easier than she is her art history classes.

Ultimately Kate admits hypothetically in a metanovel she thinks of writing, "Would it have made any sense whatsoever if I had said that the woman in my novel would have one day gotten more accustomed to a world without any people in it than she ever could have gotten to a world without such a thing as The Descent from the Cross by Rogier van der Weyden, by the way? Or without the Iliad? Or Antonio Vivaldi?"

It helped that we researched Wittgenstein a bit as we read the book, although one hardly needs to in order to understand or appreciate Mistress. The themes of cultural reference, and cultural reference as a mutable and personal identity is evident in the first few pages, and only becomes more warped as the weeks and months go by. Kate tells stories wrong, and her sense of time and place disappear at times. Even if the same stories are being told, they take on a tragic or personal meaning.

It's not much for summer reading, we'll admit. Our attention span was rather short sometimes and it was all we could do not to flip through a couple pages. But ultimately, we've come out feeling elightened, a little bit smarter, and much smugger.