Wittgenstein's Mistress Audiobook By David Markson cover art

Wittgenstein's Mistress

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Wittgenstein's Mistress

By: David Markson
Narrated by: Madeleine Dauer
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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 listener 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."

©1988 David Markson (P)2024 Tantor Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological World Literature Witty
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DFW was so right, this book is frickn awesome! Love the swirling “plot” and the asides to painters

Wow

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First off, I thought the reader did an excellent job. Great voice that really seemed to fit the character. But the book itself I found quite difficult and while certainly different and interestingly presented it gets a thumbs down from me as a more casual reader who does not know who wittgenstein is and also lacks knowledge of ancient Greece, classical music, and art. I felt much of it went over my head. I wouldn't call it a bad book but just the wrong book for me. That being said I can appreciate the uniqueness of the writing style.

hard read

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This is brilliant. If you like both Wittgenstein and experimental fiction, try this out. It’s incredibly creative.

The world is everything that is the case.

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I've owned the book for 15 years. Bought it because of DFW's recommendation. Lost it. Found it. Shelved it with my other Dalkey Archive/Deep Vellum books. Read Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and decided I was ready. I was not. Nobody is ready for this experimental dance with solipsism and loss. But, I guess, we are all (in this age of information and big egos) quite a bit solipsistic. Probably way more even than when Markson wrote this. We are trapped in our head, trapped by our language, alone writing reviews of books I may or may not have fully understood, in sand, or Goodreads. Anyway, enjoyed it. I'd love to understand more how women take this. Markson, as a man, wrote a book that is 100 percent filled with the writing and thinking, etc., of a woman. The first thing I'd do if reincarnated as a woman would not be to read this book as a woman, but it would be 3rd, 4th of 5th perhaps.

Also, enjoyed reading DFW's take on it, now appearing as an afterword in recent editions. I almost removed a star because this book demands a re-read and that probably also means I will now have to find and read Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, so damn you Mark, er David Markson.

In the beginning, sometimes I reviewed on Audible

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in fact, as a matter of fact, perhaps, however, incidentally, one would have thought a philosopher who studied Wittgenstein would have liked this, however, as a matter of fact, one did not like it at all.

utterly pretentious crud

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