From the bookshelf of David Foster Wallace…

Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson

Why we're reading this: Part of DFW's list of "Five Direly Underappreciated Novels Since 1960" that he made for salon.com
[close] Part of DFW's list of "Five Direly Underappreciated Novels Since 1960" that he made for salon.com [close]

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MyFleshSingsOut

(page 189 of 256)
— Feb 04, 2009 05:49PM

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Oct 03, 2008

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bookshelves: david-foster-wallace-told-me-so, fiction

Read in February, 2009

Ok, right up front, I read this on the basis that David Foster Wallace, who is unambiguously my literary hero, ascribed extremely high praise to this book. Foregoing any knuckle-biting self-analysis over what effect this had on my perceptions of the book I will just give my thoughts directly.

First off, I think I could accept a description of this book as "pretentious", "self-indulgent", "plotless", etc. All the usual suspects. Large swaths of its cont...more Ok, right up front, I read this on the basis that David Foster Wallace, who is unambiguously my literary hero, ascribed extremely high praise to this book. Foregoing any knuckle-biting self-analysis over what effect this had on my perceptions of the book I will just give my thoughts directly.

First off, I think I could accept a description of this book as "pretentious", "self-indulgent", "plotless", etc. All the usual suspects. Large swaths of its contents are jumbled thoughts about painters, museums, writers, philosophers, ancient Greek mythology, and other assorted ivory tower, academic name-droppings and trivia. The book is constructed as series of single sentence paragraphs, has no breaks, no chapters. The narrator repeats the same things several times, self-interrogates with a faulty memory about what she's written, failed to mention, perhaps already mentioned, and so forth. HOWEVER, there's more to it than this. To invoke a cliche about "avant garde" literature and "experimental" art generally: this is a "difficult" book. It takes effort. It takes reading between the lines. In short it, it requires patient meditation and perhaps the "just so" levels of circumstance equalized just right to fully enjoy.

(post hoc, randomly inserted trivia: this book was rejected 54 times before being published, there's a interview with Markson at the end in my copy)

I found myself totally smitten with it immediately, before the blizzardy bursts of aforementioned "name-droppings" really kicked in. Okay, stepping back again for a moment, I think its very necessary to go into this book realizing that it consists of the strange, non-linear, typed thoughts of a woman who is, within the logic of the novel, the very last animal on the planet. No more humans, no more seagulls, no more cats, etc. This circumstance is not explained, at least not explicitly so. What IS explained though are seemingly random accounts of traversing the globe by her lonesome--living in famous European art museums--staying warm by burning art, artifacts, frames of famous paintings--admissions of periods of time where she was undeniably "mad"--descriptions of reading collections of ancient Greek plays and tearing out and burning each page after reading both sides in order to stay warm--sleeping in, driving and destroying and (oddly enough) nearly being killed by some of the millions of abandon vehicles she finds--discovering tapedecks set to "Play" in said vehicles and listening to beautiful music in them--and many, many other heartbreaking, beautiful little descriptive gems of these kind of things that would transpire eventually in such a reality.

The flurry of meandering thoughts about artists, writers, etc, (and the many dis/connections between them) as annoying as they sometimes became (though much of it was very interesting) really do serve as an excellent device which both obscures and sheds light upon the more fleshed out picture of Kate, our singular "protagonist"/narrator. A character whom I basically fell in love with, perhaps in a superficial way as so much of her person is obscured with the constant asides and gaping holes within the "plot"...but I recant the "superficial" there and want to replace it with the idea that I fell in love with her humanity, as cheesy as that may sound. She is the single loneliest character I've ever encountered. Her descriptions of imagining having seen a cat at the Colosseum in Rome, which becomes a motif throughout the book (like most of her thoughts, they repeat, all motif-ishly) becomes more clearly heartbreaking as they go on. She often has this emotionally detached voice, this sound of resignation, but it cracks and becomes desperate loneliness for the briefest flashes. She describes putting dozens of open cans of cat food about and being unable to tell if any has been eaten or not, though she seems know beneath her desperation and wishful thinking that there are no creatures left but her.

Good grief, this book is appearing more beautiful to me upon reflecting on it right now than it was while I was reading it. Another cliche about "difficult" art: it makes for slow digestion. Thinking about it more now I realize that there are hundreds of beautiful little descriptions scattered throughout this book, cropping up amongst the scatterbrained trivia...some so beautiful that to try to describe them out of context just feels...wrong.

I could go on giving sketches of her sketches, but I think, to somewhat relevantly quote Wittgenstein, "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."(less)

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