It probably took me less than 20 pages to be enamored with Wittgenstein's Mistress and I turned the last page quite in awe of David Markson.

What we read as the novel is an unbroken series of sentences being typed by a woman, who could be the last animal alive on the earth. One by one she pulls out little threads out of the tangled yarn that her fading and cluttered memory has become. As she unloads her intellectual baggage, she constantly corrects and contradicts herself. We see her struggle to hold on to a train of thought and connect her ideas in some manner. Many of the thoughts are repeated and re-visited, except by the time she comes back to a thought, she may be misrembering what she had said earlier. Different ideas blend into one another, time is bent out of shape, resulting in inaccurate and mixed-up facts. There are times when something which had existed only in her head takes the shape of reality that she completely believes in. She sees some broken bottles by the garbage disposal and imagines how Rembrandt could have painted that. Several pages later she informs us that Rembrandt's painting The Broken Bottles had been painted by him standing by a garbage disposal. Sometimes details from her present or past life project themselves onto learned knowledge of hers and color it with subjectivity. Within these seemingly disorganized sentences, there is an intricate pattern through which Markson brings forth the nature of memory, the close connection between imagination and our concept of reality.

"What an extraordinary change takes place...when for the first time the fact that everything depends upon how a thing is thought first enters the consciousness, when, in consequence, thought in its absoluteness replaces an apparent reality." - Kierkegaard

Her meandering thoughts on literature, art history, philosophers etc., perhaps have to do with escapism. Her ramblings are sprinkled with little tidbits of her daily life, but one rarely finds her talking about her past life or the family she once had. Slipping into madness may be the only way she can have an iota of sanity. While her being the last animal alive on the earth is an acceptable premise, there is some hint that this world may be existing only in her head. I see the possibility of this being a coping mechanism for her to deal with her son's death. Perhaps her trying to name the cat she thought she saw at the Colosseum or the tape that makes a cat-like scratching sound, is only an attempt to name the cat that her son used to have but never gave a name to. Cat was all they called it. However the dam does break at times and what it gives away is devastating. Throughout there is a sense of sadness lurking just beneath the words, that one can't shake off. Be it her trying to play tennis with herself, or her putting out cans of cat food for a cat she knows she had only imagined.

In her own rambling and scatterbrained manner, she brings up many a philosophical questions. Though I am not familiar with the related works, one of the themes I did notice was about Wittgenstein's concern with logic and precise use of language. She often discusses questions of This is not a pipe variety and worries about expressing herself accurately. The novel itself could be an example of some such philosophical theme in that the literal meaning of the words you see printed on the paper won't explicitly tell you the meaning of the novel. You have to peel the layer and discover the order in disorder. It is amazing how much Markson says without putting it into words.

Amidst all the trivia, philosophy and a heartbreaking depiction of loneliness, there are several beautiful scenes that leave quite an impression ... her sitting in an automobile watching Stratford-on-Avon fill up with snow, rolling hundreds of tennis balls down the Spanish steps or the transcendental view of the Parthenon in the afternoon Sun.

And the ending - the first 220 pages might be worth reading just to be able to experience those last 20 pages in the light of the rest of the novel.