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Original Essays | November 9, 2009

Jesse Bullington: IMG Abash'd the Devil Stood



I don't believe in evil. It's a word I use, certainly, because words are shortcuts and we all take the short way round from time to time, but that's... Continue »
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Wittgenstein's Mistress: In the Beginning, Sometimes I Left Messages in the Street (American Literature)

by David Markson

Wittgenstein's Mistress: In the Beginning, Sometimes I Left Messages in the Street (American Literature) Cover

ISBN13: 9781564782113
ISBN10: 1564782115
Condition: Standard
All Product Details

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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Wittgenstein's Mistress is a novel unlike anything David Markson — or anyone else — has ever written. It is the story of a woman who is convinced — and may ultimately convince the reader 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 from Brahms to sex to Heidegger to Helen of Troy.

Review:

"As precise and dazzling as Joyce....I couldn't put this book down. I can't forget it....Original, beautiful, and an absolute masterpiece." Ann Beattie

Review:

"A work of genius...an erudite, breathtaking cerebral novel whose prose is crystal and whose voice rivets and whose conclusion defies you not to cry." David Foster Wallace

Review:

"Brilliant and often hilarious...Markson is the one working novelist I can think of who can claim affinities with Joyce, Gaddis, and Lowry, no less than with Beckett." San Francisco Review of Books

Review:

"The novel I liked best this year....one dizzying, delightful, funny passage after another....Wittgenstein's Mistress gives proof positive that the experimental novel can produce high, pure works of imagination." Washington Times

Synopsis:

The heroine of David Markson's witty experimental novel is a woman named Kate, and she's convinced that she is the only person left on earth. Is she insane? And does it matter? As she ranges back through the events of her life, and through a ragbag of opinions on everything from Rembrandt's cat to Willem de Kooning's soccer shirt, Kate manages to find some kind of meaning for herself in the oddities she turns up.

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Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
WittsMiss, December 17, 2008 (view all comments by WittsMiss)
The novel’s concluding line—in many ways the saddest and most heart-breaking—is conversely the most optimistic as well; in the utter absence of any hope for the future, Kate continues her Sisyphean endeavor of artistic creation, repeating (not referencing) her earlier message in the sand and defying mortality by asserting her existence, even if it is true that her messages “begin to deteriorate…before they [are] finished being written” (185).
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Product Details

ISBN:
9781564782113
Subtitle:
In the Beginning, Sometimes I Left Messages in the Street
Author:
Markson, David
Author:
Moore, Steven
Afterword:
Moore, Steven
Publisher:
Dalkey Archive Press
Location:
Chicago
Subject:
General
Subject:
Literary
Subject:
Women
Subject:
Psychological fiction
Subject:
Survival
Subject:
Long island
Edition Number:
2nd pbk. ed.
Edition Description:
Dalkey Archive
Series:
American Literature Series
Series Volume:
no.4/86
Publication Date:
February 1990
Binding:
Paperback
Language:
English
Pages:
256
Dimensions:
8.50x5.60x.75 in. .74 lbs.

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