This extraordinary book is a journey into loneliness that encompasses all the stuff of life
Kate, the narrator of David Markson’s 1988 novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress, is a world traveller. She has sailed the Aegean and the Bering Strait, and driven across Russia and western Europe. A painter, Kate has not only visited but lived in some of the world’s most famous art museums: the Met, the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Tate. She has displayed her own canvases beside Renaissance masterpieces. She has visited Hisarlik in Turkey, supposed site of Troy, made pilgrimage to a Mexican village, and poured hundreds of tennis balls down the Spanish Steps in Rome. Kate can, in theory, do whatever she wants, whenever she wants. But her absolute freedom is also a form of imprisonment, because Kate is the last person – in fact the last life form – on Earth.
Or is she? Perhaps she is mentally ill, and her solipsism symptomatic rather than literal. She has, she says, been “mad” at some point, but claims: “I can almost always make a distinction between periods when I was mad and periods when I was not.” The way certain of her recollections repeat with key details altered, the way names of her family members and ex-lovers swap and change, suggest a slippage between perception and reality, but this soon ceases to matter. Likewise, the lack of explanation for Kate being the only survivor of an unexplained calamity is unimportant. Earlier drafts of the novel included one, but as Markson revised the manuscript he decided it was redundant. Whatever else is going on in this deeply complex, immensely readable book, its great theme is human aloneness, and it is the truth of that condition, as opposed to the reality of Kate’s situation, that really matters to and for the novel.
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