Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson

Earlier drafts of the novel included one, but as Markson revised the manuscript he decided it was redundant. Likewise, the lack of explanation for Kate being the only survivor of an unexplained calamity is unimportant. 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. Or is she? Perhaps she is mentally ill, and her solipsism symptomatic rather than literal.

But her absolute freedom is also a form of imprisonment, because Kate is the last person – in fact the last life form – on Earth. Kate can, in theory, do whatever she wants, whenever she wants. 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. She has displayed her own canvases beside Renaissance masterpieces. 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 sailed the Aegean and the Bering Strait, and driven across Russia and western Europe. Kate, the narrator of David Markson’s 1988 novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress, is a world traveller.

Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson