The author of Wittgenstein’s Mistress asks "What is a novel in any case?” and answers with a work both radically fragmented and hypnotically readable.
An aging author identified only as “Reader” contemplates the writing of a novel. As he does, other matters crowd his mind—literary and cultural anecdotes, endless quotations attributed and not, scholarly curiosities. We realize quickly that these are the residue of a lifetime’s reading, which is apparently all he has to show for his decades on earth.
Innumerable details accumulate about madness and calamity in artists’ and writers’ lives, the ubiquitous critical affronts, the startling bigotry, the countless suicides.
Out of these unlikely yet fascinating materials, David Markson has created a novel of extraordinary intellectual power: "Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.” While shoring up Reader’s ruins with such fragments, Markson has also managed to electrify his novel with an almost unbearable emotional impact.
