Wittgensteinʼs mistress

Wittgensteinʼs mistress

1988 • 279 pages

Ratings4

Average rating3.3

15

(3.5, rounded up to 4 stars)
TL;DR - This is a mind-bending piece of fiction. One of the most surreal books I've ever read, or maybe will. Must-read if you're tired of linear plots and reliable narrators.
On the surface, Wittgenstein's Mistress is a very shallow piece of literature - a narrator who may or may not be the last person on Earth, and is looking to find other humans. There's not even a semblance of a plot. The protagonist is the definition of unreliable. The plot has no structure. Neither does it have a pacing.
Then why should you read it?
Precisely because of all of the things above. Because there is no plot, we are free to listen to Kate's musings on the relation between Shakespeare and Greece, on how Dostoyevsky cried after coming to the US, and much more supposedly meaningless trivia. Because the narrator is unreliable, it makes a cat-and-mouse game for the reader to remember which strand of plot is about to be rendered into incoherent fragments in the next few sentences. Because there is no structure, you are free to lose your train of thought and come back to it, and you'll realize that you've missed nothing, since nothing has happened in the first place! Because there's no pacing, you are free to ponder on Kate's absolute misery on being the last person on Earth, and to realize that the trivia is there for a reason (no spoilers).
Avant-garde doesn't even begin to cover it. This is one of the few original novels of our lifetime - and I can see why it was rejected a staggering fifty-four times. For me, I'll never look at literature the same way again. This is the very antithesis of what a novel is supposed to be - but then again, I suppose, that's the point.

January 29, 2020Report this review