David Markson, the author of "Wittgenstein's Mistress," has died. He was 82.
Markson was a serious writer with a sense of play. His book "This Is Not a Novel" was, in fact, a novel, if a fractured one; it was an assemblage of short interludes, which acknowledged the presence of the writer, that seemed to point toward a novel in progress rather than fully realize it.
His most seminal work, "Wittgenstein's Mistress," was told from the point of view of a woman who had either lost her mind or was the last person on Earth. Although this may not sound all that unusual, the form and narrative pushed all kinds of boundaries when it came out in 1988. Edgy Publisher Dalkey Archive described it as "a novel unlike anything David Markson — or anyone else — has ever written before". When we were putting the Jacket Copy list of61 essential postmodern reads together, "Wittgenstein's Mistress" was a shoo-in.
