A woman named Kate lives alone in a beach house, typing an avalanche of memories and reflections though no one will read them, convinced as she is the last human being on the face of the earth. She knows it for sure, because she has not found a soul despite having traveled the entire world, taking refuge in the National Gallery, in the Metropolitan or in the Louvre, where she burned antiques and picture frames to withstand the cold in winter. Thus, revisiting the milestones of Western culture –from the Odyssey to Picasso, from Leonardo da Vinci to Brahms, from Shakespeare to Wittgenstein–, spinning one theme with another, the deep fractures of Kate's mind begin to appear here and there, and the narrative is then revealed in all its bitter and poignant beauty.

In that dance between what is said and what is not said, this masterful, ambitious and poetic novel moves that David Foster Wallace pointed out as one of his favorite works. Beyond its undeniable ingenuity, beyond its humor, its irony and its virtuosity, Wittgenstein's lover is ultimately a powerful reflection on memory, language, isolation, madness and the most heartbreaking loneliness.

"That such a self-absorbed, erudite, and avant-garde novel is at the same time so moving makes Wittgenstein's The Mistress the pinnacle of American experimental fiction."
david foster wallace

"Brilliant and at times hilarious... Markson is the only author to whom one can attribute an enormous affinity with Joyce, Gaddis and Lowry, and no less with Beckett."
San Francisco Review of Books