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  • MediaDB / «Wittgenstein's Mistress" David Markson: download fb2, read online

    About the book: 2017 / An experimental novel by the American writer David Markson (1927-2010), recognized as a classic of postmodernism. The novel is a journey into solitude, where the main, and she is the only, heroine of a deserted world, cluttered with the cultural heritage of mankind, takes the reader. Tangling on its canvas many threads pulled from the biographies and works of famous artists (composers, philosophers, writers...), inserting bright fragments of ancient myths, stretching through them fragments of the heroine’s contradictory memories, imposing reservations and associations, the novel draws you into a deep pattern, in the nodes and crosshairs of which the appearance of a confused and lonely person appears, left alone with world culture (consolation? obsessive curse? unnecessary baggage ?a meaningless set of artifacts in the absence of humanity?)...Markson succeeds in this book on all the truly important levels of artistic conviction. He translated the abstract outlines of Wittgenstein's doctrine into the concrete theater of human loneliness. At the same time, his novel captured much better than the pseudobiography what made Wittgenstein a tragic figure and a victim of the very refracted modernity that he helped to discover. Polymath Markson has written a stunningly intelligent novel with clear writing, a mesmerizing voice and an ending that will bring tears to your eyes. In addition, he created (as if unwittingly) a powerful critical reflection on the connection of loneliness with language itself... David Foster Wallace