Perhaps I'm merely in a troubled state of mind these days, however, this novel, as well as the other text that I'm currently struggling through, Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, struck me as both brilliant and, as the same time, as a wholly unsatisfying read. That is to say, I loved the unique voice/style of the novel right from the get-go, I got (at least some of) the many references to so many things that I know and love--Wittgenstein's Tractatus, galleries, paintings, and the lives of the famous painters, places in the world with which I'm familiar and love, the identification of the narrator with the women of ancient Greek literature, the many other literary references and the personal anecdotes about various composers, writers, and visual artists, even the text's nostalgic use of cats--but, in the long run, these accumulated trivia and the staccato style of one sentence/statement per paragraph, and then usually one or two more re-questioning or re-calibrating what has just been said, although clever and philosophical... and the many, many other types of repetition... made the actual reading of the novel rather more tedious than pleasurable. I read one reviewer here below who actually liked the character and the accumulated trivia until she read the essay/afterword by David Foster Wallace at the end explaining the Wittgensteinian references, which ruined it for her. I had exactly the opposite feeling--that without the clever references to nominalism and the nature of reality as a linguistic re-presentation this would have been terribly repetitive and largely a long series of inconsequential chit-chat. Despite the novel's being constructed out of all of that, I did get a feel for the character and found myslef somewhat immersed in its situation, a rather hellish, post-apocalyptic scenario--to be a lone voice coming through a type-script in a world rendered utterly meaningless in terms of communication because there is no longer anyone else to speak with, interact with, nor will there ever again be someone to read one's words; still, this would appear to be the challenge that Markson set for himself: to write an entertaining novel about the inability of anything important or communicative happening because of said situation. Nice and worthy try. I put it on the shelf for a re-read one day, but I cannot say that I enjoyed it this first time through. And I've immediately turned to a Hubert Selby Jr. novel in order to counteract the dryness I found here with full-scale assault on my humanity through torture and empathy. Perhaps it's because my roommate has gone away for a month of research abroad, my son will spend the Easter holiday with my ex's family and with various other of his friends, and, without my classes running, I will probably come to feel the same loneliness over the next week or so that Wittgenstein's Mistress narrates.