'In the beginning, sometimes I left messages on the street,' is the first sentence of Wittgenstein's Mistress, an amazing novel I just had the pleasure to read. The novel, which contains no chapter breaks or dialog, comprises the internal musings of a woman who may or may not be the last person alive on the planet (although the circumstances by which this may have come to pass are never explained), and who may or may not be insane (in either event, she has suffered bouts of madness in the past). No surprise given the set-up, there's a pervasive sadness and melancholy to the prose, which gets more intense as you approach the end and get more insight into exactly who this woman is and what has happened to her, both before and after whatever it was that made her the last person on earth.
There is, however, much hilarity throughout the book: the author literally drives around the world -- from Moscow to Pennsylvania and Rome -- often stopping in the great museums to burn the frames of masterpieces for heat as with a gun she shoots out the windows to allow the smoke to escape. She burns some houses to the ground and dismantles others while writing Greek in the sand that will be soon washed away by the waves. As she does all of this, she muses on an incredible array of artists (loosely defined) -- including painters, writers, philosophers, and musicians -- going all the way back to the ancient Greeks (she is obsessed with Helen of Troy among others) up through the present (she claims to have met a few), and describing the foibles and manias of these cultural icons more than the works they produced. Her language is also very funny at times, and is an amazing combination of high-intellectual riffing and a kind of conversational style that sounds like it could have been written for the blogosphere. (The book was published in 1988.) 'The world is everything that is the case. I have no idea what I mean by that sentence I just typed, by the way,' is a typical example of how the author will say something profound or lyrical in one second and sabotage it in the next. Other themes in the book (based on the notes I made in the margins) include: the idea that all facts become equal in madness (or the end of the world); the pleasure of trivia (and ruins); the erosion of time in madness; facts as music; the illusion of money (which is even more illusory than art); the pointlessness of artistic criticism; and cats.
This is a book you will read and (if you're me) never forget. It's ultimately a story about how each of us is alone in the world, and -- given that less-than-joyous fact -- what makes life worth living, with whatever time we have left.
« The Washington Heights Project: Blizzard Shots | Main | The Washington Heights Project: Cats In Snow »
01/28/2011
Comments
The comments to this entry are closed.
ORDER HERE
A RADICAL NEW MYTH ABOUT SEX, FAITH, AND THOSE OF US WHO WILL NEVER DIE
A young boy wanders into the woods of Harlem and witnesses the abduction of his sister by a glowing creature. Forty years later, now working as a New York City homicide detective, Gus is assigned to a case in which he unexpectedly succumbs to a vision that Helen is still alive. To find her, he embarks on an uorthodox investigation that leads to an ancient civilization of gods and the people determined to bring them back.
In this colossal new novel from the author of The Metropolis Case, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice collides with a new religion founded by three corporate office workers, creating something beautiful, illogical, and overwhelming. Part sex manifesto, part religious text, part Manhattan noir—with a dose of deadly serious, internet inspired satire—#gods is a sprawling inquest into the nature of faith and resistance in the modern world. With each turn of the page, #gods will leave you increasingly reborn.
Praise for #gods
“#gods is a mystery, an excavation of myths, an index of modern life, a gay coming-of-age story, an office satire, a lyrical fever dream, a conspiracy. One of the most ambitious novels in recent memory—and a wild, possibly transformative addition to the canon of gay literature—it contains multitudes, and seethes with brilliance.” —Mark Doten, author of The Infernal
“Matthew Gallaway’s #gods is a novel so brilliant, so funny, so full of strange and marvelous things, I couldn’t stop writing OMG WTF I <3 THIS SO MUCH in its margins. It’s rare to find a novel that so dazzlingly reinvigorates age-old meditations on faith and f&!*ing, art and eros. Luminous, enterprising, and sublimely cheeky, #gods tells the story, the myth, the dream of the human soul in all its glorious complexity.” —Suzanne Morrison, author of Yoga Bitch
“Matthew Gallaway’s storytelling manages to be both dreamy and serious; lean and luxurious. His words carry an incantatory power of mythic storytelling where beauty and savagery wrap around each other like bright threads in a gorgeous tapestry.” —Natasha Vargas-Cooper, author of Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America
“If the ancient gods were just like us, only more so, then the same could be said for this strange, wonderful book, in which the mundane sorrows and small triumphs of very ordinary lives glow ever so slightly around the edges, sometimes quite literally. At once an oddly romantic send-up of dead-end office culture and an offbeat supernatural procedural, #gods is terrifically weird, melancholy, sexy, and charming.” —Jacob Bacharach, author of The Bend of the World
'It’s to the credit of Matthew Gallaway’s enchanting, often funny first novel that it doesn’t require a corresponding degree of obsession from readers, but may leave them similarly transported: the book is so well written — there’s hardly a lazy sentence here — and filled with such memorable lead and supporting players that it quickly absorbs you into its worlds.'
-- The New York Times
Music: Death Culture at Sea and Saturnine
Listen or download songs and records from my indie-rock past with Saturnine here and Death Culture at Sea here.
Music Video: Remembrance of Things Past
Watch the rock opera Remembrance of Things Past written and performed by Saturnine and Frances Gibson, starring Bennett Madison and Sheila McClear.
Video: The Chaos Detective
The Chaos Detective is a series about a man searching for 'identity' as he completes assignments from a mysterious organization. Watch the first episode (five parts) on YouTube.
R.I.P. David Markson. He died last year.
Wittgenstein's Mistress is indeed a wonderful, one-of-a-kind novel that is "experimental," but so rich and funny and, despite its deeply ambiguous context, so alive to the human and the world of culture that humans create which is perhaps the only world that we can "know" and, therefore, the only one we can abandon or forget.
Your mention of the novel makes me now think about the "Marksonian" photographs you post on this site which so rarely have any images of people in them, just flowers, cats, clouds, rusting bridges, shells of long abandoned buildings, the rays of the cold sun strafing empty streets, columns of dead cars piled with snow.
I hope you go on to read some of the works that Markson wrote post-WM. They are ever more economical mediations on loss and art.
Posted by: Edward S. | 01/28/2011 at 12:48 PM
Hey Ed -- thanks for the nice comment -- Im so happy to have discovered this book, I dont really understand why it has to be labeled experimental (although of course I do understand), but still -- amazing book.
Posted by: Matthew Gallaway | 01/28/2011 at 04:15 PM
Whereas I? Read it and forgot it. But then I killed many a brain cell in the youth I am lucky to have survived, and when I read it again, it will be new to me.
Posted by: Talix18 | 06/13/2011 at 02:28 PM