Translated material
Catious teacher
David Marxon and his novel "Wittgenstein's mistress"
The publishers rejected his book 54 times, during the life of David Marxson, Roman had no loud success, and the story of the author’s archive after his death is most like a detective. Alexei Polyarinov talks about the book "Wittgenstein's mistress." 
David Marxon. Wittgenstein's mistress. Yekaterinburg: Gonzo, 2018
There are such books, the story of which we most often start with a number-with the number of publishers who once rejected the manuscript. Robert Pirsiga at one time refused 141 publisher, 42 Samuel Bekket, 42 refused the “motorcycle”.
With Marxon, the same story - his “Wittgenstein’s mistress” was rejected 54 times. This detail has nothing to do with the content of the book, and yet it is difficult not to mention it - very bright.
As for Wittgenstein, he wrote his “logical and philosophical treatise” in the camp during the First World War. I don’t know how many publishers rejected the manuscript (if rejected). When the First World War began, Wittgenstein was 25, and Borgees - 15.
When Borgees was forty and he worked in the library, his colleague found an article about him in the encyclopedia. “Hey, Borges,” said a colleague (Borges named everything by last name), “there is a note about the writer, who is called the same as you. And just like you, he works in the library. What a strange coincidence! "
And then, when Wittgenstein had already died, and Borkhes was 81 years old, Umberto Eco wrote “The Name of Rose”, and there was a blind biblio-former character named Horhe. The reference is too obvious to not notice it.
You probably wonder why I tell all this and how all these facts are connected with the novel "Wittgenstein's mistress"? I will explain now.
The fact is that this is what Marxon's text looks like. Strictly speaking, “The mistress ...” is generally difficult to call a novel, it is rather a poem in prose, with a minimum dotted plot, which is easy to fit into one sentence: the artist Kate travels around the world and thinks a lot about art. But there is a nuance: she is the last person on earth. The text itself is built as a stream of erudite consciousness - a rough installation of quotes, allusions and just stories from the world of art/literature - like those with which I started a review. It is like a collage or rather a pilimpsest, where thoughts are superimposed on each other, like layers of paint on canvas, and then are also erased consistently (hence the constant mention of the American artist Robert Raushenberg, who wore most of the drawing of the Dutch expressionist William de Kuning, and then called it “the erased pattern of de Kunining”) to achieve these random contributions) The maximum effect is to force the reader to seek relationships between at first glance random associations.
“Wittgenstein’s mistress” is a reduced one, 1: 7,000,000,000, a model of culture, a huge pilim, where hundreds of authors, through time, communicate with each other in the head of each reader/viewer, interrupt and rewrite their and other people's thoughts.
And at the same time, “LV” is a novel about cultural baggage, which determines us and at the same time burdens. In the hands of Marxson, the Descartes “I think, therefore, exist” becomes something like “I am part of the culture, therefore, I exist.” Indeed, it is through parallels, through bindings to painting and literature, through language, through the statement, the main character Kate affirms her existence. More precisely, he is trying to formulate herself, to understand what exactly gives her the right to believe that she is. And it is no coincidence that in her records several times the image of a crazy van Gogh, who eats his colors, arises several times.
In addition, “LV” is also a textbook of attentiveness. The author does not just show us a mosaic of stories, his idea is that even if two or more factuals are accidentally, you can always get something new, interesting. In the novel, for example, Emily Bronte is mentioned every now and then, and Kate remarks that Bronte has some kind of fixation on the windows, her characters are either looking out of the windows all the time or look into them. It is precisely of such “random” observations that the “lover ...” consists of, Marxon himself, as it were, calls the reader to be more closely and learn to notice such “windows” in his own book and look more often in them. There, for example, you can notice that Kate every now and then recalls the biography of Brahms - not in the sense of his life, but in the sense of a book where this life is described; And this constant, obsessive recalling is the most important element of his plan: are the facts of your biography proof that you existed?
David Marxon
Another motives for tennis and baseball are two sports, where there is a submitter and receiving, which cannot be played alone in. This, by the way, is an excellent metaphor for the reader’s interaction with the author. The book of Marxson is not one of those that we open for the sake of cunning stories, bright characters or beautiful worlds; His book is a game in which you need to catch and beat off ideas flying on the other side of the page - “Hey, reader, you may not notice, but I haven’t just thrown it about windows in a“ thunderstorm ”; Do not miss the next feed, okay? " Such a literary tennis.
This is partly why, due to the high threshold of entry, Marxon remained “writer for writers” until the rest of his life, they were admired by David Foster Wallace, Amy Hempele and Anne Bitty, but when he was talking about fame, he always joked: “My friend, my friend advised me to be careful not to become famous for the fact that no one knows that I do not know” ( The story of Borges and the Encyclopedia from the beginning of the review).
And, in fact, it happened: he died in 2010, serious literary publications responded to death by duty necrologists, but the noise quickly subsided. On this, however, his book biography did not end. After some time, a student at the University of British Colombia (Canada, Vancouver) acquired Don Delillo at the random collapse of the White Noise, began to read and found that the fields of the book were painted with notes and thoughts of the owner of the owner. The notes were very witty, the student examined the vogs and found the inscription: David Marxon. The name did not say anything to him, but he decided to find the master’s past to say “thank you” for these comments, which made reading the book even more exciting. Googling Marxon, the student realized whose book fell into his hands. He spoke about the find to the literature teacher, and the one to the London Review of Books journalist Alex Abramovich, who wrote an article about this. As it turned out, Marxson bequeathed his personal library to the Strand New York Bookstore, but by some strange misunderstanding, the store staff did not allocate a separate stand for his books, they simply laid them on the shelves and put up for sale-so the personal library of the author, whose creative method relied on book knowledge, dispersed in several departments of the bookstore at the fourth fourth Avenue in New York and parted all over America and even reached Vancouver.
And then - the treasure hunt began. Marxson's fans through Facebook and Raddit began to look for his books, in the hope of collecting the sold library entirely (Alex Abramovich himself spent the dollar in the Strand 262.81 store), the scanned pages with comments and in parts were put on a cheap legacy of the classic.
Among the posthumous property of Wittgenstein was a box with notes. One note, one thought. Whether these notes had order - it is already impossible to establish.
Marxon's posthumous property was a personal library - sold, scattered through the continent and later restored by caring people. It is difficult to come up with a more suitable plot to describe his creative method.