The first chapter starts off with a soliloquy from the narrating protagonist who is a bat shit insane woman who has been running around the entire world in some sort of fugue state ("time out of mind"). When we encounter her, she is living on the beach in the second house, because she burnt the first one down on accident.

So far, the only other living person that she's mentioned it's not even living. It's her deceased child whose grave she visited in Mexico, but it kind of sounds like this might be a post apocalyptic setting, and she is so singularly charged with remembering all of culture hence her obsession with art and literature.

Her disregard for safety and property and her reliance on surviving without devices that provide shelter or heat does reinforce the idea that she might be the last person alive. It would also explain her removed and apathetic sense of remembrance towards the name of her husband and her son, whose name is she interchanges (Simon (S) and Adam (H)). She mentions how some old habits die hard, and for example, mentions how she will occasionally drive on the British side of the road. This is not something that you can do if there are other people or not driving on the right side of the road.

We don't even learn that her name is Kate until the second or third chapter – identity of self/other real people (not authors or painters or musicians) fall by the wayside.

Sounds like he was having an affair with some guy named Terry (later Luciene), and there were probably others too. This comes up through her recollection of a admonishment from her mother who calls her a young silly girl.

Need to read more Wittgenstein in order to verify, but there are certain stylistic cues that seem intentionally stilted, probably imitating his style of writing. Such as lapsing between first person pronouns, and then the impersonal third person pronoun "one" when using about things that she, Kate, is definitely the one musing about. Additionally, using, "however," and "apologies," for a very jarring transition phrase. See also "doubtless"

Lots of stilted monologues (the whole book consists of these throughout which are interwoven glimpses into the world she lives in)

There was an X. Actually, there was only almost an X however. This is somehow similar to a 123, have I mentioned that I do love 123? I do a 123 actually it's only just almost 123.

Kate states some connection that Lucien is the first of her lovers that she has told us about, but this is not true since we already know that she was recommended by her mother for having an affair with Terry who we also know was not the first. So it seems as though Kate's own recollection is flawed.

Other details she gets wrong or contradict herself, establishing herself as an unreliable narrator, stating that the cat was orange and this comes out of nowhere. Well after the description of the cat she ran into at the Colosseum. And then two chapters later she says no I'm sure the cat is black. She doesn't even say "no, I was wrong not orange but black," admitting that it's something that she's told us about already, she just introduces it as if it's new additional fact, not a piece of information to be held in tension against everything else that we've heard from her so far because it reinforces the fact that she is unreliable.

At some point, admittedly, probably far too long into the book, do I begin to wonder how the hell she braved the Atlantic. It sounds as though she went from Mexico to somewhere in Texas and then up through Alaska then through Russia while she thought it was China finally to Greece and then set up shop in London and Rome and France. But I can't imagine that she drove all that way. Maybe she did. She also stayed in Soho and somewhere in Pennsylvania, so she's really just painting a map of the United States on her travels. Unclear at what time everybody else disappeared from the world, but if she's driving all this distance and staying in these places for long enough to burn down some houses and do lots of reading aloud and eventually burning those places in those pages as well, it sounds like on the order of years like tens of years.

Perhaps they have not invented baseball at the time is just a hilarious thought for this woman to have. Fully embracing her femininity.

Another book which, like Stoner, sounds droll in its description but has such rich texture and is a celebration of a very specific idea. In the same way that I found it impossible to describe The Unbearable Lightness of Being without it sounding incredibly dull, this book would sound incredibly pretentious. However, I think the unique voice of the protagonist and the recurrence of and reliance upon mythology and artists and musicians looking from trivia rather than the things that they might commonly be known for as well as the constant second-guessing about the assurance of those facts, which is definitely intentional, doesn't make it seem as though references to those things he's trying to impress upon the reader house part the author is your house smart the speaker is, it's just like.

The fact that they never get around to naming the cat that she and her son had and always only ever called the "cat" seems like the truest name that you could give such a thing, I'm not sure if Wittgenstein speaks of this, but I suspect that he does.

Contrast with an earlier anecdote about how Rembrandt's students in his workshop write or draw or paint images of gold coins on the floor that were so convincing that he would stoop over to try to pick them up. This is an illusion of meaning, which had no effect on cats because they don't understand currency, and if they did, they probably wouldn't care either. So in some sense, the cat does not care about its own name, so call a cat. The cat is the most accurate thing that you can do, but there's still probably a fundamental breakdown meaning of the construct of animals species.

Additionally, there's a really funny implication that the tortoise from Zeno paradox is faster than Hector because while Achilles never catches up to the tortoise, Achilles does catch up to Hector and kill him.

Confuses the name of her son, which is Simon not to be confused with the name of the father Paul (or Adam) with the name of the man with whom she was having an affair, Luciene, this comes out when she's describing who's responsibility was to name the cat and she said it was four-year-old Lucien's immediately after describing the man with whom she was having an affair also by that same name. These kinds of lapses in memory be the question if the whole book is supposed to be an indictment of analytic philosophy, or maybe just specific theories, while still celebrating his [W's] ideas through the emulation of his tone. The fact that she can't keep straight the things which really auto to matter to her like the name of her son let alone the name of her son's cat, can one reason herself to any sort of meaningful conclusions from first principles alone in isolation? No woman is an Island.

It is implied that her son died while she was having an affair (like literally while she was having an affair) with another man, and her still-husband at the time Adam got drunk and didn't call a doctor. The actual details surrounding her son's death are ambiguous, but the conflation of her son's name with the name of her lover, who she was saying while he was dying is speak volumes. She immediately revises this order of events, saying, of course, none of this happened given that we were both there that weekend, and neither of us could've done anything at all, after musing about which came first the husband getting drunk because of the affair or the affair happening because of the husband's insistence on getting drunk.

Paraphrasing, imagine how a heroine would feel if she awoke on some Wednesday or Thursday, utterly alone in the world. Not even a seagull, just vegetables and plants. She doesn't mention that there would be cats, also this comes towards the end of the book as an introduction, explaining what's been going on this far, though I think it should be straightforward to peace together what's happening after the second chapter. Kate continues to muse about the merits of such an autobiographical novel where the woman would gradually come to realize that she had always been alone just as much as she was now at the point of composing the autobiography in a world where everyone else is gone, and there would not be much to do other than be angry at home though, and then write nonsense Greek in the sand and burn the occasional house down

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