Bartleby & Co.

Raises questions about why people write, the purpose of literature, whether it's better to never write. I wrote down a ton of author names... hopefully I'll actually read some of them. ( )

I spoke of this book in a review I had written for a different Vila-Matas title. My review can be found here:
http://mewlhouse.hubpages.com/hub/Never-Any-End-To-Paris-Enrique-Vila-Matas ( )

What with the incessant name dropping this reminded me a lot of The Savage Detectives; though that's about where the similarities end. Bartleby & Co. is a pleasant book to read: Vila-Matas has a nice style of writing and the book isn't overly long. Yet for all its playfulness I couldn't help but think this book a little pointless. Perhaps it's just a post-modern novel and that shouldn't bother me but I would have enjoyed learning a bit more about the narrator. The snippets we're allowed to see of his life are interesting and primed me for more. I was frustrated that was all Vila-Matas provided in the way of detail.

That's really all there is to this novel though. If you don't mind a post-modern book with no plot, just a lot of digressions on authors real or not, then this will be a fun distraction. If, like me, you expect a bit more character depth or plot then you'll probably enjoy the pleasant prose and the neat idea but that won't leave you feeling satisfied at the novel's end. ( )

I'm discouraged and also relieved to have abandoned this short novel.

Its premise is terrific metafiction (a writer who stopped writing now undertakes a project to explore other writers who stopped writing*) and its structure is clever (a series of 86 footnotes -- just the footnotes -- to a non-existent text). Exactly to my taste!

Alas, my literary eyes are bigger than...; this is way over my head. Vila-Matas references dozens (hundreds?) of iconically erudite writers who span civilization’s geography and chronology. I knew enough about a few that I'd already read their work or made plans to do so; I’d at least heard of others; but so, so many more were completely unfamiliar and there was so little space to get to know them in each one- or two-page “footnote.”

So I dug in deeper, Googleing the writers and trying to orient myself until that became too ambitious to keep up. Then I Googled just those who legitimately caught my interest, often to find (to my frustration and amusement) that their existence was fictitious! There’s Clement Cadou, for example, an aspiring writer who feels overlooked to the point of feeling like a piece of furniture, and so abandons writing to become a painter -- each painting featuring a piece of furniture and titled, “Self-Portrait.” Hilarious! (And deep -- isn't it what some writers do, continually re-working an aspect of self in their writing?) Or Felisberto Hernandez (apparently a real person), reputed for refusing to write endings to his stories and whose collection of such stories, Incomplete Narratives, intrigues me (but apparently isn’t real).

So I lightened up and then felt completely adrift in the book. I struggled to the halfway point where, even though I noticed an underlying narrative forming, I let it go.

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* a la Herman Melville’s story Bartleby the Scrivener, about a man who makes hand-written copies of documents in an 1850s Wall Street law office. Early on, Bartleby declines his boss’s assignment to proofread colleagues’ copies by responding, “I would prefer not to.” Before long, he also prefers not to write his own copies, or leave the office, or even eat, and events follow to a logical conclusion.

Dear Mr. Vila-Matas,

I have no reason to think you will ever see this. Why, after all, should you spend your time reading the reviews on the English-language Amazon site, or on LibraryThing? But I have decided to write this review as if I am writing it to you, because it's in the spirit of your book. And how will I describe this book? It is generous, open, friendly, conversational, and also -- I hope you did not think this was only going to be a friendly review -- also infuriating, loosely written, and sometimes scattered.

The book is a treasure trove of wonderful books, because you report on many writers that your reader will not have heard of. I marked the margins of my copy with a dozen names that I will now have to go and read. At the same time, I was delighted to find the names of many others that I know and recognize.

And that leads me to my frustration. From very nearly the beginning of the book I found myself arguing with you. Your theme, you say, is 'writers of the No,' meaning writers who have, for one reason or another, stopped writing. But that is the crux of the matter, that 'one reason or another.' Writers stop writing for many different reasons. Beckett is not the same case as Rimbaud, and Melville is not the same as Hawthorne. Some were depressed, some tired, some scared, and some -- I would have thought they would be your only subject -- stopped because they felt that modernism (a word that is unexpectedly absent from your book) has prohibited the endless production of novels.

I can hear you saying, Well, yes, but as I say in my book, this is a vast subject, and there are many nuances and many different cases that must be judged and weighed. Exactly. They are different, and where your book falls short (sorry, I am being honest because I do not think you'll see this letter) of, say, Blanchot or even Perec (whom you cite) is where it is necessary to slow down and think about each individual case.

Still, even though this is negative and even, I suppose, a bit petulant (or even arch in my mimicry of your easy way of writing), the book is wonderful. One of the most memorable I have read in the past several years.

Postscript, added May 9, 2012
There is an interesting parallel between the concerns of this book and Craig Dworkin's parting characterization of "conceptual writing" in his essay "The Fate of Echo" in the book "Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing." Dworkin ends by listing Borges's Pierra Menard, Bartleby, and Bouvard and Pécuchet. But from Dworkin's perspective, what follows from precedents like those is conceptual writing, which is "nominalist," "literalist," "genuinely contrarian and oppositional," against "sentiment" and "expression." By Dworkin's standards, Vila-Matas has it all wrong: he continues to write old-fashioned, first-person, expressive, even nostalgic prose, in all the old ways, even though his subject is so much about what Perloff calls "unoriginality" and what Dworkin calls "uncreative writing." There is some truth to that implied verdict. ( )