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Common Knowledge

Canonical name: Vila-Matas, Enrique
Birthdate: 1948-03-31
Gender: male
Short biography: Nació en Barcelona en 1948. De su obra narrativa destacan Historia abreviada de la literatura portátil, Suicidios ejemplares, Hijos sin hijos, Bartleby y compañía, El mal de Montano (Seix Barral, 2012), Doctor Pasavento, Exploradores del abismo, Dietario voluble, Dublinesca (Seix Barral, 2010), Chet Baker piensa en su arte y Aire de Dylan (Seix Barral, 2012). Entre sus libros de ensayos literarios encontramos Para acabar con los números redondos, Desde la ciudad nerviosa, Aunque no entendamos nada, El viento ligero en Parma, Perder teorías (Seix Barral, 2010) y El viajero más lento. El arte de no terminar nada (Seix Barral, 2011). Traducido a 32 idiomas, ha obtenido un amplio reconocimiento internacional y ha recibido, entre otros, el Premio Nacional de la Crítica, el de la Real Academia Española, el Ciutat de Barcelona, el Herralde de Novela, el Fundación Lara, el Leteo, el Argital, el del Círculo de Críticos de Chile, el Meilleur Livre Étranger, el Fernando Aguirre-Libralire, el Médicis- Roman Étranger, el Jean Carrière, el Ennio Flaiano, el Elsa Morante, el Mondello, el Bottari Lattes Grinzaine y el Gregor von Rezzori. Es chevalier de la Legión de Honor francesa, pertenece a la Orden de Caballeros del Finnegans, y es rector (desconocido) de la Universidad Desconocida de Nueva York (McNally Jackson).

www.enriquevilamatas.com
Nationality: Spain
Birthplace: Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Places of residence: Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Map Location: Spain

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167 reviews

proustitute 259 reviews

Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas

These phantom books, invisible texts, are the ones that knock at our door one day and, when we go to receive them, for what is often a trivial reason, they disappear; we open the door and they are no longer there, they have gone. It was undoubtedly a great book, the great book that was inside us, the one we were really destined to write, our book, the very book we shall never be able to write or read now. But that book, let is be clear, exists, it is held in suspension in the history of the

art of the No.

We tend to hold aloft those works of literature that are, to put it crudely, too heavy to actually hold aloft. For some reason, literary genius, in our view, denotes extensive creative output: literary genius is Proust writing his seven-volume masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu by lamplight in his cork-lined bedroom; it is Woolf suffering a nervous breakdown after the symphonic jetties of The Waves have sapped every word from her, every ounce of creativity; it is Musil's The Man without Qualities for its examination of artistry, morality, and the social structures that oppress individuals and their relations with others. Hell, literary genius is even Freud's 24-volume complete psychological works, a monumental achievement of groundbreaking thought that continues to influence many disciplines to this day.

But what about the smaller masterpieces? In one of the many vignettes collected in Vila-Matas's literary-critical-cum-novelistic meditation Bartleby & Co., the humpbacked narrator recalls a childhood friend, Pineda, who scoffed literary production, preferring instead to write only the first lines of poems; on occasion, too, he would write a whole verse on cigarette paper, after which he would then smoke his poem literally to ashes. What about the writers who write one novel, and then never produce another work—whether because they have dried up all creative energy in the initial endeavor, whether because they have lost their muse (in whatever form that might take), or just because they have been forced into relative obscurity? As Marguerite Duras observes: "To write ... is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly... To write is to attempt to know what we would write were we to write."

While Vila-Matas names these lesser-known and more marginal writers as Bartlebys, after Melville's fictional scrivener who famously "prefers not to" do anything, he is also quick to point to larger socioeconomic and literary trends that often silence writers of immense promise. (The example of Proust above is one that fits here quite relevantly, as, despite the initial rejection of his work, his social status allowed him to continue carving away at the Recherche, even publishing the first volume himself.) As far as Melville, a writer who has become virtually synonymous with literature-with-a-capital-L, Vila-Matas rightly points out that he suffered obscurity in his own lifetime, eventually forced to take on the same job as his fictional creation to make ends meet: a mere scrivener, a copyist of other people's words.

Because I mentioned Freud and Woolf above, I'm also interested in the ways in which Vila-Matas's project echoes theirs. Before Freud conceptualized the uncanny, the field of aesthetics was largely concerned only with what was beautiful; while Burke and Romantic philosophy began to change this, it's only with Freud and the advent of modernity that we see more artists turning to the grotesque, the horrors, and the ugly aspects that inform our lives and our experiences just as much as do the pleasurable aspects. Similarly, Woolf's call for literature to not ignore the very real topic of illness is one that is very much in line with Vila-Matas's thoughts here: while he does mention illness several times (and, to be clear, by writers who have abandoned writing—or even those who are "writers" but have never written a word—he does not mean those whose lives are cut short by suicide, although he does make three exceptions to this rule), it is less how illness can cut short a writer's productive years than how illness can feature in the works we come to think of as canonical, again aligning his thesis with this trend après Freud.

While Bartleby & Co. is a difficult book to review, it is a project that is so very important, one that makes readers rethink what literary production is, entails, and what it might mean to be "a writer." Do we need thousands of pages to have been produced in order to name someone "a writer," or is the person who never sets down his or her thoughts—or else abandons a writing career after one or two successful (or not) texts—as much "a writer" by right?

Poetry unwritten, but lived in the mind: a beautiful ending for someone who ceases to write.

What constitutes the writing life: the output or the intellectual framework and thought patterns that often inform, and sometimes do not inform, this output? As Jaime Gil de Biedma writes: "I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I wanted to be a poem."

In making his case for "a literature of the No," Vila-Matas is concerned both with Bartlebyan writers who would "prefer not to" writer, for whatever reason, and also with the intersecting matrices within and by which literature is inspired, produced, and eventually disseminated. A personal yet philosophical inquiry into the underbelly of literature, and one that questions canonical assumptions and often flips them on their categorical heads, Bartleby & Co. is a text that all writers should read, but also all readers: not only will Vila-Matas cause you to jot down names of unfamiliar writers on nearly every page of his text (although not all, as most do not exist except "in suspension in the history of the art of the No"), but he will also cause you to question rigorously just what "literature" is in the first place, and what we mean when we call someone "a writer." In fact, in quoting from Peruvian writer Julio Ramón Riberyo's The Temptation of Failure, Vila-Matas seems to agree that we all are:

We all have a book, possibly a great book, but in the tumult of our inner lives it rarely emerges or is so fleeting that we don't have time to pin it down.

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Apr 2, 202334 other reviews

RandyMetcalfe 890 reviews

Never Any End To Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas

Ostensibly presented as an ironic homage to Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Enrique Vila-Matas’ quixotic Never Any End to Paris flits between an inverted Roman à clef, bildungsroman, situationist non-happening, and self-help manual on how (not) to write a novel. If that sounds jumbled, enervating, or distracting, you’ll probably also think, at times, that there’s just never any end to Never Any End to Paris. But if serious play is the kind of thing that turns your literary show more crank, then this may be an excellent introduction to the very serious play of Enrique Vila-Matas.

The narrator supposedly has written a lecture that will be presented over three days at a literary festival in which he looks back on the two years he spent in Paris as a young man. Why Paris? Because Hemingway’s late rose-tinted memoir described it as the place where he was poor and happy. What could be more enticing for a young wannabe writer? Except that the narrator, looking back on his own time in Paris, describes himself as very poor and very unhappy. It was ever thus as we seek to emulate and overcome our literary forebears (not so much the anxiety of influence, but more the influenza of anxiety).

The narrator’s time in Paris is not entirely wasted. He has connections, after all. He lives in a garret owned by Marguerite Duras (which once hid François Mitterand for two nights during the French Resistance). He parties with Paloma Picasso. He sees Samuel Beckett in the Jardin du Luxembourg. And of course the cafés, of which there definitely seems to be no end in Paris. All the while he is struggling to write his first novel, The Lettered Assassin. (It would take someone more knowledgeable than me to determine whether that is a play on the emergence of situationist theory from lettrism.)

The writing is playful and pointed, sometimes insightful, often repetitive (though presumably to a point), ironic to an almost uncomfortable degree, and at times lovely. Its embrace of and flight from modernism might be considered challenging. But it rewards patience (if not effort). And I’m glad I read it. show less

Jan 27, 201313 other reviews

dcozy 76 reviews

Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas

In Never Any End to Paris Enrique Vila-Matas has given us a novel about a lecture about his time as a young in Paris trying to write a novel while living in a garret owned by Marguerite Duras. He manages to be at once formally interesting, funny, and penetrating about living in Paris in particular, and living as an expatriate in general, about the Parisian literary and bohemian demimonde, and about what writing is and can be. He is an avant-garde writer for those who like to smile while they show more are amazed. show less

Sep 11, 201413 other reviews

RandyMetcalfe 890 reviews

Mac and His Problem by Enrique Vila-Matas

Just what is Mac’s problem? Is it that his business has failed and that he has been forcibly retired? Is it that he is seeing things and people that might not exactly be there? Is it an almost inarticulate suspicion of his wife’s fidelity? Is it that he has too much time on his hands? Is it that he has taken up writing as an avocation? Is it that he has a problem with novels and so prefers the diary as his writing form? Or is Mac’s problem really our common problem: death is looming show more whether we rush toward it or flee its approach?

Vila-Matas presents a curious figure with Mac. Both utterly sincere and almost wholly unreliable. He is surprisingly well-versed in the history of literature given his apparent prior occupation as a building contractor. But also professes to be an absolute beginner. And despite a stated revulsion of novels and narrative, he regularly finds himself in narratively intriguing situations. His account of his days is both awkward and distancing and yet somehow compelling. And in the end, many readers might, as I was, be left wondering what exactly Vila-Matas is up to here. Not such an unusual response, I suppose, to a Vila-Matas novel. But one which probably undercuts a whole-hearted recommendation of said novel to others. Maybe this novel is much better than I’m allowing it to be in these few words. I just don’t know.

Very gently recommended. show less

Mar 15, 20228 other reviews

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