1.NARRATIVA (13) 1001 (13) 20th century (15) 21st century (44) anthology (39) avant-garde (12) CondellR (14) Dublin (11) essay (14) Estescr4C (12) european literature (15) fiction (267) literature (125) metafiction (18) metaliterature (12) narrativa (56) narrativa espanhola (13) Narrativa española (13) New Directions (43) novel (91) Novela (46) Novela española (13) novel·la (24) Paris (22) postmodernism (17) read (15) Roman (26) romance (26) romance espanhol (21) short stories (63) Spain (120) Spanish (79) Spanish Fiction (33) Spanish literature (232) to-read (243) translated (16) translation (36) unread (16) Vila-Matas (45) writing (12)

Common Knowledge

Canonical name: Vila-Matas, Enrique
Birthdate: 1948-03-31
Gender: male
Nationality: Spain
Country (for map): Spain
Birthplace: Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Places of residence: Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
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

Members

Reviews

Bartleby e compagnia by Enrique Vila-Matas

Libro per chi ama la letteratura e vuole perdersi in questo saggio strambo e sbilenco, alla ricerca degli autori del "NO" fra nomi reali e inventati, godibili aneddoti e ancor più piacevoli scenette inventate di sana piana e appiccicate sulla pelle dell'anonima voce narrante (uomo spagnolo con la gobba), per esempio quella dell'incontro con Salinger in tram. Vila-Matas sa sempre come uscire dal convenzionale creando qualcosa di unico.

Flagged

d.v. | 31 other reviews | May 16, 2023 |

Kassel non invita alla logica by Enrique Vila-Matas

Vila-Matas comincia molto bene: divertente, affascinante, profondo. Sa come "legare" il lettore (tema da lui citato in relazione a una affermazione di Kafka). Chi è stato a Documenta nel 2012 può provare molto piacere nel rivivere le opere attraverso lo sguardo dell'autore. Ma a circa metà libro il meccanismo si inceppa: il personaggio Vila-Matas, con tutta la sua - reale o costruita? - difficoltà relazionale ed esistenziale, diventa macchietta, così come lo diventano ancor più gli altri personaggi. La struttura si fa ripetitiva, pur conservando interessanti riferimenti bibliografici (Locus Solus di Raymond Roussel mi è proprio venuta voglia di leggerlo) e puntuali noti sulle opere. Si procede quindi stancamente e si arriva alla fine del libro quasi per dovere, senza più sorprese. Peccato.

Nota a margine: primo libro che leggo di Vila-Matas, forse non il migliore da cui iniziare per capire l'autore. Penso che proverò a leggere anche altro.… (more)

Flagged

d.v. | 6 other reviews | May 16, 2023 |

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.

… (more)

Flagged

proustitute | 31 other reviews | Apr 2, 2023 |

Historia abreviada de la literatura portátil by Enrique Vila-Matas

¿Qué pretende Vila-Matas con este libro?¿Qué sentido, finalidad, objeto persigue con ésta novela? Su inteligente prosa nos presenta un desfile interminable de personajes históricos en algunos instantes de sus vidas. Instantes imaginarios en muchos casos pero verosímiles y absurdos por igual.

La sensación de desconcierto se desgrana página tras página en un laberinto imposible cuyo único hilo de Ariadna es el reconocimiento geográfico de las ciudades donde se desenvuelven los personajes: París, Trieste, Praga, Sevilla… La novela es una oda a lo efímero, a la insolencia, al viaje más nómada y vagabundo. Su atractivo radica en la provocación, en una visión desafiante de la vida y de la muerte, en mostrar la relevancia de lo transitorio como agente transformador y en señalar a la dispersión como alternativa creativa a la opresiva realidad cotidiana.

La novela habla de principio a fin de ella misma, mostrándose como ejemplo de literatura portátil, y en este sentido el autor es al mismo tiempo creador y personaje de la sociedad conspirativa shandy que nos describe. Es la novela “de quien no puede creer en la verosimilitud de la Historia ni en el carácter metafóricamente histórico de toda novelización.”

Volvemos a las preguntas del principio y la respuesta es que aparentemente la obra carece de sentido, con una trama y un argumento dispersos, “un tipo de literatura que,…, se caracteriza por no tener un sistema que proponer, sólo un arte de vivir.”… (more)

Flagged

GilgameshUruk | 5 other reviews | Jul 17, 2022 |

See More Reviews