Enrique Vila-Matas / Jonathan Dunne
Librería Samer Atenea
Librería Aciertas (Toledo)
Kálamo Books
Librería Perelló (Valencia)
Librería Elías (Asturias)
Donde los libros
Librería Kolima (Madrid)
Librería Proteo (Málaga)
A man’s obsession with literature leads him to see the world through the eyes of fictionLiterature can be contagious; it can also be our only means of salvation. That at least is the experience of Montano the ’unreliable narrator’ of Enrique Vila-Matas’ prize-winning novel a man and a writer who is so obsessed with the books of certain celebrated contemporaries that he is unable to put pen to paper or utter a word without summoning up their work or their lives and whose malady is that he finds it impossible to distinguish between real life and fictional reality. Part picaresque novel part intimate diary part memoir part philosophical musings Vila-Matas has created a labyrinth in which writers as various as Cervantes Sterne Kafka Musil Perec Bola o Coetzee Sebald and Magris cross endlessly surprising paths while his protagonist leads the reader on an unsettling journey from European cities such as Nantes Barcelona Lisbon Prague and Budapest to the Azores and the Chilean port of Valpara so. Yet for all the author’s dazzling literary pyrotechnics this is a novel that is always witty and accessible.
