Enrique Vila-Matas

Una novela que defiende la repetici n y reflexiona sobre c mo se ha construido la historia de la literatura a partir de sucesivas variaciones del relato. En Mac y su contratiempo Enrique Vila-Matas revisita Una casa para siempre, as como su obsesi n por el origen de la literatura y el concepto de originalidad, el paso del tiempo o la posibilidad de corregir el pasado a trav s de la escritura. Mac no tiene empleo y ocupa sus horas deambulando y obsesionado con su vecino, un reconocido escritor al que detesta, especialmente cuando ste lo ignora. Un d a lo oye hablar con una librera acerca de su primer libro, Walter y su contratiempo, una obra de juventud de la que apenas se acuerda. Mac decide emprender un nuevo proyecto, el de reescribir y mejorar la novela como si fuera suya. Se inicia as un vertiginoso juego de espejos orquestada por este peculiar lector-autor. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION Mac is currently unemployed and lives on his wife's earnings from her furniture restoration business. An avid reader, he decides at the age of sixty to keep a diary. Mac's wife, Carmen, a dyslexic born of dyslexic parents, thinks he is simply wasting his time and risking sliding further into depression--but Mac persists, and is determined that this diary will not turn into a novel. However, one day, he has a chance encounter with a near neighbor, a highly successful author who once wrote a collection of enigmatic, willfully obscure stories. Mac decides that, while he will not write his own stories, he will read, revise, and improve his neighbor's, which are mostly narrated by a ventriloquist who has lost the ability to speak in different voices. As Mac embarks on this task, he finds that the stories have a strange way of imitating life. Or is life imitating the stories? As the novel progresses, Mac becomes stranger and more adrift from reality, and both he and we become ever more immersed in literature: a literature haunted by death, but alive with the sheer pleasure of writing.

The writerâ??s mission will be to transform himself into a living art installation, by sitting down to write every morning in a Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of town. Once in Kassel, the writer is surprised to find himself overcome by good cheer.

Ny roman från en av de mest hyllade och prisbelönta samtida spanskspråkiga författarna. Skarpsynt och intresseväckande om konsten och litteraturen -- och inte minst om livet självt Författaren Enrique lyfter telefonluren och får ett kryptiskt meddelande från kuratorn för documenta, den världsberömda konstutställningen i tyska Kassel med nästan en miljon besökare. Kuratorn vill göra Enrique till ett konstverk. Här är en inbjudan till en kinesisk restaurang, vi vill ha konst, visa oss vad du har att komma med, säger hon. Varje morgon ska han sitta på restaurangen och skriva inför publik, som en installation inom ramen för utställningen. Han antar utmaningen, något tveksam. Men den lite buttre och pessimistiske mannen blir själv förvånad över sin positiva reaktion på all den märkliga samtidskonst som omger honom under tiden i Kassel. Han förstår ingenting, varken av konsten eller av språken som talas runt omkring honom. Men som han skriver: "När man utsätts för språk man inte förstår inser man plötsligt att man kan uttyda allting." Utan logik i Kassel är en skildring av ett uppvaknande, ett slags charmig bildningsroman med en 65-åring i huvudrollen. Genom en säregen blandning av fiktion, essä och självbiografi skriver Enrique Vila-Matas fram ett försvarstal för litteraturen och konsten, i en era då allt annat tycks ha företräde. Enrique Vila-Matas (född 1948 i Barcelona) är en av den samtida spanskspråkiga litteraturens främsta författare. Hans verk har översatts till ca 30 språk. Utan logik i Kassel är den tredje boken som ges ut av Tranan, efter Dublinesk (2013) och Bartleby & co (2014). Vila-Matas har tagit emot en ansenlig mängd priser för sitt skrivande, senast det prestigefyllda Fil de Literatura, och hans namn nämns ibland i nobelpristipsen. 2014 besökte han Stockholm Literature på Moderna museet.

Gathered for the first time in English and spanning his entire career, Vampire in Love offers a selection of the Spanish master Enrique Vila-Matas’s finest short stories. An effeminate, hunchbacked barber on the verge of death falls in love with a choir boy. A fledgling writer on barbiturates visits Marguerite Duras’s Paris apartment and watches his dinner companion slip into the abyss. An unsuspecting man receives a mysterious phone call from a lonely ophthalmologist and visits his abandoned villa. The stories in Vampire in Love, selected and brilliantly translated by Margaret Jull Costa, are all told with Vila-Matas’s delightful erudition and wit, and his provocative questioning of the interrelation of art and life.

Gathered for the first time in English, and spanning his entire career, Vampire in Love offers a selection of the Spanish master Enrique Vila-Matas's finest short stories. An effeminate, hunchbacked barber on the verge of death falls in love with a choirboy. A fledgling writer on barbiturates visits Marguerite Duras's Paris apartment and watches his dinner companion slip into the abyss. An unsuspecting man receives a mysterious phone call from a lonely ophthalmologist, visits his abandoned villa, and is privy to a secret. The stories in Vampire in Love, selected and brilliantly translated by the renowned translator Margaret Jull Costa, are all told with Vila-Matas's signature erudition and wit and his provocative questioning of the interrelation of art and life.

Un libro clave para entender la obra de Enrique Vila-Matas. En Bartleby y compa a Enrique Vila-Matas comparte con el lector la m s grande de sus pasiones, la literatura, para hacer de esta obra un homenaje a todos aquellos escritores que un d a dejaron de escribir. Cuando Herman Melville dio vida al personaje del escribiente Bartleby cre sin saberlo el modelo a seguir para algunas de las m s brillantes plumas de la literatura universal, escritores que dejaron de escribir sin que nadie pudiera saber nunca por qu . A caballo entre la novela, el ensayo y el diario personal en una original f rmula que lleva el sello inconfundible de su autor, Bartleby y compa a es una reflexi n con una pregunta como tel n de fondo: por qu renunciar a la literatura? Quiz las grandes obras se escondan detr s de esos silencios que siguen a la famosa cita de Melville. Quiz , despu s de todo, sea preferible no escribir." El narrador es un rastreador de Bartlebys, esos seres que se niegan a escribir, llevados por la pulsi n negativa e inspirados en el famoso oficinista del relato de Herman Melville que, ante cualquier requerimiento, responde siempre diciendo: Preferir a no hacerlo . En sus notas a una novela nunca escrita, este explorador del mal end mico de las letras contempor neas habla de Rulfo, de Rimbaud, de Salinger, de Kafka, de las razones que los llevaron al silencio y de las historias reales e inventadas que bordean el laberinto del No.

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, Bolaño, 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 Valparaíso. Yet for all the author's dazzling literary pyrotechnics, this is a novel that is always witty and accessible.

Because She Never Asked is a story reminiscent of that reached by the travelers in Patricia Highsmith's Stranger on a Train. The author first writes a piece for the artist Sophie Calle to live out: a young, aspiring, French artist travels to Lisbon and the Azores in pursuit of an older artist whose work she's in love with. The second part of the story tells what happens between the author and Calle. She eludes, him; he becomes blocked, and suffers physical collapse." Something strange happened along the way," Vila-Matas wrote. "Normally, writers try to pass a work of fiction off as being real. But in Because She Never Asked, the opposite occurred: in order to give meaning to the story of my life, I found that I needed to present it as fiction."

Trying to be Ernest Hemingway is never easy. After reading A Moveable Feast, aspiring novelist Enrique Vila-Matas moves to Paris to be closer to his literary idol, Ernest Hemingway.

A puzzling phone call shatters a writer s routine. An enigmatic female voice extends a dinner invitation, and it soon becomes clear that this is an invitation to take part in the documenta, the legendary exhibition of contemporary art held every five years in Kassel, Germany. The writer s mission will be to sit down to write every morning in a Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of town, transforming himself into a living art installation. Once in Kassel, the writer is surprised to find himself overcome by good cheer as he strolls through the city, spurred on by the endless supply of energy at the heart of the exhibition. This is his spontaneous, quirky response to art, rising up against pessimism. With humor, profundity, and a sharp eye, Enrique Vila-Matas tells the story of a solitary man, who, roaming the streets amid oddities and wonder, takes it upon himself to translate from a language he does not understand."

An author (a version of Vila-Matas himself) presents a short "history" of a secret society, the Shandies, who are obsessed with the concept of "portable literature." The society is entirely imagined, but in this rollicking, intellectually playful book, its members include writers and artists like Marcel Duchamp, Aleister Crowley, Witold Gombrowicz, Federico Garc a Lorca, Man Ray, and Georgia O'Keefe. The Shandies meet secretly in apartments, hotels, and cafes all over Europe to discuss what great literature really is: brief, not too serious, penetrating the depths of the mysterious. We witness the Shandies having adventures in stationary submarines, underground caverns, African backwaters, and the cultural capitals of Europe.

Enrique Vila-Matas hace una reconstrucción irónica de su etapa parisina, cuando trataba de vivir a la manera de Hemingway en París era una fiesta. Si en los años veinte su ídolo de juventud fue acogido por Gertrude Stein, en la década de los setenta el joven Vila-Matas alquila una buhardilla en la capital francesa a Marguerite Duras. En vez de codearse con Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound o Pablo Picasso, trata con Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, Isabelle Adjani, Julio Ramón Ribeyro y una escurridiza Paloma Picasso, entre muchos otros. París no se acaba nunca es un relato autobiográfico que conecta con cierta sensibilidad contemporánea para la cual hay una continuidad natural entre lo real y lo ficticio. Una novela en la que el autor «ficcionaliza» el yo y lo real en términos literarios muy convincentes. «Aviso para escritores en ciernes, principiantes o consagrados: si se preguntan dónde está la literatura y si es posible renovarla, lean a Vila-Matas.» Le Magazine Littéraire.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE INDEPENDENT FOREIGN FICTION PRIZE'A writer who has no equal in the contemporary landscape of the Spanish novel.' Roberto BolanoSamuel Riba is about to turn 60.

One night, a renowned and now retired literary publisher has a vivid dream that takes place in Dublin, a city he s never visited. The central scene of the dream is a funeral in the era of Ulysses. The publisher would give anything to know if an unidentified character in his dream is the great author he always wanted to meet, or the ghostly angel who abandoned him during childhood. As the days go by, he will come to understand that his vision of the end of an era was prophetic. Enrique Vila-Matas traces a journey that connects the worlds of Joyce and Beckett, revealing the difficulties faced by literary authors, publishers, and good readers in a society where literature is losing influence. A robust work, Dublinesque is a masterwork of irony, humor, and erudition by one of Spain s most celebrated living authors.

Rotløs og hjemløs foretar den aldrende Mayol en reise fra Barcelona, via Porto og Lisboa til Madeira, en atlantisk odyssé. En ny verden åpner seg, men samtidig oppdager Mayol at reisen er vertikal: Det finnes ingen muligheter for retur.

Shandyene som står i sentrum i denne romanen har sitt navn etter helten i Laurence Sterns "Herr Tristam Shandys liv og meninger", og er en kulturell klubb, etablert i 1924. Medlemmene er kulturelle vagabonder, blant annet skikkelser som Arthur Rimbaud, Walter Benjamin, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Scott Fitzgerald og Federico García Lorca. Det viktigste for medlemmene er å ivareta en kunst som er så blottet for normer og så anvendelig at man kan bære den med seg i en stresskoffert. Vi blir vitne til Shandy-klubbens tilblivelse, dens storhetstid og dens melankolske undergang.

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Marcelo, a humble clerk in a Barcelona office who might have come from a novel by Kafka, inhibits a world peopled by characters in literature. He once wrote a novel about the impossibility of love, but since then he has written nothing and a mental trauma has meant that he has been unable to put pen to paper; he has become a 'Bartleby'.