Enrique Vila-Matas – författare

Marcelo, a clerk in a Barcelona office who might himself have emerged from a novel by Kafka, inhabits a world peopled by characters in literature. He once wrote a novel about the impossibility of love, but since then he has written nothing. He has, in short, become a 'Bartleby', so named after the character in Herman Melville's short story who, when asked to do something, always replied: 'I would prefer not to.'One day Marcelo sets out to make a search through literature for all those other possible Bartlebys, and with this in mind he has the engagingly original notion of keeping a diary and writing footnotes to an invisible text. His references to authors, both real and invented, provide the reader with extravagant doses of humour that are at once hilarious, irreverent and stimulating.

A puzzling phone call shatters a writer’s routine. An enigmatic female voice extends an invitation to take part in Documenta, the legendary contemporary art exhibition held every five years in Kassel, Germany. The writer’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. As he strolls through the city, spurred on by his spontaneous, quirky response to art, he begins to make sense of the wonders that surround him.'A writer who has no equal in the contemporary landscape of the Spanish novel' Roberto Bolaño'Vila-Matas's work made a tremendous impression on me'Paul Auster

The award-winning newest novel by Spain’s premier writer—a metafictional meditation on the limits and possibilities of literature  The narrator of Montevideo is an itinerant writer and erstwhile drug pusher in the throes of a personal and literary transformation. Increasingly disillusioned with life in Paris and hoping for an artistic breakthrough, he ventures out in search of a “new style.” His quest takes him to Barcelona and then to a hotel in Montevideo, Uruguay, called the Cervantes, where seemingly both Julio Cortázar and Adolfo Bioy Casares found inspiration. Montevideo, however, is not the final stop: Bogotá, Reykjavík, New York, and St. Gallen in Switzerland are ahead on the narrator’s journey. But to what?  In this brilliant new novel, Enrique Vila-Matas deepens and extends his inquiry into the purposes and functions of fiction: Can the products of the imagination be set on paper, coherently and faithfully? Or is literature forever destined to fall hopelessly short—consigned to be nothing more than an impoverished, inaccurate representation? Moving between cities and genres, from coarse slapstick to insightful criticism, from travelogue to metaphysical speculation, Montevideo is a narrative vortex, a labyrinthine tale of mirrors and illusions.

From Spain’s most celebrated author, an inventive, quietly radical novel that explores how books illuminate our livesIn Camera Obscura, Enrique Vila-Matas returns with a novel-in-motion that turns the very act of looking into a literary method. Set in Barcelona, the novel follows widower Vidal Escabia as he undertakes a precise, time-bound task. Over the course of seventy-one days, he must construct an “untimely” counter-canon by entering his home library in darkness, reaching for a book at random, and, in the light of his picture window, selecting a single fragment. What begins as the fulfillment of a friend’s dying wish gradually gathers force, propelling the reader through a journey governed by luck yet shaped by necessity.The fragments accumulate; so, too, do the stakes. As he moves through Barcelona among androids known as the Denver-7, Escabia is haunted by his estrangement from his only daughter, and by the absence of his beloved wife, lost to the cliffs of Tojinbo. In this unstable landscape, where human intention increasingly intersects with automation and chance, the novel builds a subtle but persistent tension: Is Escabia truly constructing the canon, or is another intelligence at work alongside him, in the dark?Camera Obscura refracts Vila-Matas’s singular vision into a book about how we see, how we read, and how meaning assembles itself in the margins of our experience.

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.

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.

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.”

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 García 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.

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.

Mac is currently unemployed and lives on his wife’s earnings. An avid reader, he decides at the age of sixty to keep a diary. Mac’s wife, a dyslexic, thinks he is simply wasting his time and risking sliding further into depression—but Mac persists, and is determined that this diary won't turn into a novel. However, one day, he has a chance encounter with a neighbor, a successful author of a collection of enigmatic, willfully obscure stories. Mac decides that he will read, revise, and improve his neighbor’s stories, 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 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.

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.

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.