The versatile Enrique Vila-Matas offers us the latest in the mosaic of his literary creation. Doctor Pasavento + Bastian Schneider is the story of a writer, that kind of magic mirror in which the author has no choice but to recognize part of himself left behind in the protagonist of the plot.
The issue of the alter ego is even clearer when we discover this writer Andrés Pasavento, launching himself to meet Professor Morante, a clear replica of the well-known poet Robert Walser who inhabited the world halfway between freedom and confinement in psychiatric centers.
The meeting ends up being a good excuse to raise the old dilemma of creation, especially the literary one. The loneliness of the task of writing and the desire for recognition, fame and glory. A contradiction that goes beyond the necessary fact of writing and extends to a vital paradox in which we can all see ourselves reflected. It is about that vain attempt to immortalize ourselves, balanced by opposing sensations that occupy us at times and that push us to hide from everything.
Summary: The writer Andrés Pasavento wants to recover the innocence of his beginnings, lost from the moment he reached literary glory. To do this, he decides to change his identity, avoiding at all costs to meet acquaintances, especially his editor.
Now he is a discreet doctor of psychiatry who travels to Campo di Reca to interview Professor Morante, a transcript of Robert Walser, in a madhouse on the slope of Vesuvius. Divided between the desire to go unnoticed and the fear that no one will miss him, the narrator of this funny and tragic novel is carried away by his obsessions: fame and anonymity, the panic of losing creative inspiration, the desire to to hide and the yearning to be observed.
You can buy the book Doctor Pasavento + Bastian Schneider, the new novel by Enrique Vila-Matas, here: