Since, at the age of twenty-five, he published his first book Woman in the mirror contemplating the landscape, Enrique Vila-Matas has released a multitude of new books of all kinds, essays on broad themes, stories and novels. Today he is one of the most valued writers in our country, with many awards for his essay and narrative work..
An essential author of our lyrics for his creative capacity and for his literary mimicry, a kind of assumption of the leading role to unravel the convoluted perspective of the writer who seeks immortality and glory in the supposed transcendence of daring to narrate the world and who, in his time, he weathered the contradiction of feeling the need to hide from everything, to seclude himself in his ascetic desk.
Between Enrique Vila-Matas and his character the Dr. Pasavento a fusion takes place that transfers from paper to real life, an admirable integrating passion for literature and life.
And here comes the moment of me selection of novels by Enrique Vila-Matas.
3 recommended novels by Enrique Vila-Matas
Imposture
Novel authentically novel. From when Enrique Vila-Matas still did not mix reality and fiction as a vital narrative resource. An interesting novel that raises the weakness of memory and identity.
Summary: The discovery of a homeless man with no memory in a Barcelona cemetery, caught stealing funeral urns, uncovers an unusual interest at the same time that his photograph and description appear in a newspaper by work and grace of the asylum in which he is staying.
Two families will instantly recognize the knight in question: on the one hand he is Ramón Bruch, a Falangist writer whose track was lost when he was fighting in Russia in the Blue Division; on the other, he is Claudio Nart, a lowlife swindler. Who is this forgetful really?
Children without children
Book of stories in which the student surpasses the teacher. The whole is supposed to have an aftertaste Kafka. But in view of the reference, I will end up assuring that this book is better than the oneiric surrealism and with less background of the cited author.
Summary: Each of the stories that make up this book hides a quote from Kafka, perhaps the childless son par excellence, the epitome of individualism and, at the same time, indifference.
All the characters presented here are self-supporting, they could be single machines -even being married- and remain tied to reality only with a spider's thread. However, they also weave the abbreviated and portable tapestry of a particular history of Spain that covers barely 41 years, the age of Kafka when he died in Kierling.
Mac and his setback
The nature of the obsessions goes a long way to pose a plot at times delusional, at other times intense. Everything about the trade, dedication or passion for writing.
Summary: Mac has just lost his job and walks daily through El Coyote, the Barcelona neighborhood where he lives. He is obsessed with his neighbor, a famous and well-known writer, and feels annoyed every time he ignores him. One day he hears him talking to the bookseller about his debut feature Walter and his setback, a youth book full of incongruous passages, which he vaguely remembers, and Mac, who caresses the idea of writing, then decides to modify and improve this first story that your neighbor would rather leave in oblivion.
"The novels that I like are always like Chinese boxes, they are always full of stories," says the narrator of this amazing novel that disguises itself as a hilarious diary, an essay on the origin and the writing process, a criminal investigation and a novel Learning.
Enrique Vila-Matas destroys the myth of the need for one's own voice while reworking tradition to show that he is the owner of one of the most personal voices on the contemporary literary scene; Literary creation can be approached in depth without giving up providing the reader with moments of genuine laughter; extols normality through an eccentric and peculiar protagonist, and feigns improvisation in a masterful novel that contains various levels of reading, plot surprises, truly great finds, thanks to a structure capable of turning like a sock from the middle exact of the book, leaving the reader with their mouths open until its perfect ending.
Other recommended books by Enrique Vila-Matas are
This insane haze
The figure of the writer is the paradigm of everything, of everything narrated, of all the protagonists in front of the mirror in which they find the writer, undoing his existence in front of that God once endowed with a pen, then with his unnerving noise of keys and later just by sliding your fingers on a virtual keyboard. AND Enrique Vila-Matas he knows. He does not hide in false modesty or offer artificial arguments. The writer writes and creates worlds. And therefore writing about a writer sitting alone is something like narrating the adventures of God on the 1st before nothing.
A collation of all this of God and the writer, I remember another great native writer, the immeasurable Manuel Vilas, on whose facebook profile, we used to enjoy conversations between God and Vilas, two guys always capable of gutting reality to discover its most hilarious part.
About all that about creation, about the power that turns human beings into a new God through language, is this novel “This senseless mist.” Behind the successful writer Gran Bros hides our reference writer in this story, Simon Schneider. Simon is the one who is in charge, from his refuge in a corner of the Catalan Mediterranean, of providing arguments with which to continue feeding the myth of Gran Bros, located on the other side of the world, between the spotlights of the skyscrapers. But to his credit is not only that task in the shadows for the glory of the author of the moment. His works have reached many other authors of greater importance. And that is his greatest glory, that what is his belongs to others, that his words and his ingenious compositions are rewarded to reach millions of readers. Because deep down it is him who they read, although no one wants to know...
Without a doubt a praise to the creative process, with that impossible point of the only creative interest as a path without end or glory on which Vila-Matas abounds in the paradox of the narrator God. Until Simón, in a prolific day of writing, suddenly discovers that he is missing that phrase that ties everything together. A date he had there, on standby in his brain while he wrote about it, until he disappeared when he went to look for her...
He cannot remain seated, contemplating the appointment in clear flight. That autumn afternoon Simón leaves his refuge to the world and, like Quixote, or rather like Cervantes, he goes out in search of the quote that delimited eternity, that sentenced everything, that described the process and ultimate foundation of writing...
Without a doubt, Dr. Pasavento is, together with Bartleby and company and Montano's disease, his best work, in my opinion at least.
Thank you very much for your contribution, Salvador!
The book that after years of reading Vila Matas caused a strong impact on me, I thought his narrative capacity had decreased, was «Dublinesca». A huge book.
In authors as special as Vila-Matas it may be a matter of the moment in which you catch it more than the work itself.
Come on, to raise new focuses.
Thanks for commenting, Richard.