Synopsis
A quirky, cosmopolitan novel about life and literature by the prize-winning Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas, author of Bartleby & Co.
The narrator of Montano’s Malady is a writer named Jose who is so obsessed with literature that he finds it impossible to distinguish between real life and fictional reality. Part picaresque novel, part intimate diary, part memoir and philosophical musings, Enrique Vila-Matas has created a labyrinth in which writers as various as Cervantes, Sterne, Kafka, Musil, Bolaño, Coetzee, and Sebald cross endlessly surprising paths. Trying to piece together his life of loss and pain, Jose 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 Valparaiso. Exquisitely witty and erudite, it confirms the opinion of Bernardo Axtaga that Vila-Matas is "the most important living Spanish writer.""synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Authors
ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS was born in Barcelona. He has received countless prizes and written numerous award-winning novels, including Bartleby & Co., Montano’s Malady, Never Any End to Paris, and Dublinesque.
Jonathan Dunne was born in Kingston-upon-Thames, England, in 1968 and studied Classics at Oxford University. He is director of the publishing house Small Stations Press. He translates from Bulgarian, Catalan, Galician and Spanish into English.
Reviews
The specter of Borges hangs heavily over this inventive novel by Vila-Matas (Bartleby & Co.). The title refers to "literature-sickness," an affliction suffered acutely by the narrator, a famous Spanish writer named José Cardoso Pires, who publishes under his mother's name, Rosario Girondo. The Borgesian tropes, doubles and doppelgängers multiply from there. Presented as pieces of a diary, the book's five parts include a "nouvelle" titled "Montano's Malady"; a memoiristic account of the nouvelle's genesis; a biographical dictionary of the narrator's influences; diatribes at the perceived betrayals by his wife, Rosa; his friend, Tongoy; and by art. The entire novel is suffused with quotations and reflections on the diary form as an alternative to the fiction that the narrator (who travels frequently) is blocked from writing. The diary's fictionality pushes these claims into a narrative mise en-abyme, one from which the action never emerges. From the very first page, Vila-Matas embeds clauses as deeply as he embeds his characters' identities in hallucinatory sets of relations. While the exhaustion of this kind of metafiction is one of his themes, it doesn't save the book from its own devices.
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