Never Any End to Paris - Softcover

Vila-Matas, Enrique

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811218139 ISBN 13: 9780811218139

Publisher: New Directions, 2011

Synopsis

A splendid ironic portrayal of literary Paris and of a young writer’s struggles by one of Spain’s most eminent authors.

This brilliantly ironic novel about literature and writing, in Vila-Matas’s trademark witty and erudite style, is told in the form of a lecture delivered by a novelist clearly a version of the author himself. The “lecturer” tells of his two-year stint living in Marguerite Duras’s garret during the seventies, spending time with writers, intellectuals, and eccentrics, and trying to make it as a creator of literature: “I went to Paris and was very poor and very unhappy.” Encountering such luminaries as Duras, Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, Sergio Pitol, Samuel Beckett, and Juan Marsé, our narrator embarks on a novel whose text will “kill” its readers and put him on a footing with his beloved Hemingway. (Never Any End to Paris takes its title from a refrain in A Moveable Feast.) What emerges is a fabulous portrait of intellectual life in Paris that, with humor and penetrating insight, investigates the role of literature in our lives.

About 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.

Anne McLean lives in Toronto and has translated the works of authors including Javier Cercas, Julio Cortázar, and Juan Gabriel Vásquez, and Enrique Vila-Matas.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811218139
• ISBN 13: 9780811218139
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 197