In the midst of a period of personal and literary transformation, the narrator of this novel begins to observe signs on doors and in adjacent rooms, symbols that communicate Paris with Cascais, Montevideo, Reykjavik, St. Gallen and Bogotá and that bring it stealthily we return to writing, to the desire to turn into life sheets some experiences that, at least, call to be confessed.
“In recent times you have become a writer for whom things really happen. I hope you understand that your destiny is that of a man who must want to rise, to be reborn, to be again. I repeat: to rise. the hands are your destiny, the key to the new door.”
Halfway between fiction and reality, Barcelona writer Enrique Vila-Matas (‘Dublinesque’, ‘Bartleby and Co.’) returns with ‘Montevideo’, an autofiction novel that deals with the ambiguity of the world as a characteristic feature of our time .
According to the author in a recent interview with La Vanguardia, the story of this novel goes back twenty years, when an Argentinian writer friend told him that Bioy Casares and Julio Cortázar had each written a very similar story. In both, the protagonist takes the ferry from Buenos Aires to Montevideo and stays at the Hotel Cervantes and hears things from the room door. In Casares’ story, the protagonist overhears a couple having sex. In Cortázar, the cry of a child.
Vila-Matas became obsessed with the recognition of that hotel in Montevideo, where the two Latin American writers mixed reality and fiction, and this is the origin of this novel, which has shades of detective and horror.
From the hotel room, Vila-Matas becomes a diary, as he begins to observe the signs that communicate him to Paris, Reykjavik, Bogotá and Montevideo itself. All together lead him irresistibly to the reproving writing, which he had abandoned. “I wanted to try to discover the ordinary. If reality and fiction are the same, or almost the same,” said Vila-Matas during the presentation of his novel in Barcelona.
Born in 1948 in Barcelona, Vila-Matas is one of the most internationally recognized Spanish authors and many of his novels have been translated into English and are available in the American market. Among them are Bartleby y compañía (Bartleby And Company), El mal de Montano (Malady Montanos), París no se acaba nunca (Never End in Paris), Dublinesca (Dublinesque) or ‘La Modestia’ (‘Vampire in Love’). .
He has received, among others, the Rómulo Gallegos, Médicis and FIL Prizes for Literature in the Romance Languages, is a Knight of the French Legion of Honor, belongs to the Convulsive Order of Knights of Finnegans and is a distinguished member of the Society of Refractories to General Imbecility (based in Nantes).
