It is true that the publication of a new novel by an author you have followed for a long time is always a source of joy. this happens to me Enrique Vila-Matas. Happened to me with Javier Marías’s too. And despite my eclecticism, it can be seen that the goat always shoots at the mountain. Therefore, I hardly had time to capture Montevideo (2022); and yet for some reason I don’t know what I know, it took me a few months to read and enjoy it. Safe bet.
And so I entered a narrative where the protagonist in the first person, the literary self, contemplates what writing is and what it means, a literary transcript of the author with a high dose of autofiction and a good sense of humor. not. Therefore, especially in the first chapter, he presents a narrative that is close to an essay on literature and writing. To this end his speech is articulated by laying out a multitude of observations on the subject, such as the different kinds of writers that could be, opinions about the omniscient narrator (“Because of his sudden ubiquity,” Tabucchi said, the nineteenth novelist was very much like God in the nineteenth century» p. ); on the short story as a textual genre and what needs to be told (“The secret to squeezing is to tell everything”, according to Voltaire, p. 28). with the help of allusions to reach the very dangerous thing of asking what literature really is, and beyond, what is it? another comes and in the end everything does not matter” (p.68).
With the author’s suggestion of blockage and the play of doors that open and take us to unreal spaces; like the prison doors of hotels and the mystery of a room that disappeared without any explanation in Cervantes, a hotel in Montevideo, the novel articulates as a journey where fiction exists within and within itself, and therefore is not. it is necessary to explain reality by any logic beyond what the author indicates.
Each of the found places constitutes a structuring point of the novel. There are five cities, five place names, five estancias (starting in Paris and continuing with Cascais, Montevideo, Reykjavik and Bogotá and ending again in Paris). They were all conceived and became a fusion and representation of places involved in the reality of conceiving literature and telling a true story with illogical aspects of fiction. Vila-Matas aspects such as productivity, non-writing, illogical fiction, seeing things as no one has seen before, creating gaps and many aspects are what Vila-Matas demonstrates in his impeccable narration, always with a desire to immerse himself in fiction. .
Montevideo is a novel written from the “not writing hole” (p.267) the hero falls into. It seems that life has turned into literature, and the concept that should be assumed by the theme it deals with is what this novel contains according to the literary self: “A biography of my style” (p. 37). This idea contributes to the novel’s departure from the plot as the central axis, as reflected in Cervantes’ words, which he compiled by reference in the text: “The knitting was stopped and happiness came” (p.225).
And why should you read this novel? First of all, because it deals with what might be called meta-literature, which will be examined in high literature, that is, art; and it is true that the nature of the world changes from the moment the world is organized in words, as it can be an example as a metaphysical exercise. There is nothing for the society in which we live, dominated by an ambiguity disguised as indisputable truth.