Hard drive reset and return to origins is very much in Enrique Vila-Matas’ latest novel, which hits bookstores on the 31st. It’s called ‘Montevideo’, and for those looking for depictions of the Uruguayan capital, Let’s say they’ll find Julio Cortázar’s story in a real hotel room, where he has placed it in a doomed doorway. The conversation begins with concern for the condition of the author, who has just overcome a major health problem. They say little. He just had a kidney transplant and his donor wife, Paula. The sempiternal Paula de Parma of their devotion. The author is dark, weak, and eager to overcome the grueling publicity of his published novel by Seix Barral. Everything is going well.
-The surprising light tone of this novel, written in a time when there was no entertainment.
– I can say that I have not invented such a free book saying ‘Kassel does not invite logic’. My last novels have been a little tight, especially the last one. I didn’t want to make any rules here. I told myself that I would be what I am again.
-Could you say that ‘Montevideo’ is like a rewrite of one of your most successful books, ‘Paris never ends’?
-That book was, in a way, autofiction, an undervalued and poorly understood word, because it is known that everything written about reality changes that reality. Here I wanted to point out the differences with this narrator, who went to Paris to be like Hemingway and soon became a criminal. I didn’t want journalists to ask again whether my writing was autobiographical. But it’s useless, they will do it again.
-Why does the term autofiction bother you now?
-A very modern term was imposed before. I remember once giving a talk in a provincial city where some of the Royal Family was present, and they warned me not to talk about autofiction or weird stuff. [ríe] but now it is used to make everyone equal. Even the dumbest writers today have made a book about his father or mother.
-What do you want to say here?
-Basically, I’m sick of narrators and narratives. What I love is thought, literature, Nietzsche, Paul Valery. These things.
-A novel without a story, is it?
-Yes, and it can already be seen through the cover, which shows the Danish painter Hammershoi’s painting with three doors opening in perspective. I liked that it was an interior without human figures, which means that the illustration says nothing.
-But it gives it a fantastic air. This could be said to be his first introduction to unsettling geography.
– He was already there in ‘The Picture Assassin’ that I wrote in 1977. I don’t want to pretend to be innocent, but I wasn’t aware that I was doing fantasy literature while I was writing it. Now I wanted to find the real door to the room that inspired Cortázar in a real hotel, Cervantes. When I went to Montevideo, I went there and asked for the same room.
-Did they know anything about Cortazar’s visit to the hotel?
-Number. The hotel had become an hourly dating establishment, and customers were complaining about cockroaches. It had had better times and was frequented by Borges, Bioy Casares and Carlos Gardel who came to sing there. I dreamed of a fake conspiracy at the hotel reception, based on a slogan that doesn’t appear like this in the book.
-Forks?
– ‘Tacuarembo’. The small town that Uruguayans assured was born against Gardel’s theory of Buenos Aires or those who placed it in Toulouse. Well, the plot is pretty innocent. But after the book was finished, I realized that in reality, looking for my own room, like Virginia Woolf’s, is for me searching for my own style.
-You have moved from Montevideo to Paris, where artist Dominique González-Foerster has created a special room for you.
-Yes, he was in a retrospective dedicated to him in Pompidou. He created a unique room for me that can only be opened with a key I have. Many of my friends asked me to take my place, but I felt that only I could open that door. I didn’t know I would find myself there. Finally, shortly before the owner knocked on the door of the hotel I was staying in, it was a red suitcase very similar to the one I found in Toulouse, to my amazement.
-They ask what it means for her to write to Madeleine Moore, a copy of González-Foester in ‘Montevideo’.
-Yes, and it reads, among other things, “Laughing at the Belgian origin flies”.
– Would “laughing at Belgian flies” be a good description of your literature?
-Yes, I accept. I hope the Belgians don’t get it wrong. [ríe].
-There’s another important question in the book, and that’s deep down if we don’t write about things that it doesn’t allow us to write about.
“A question Beckett asked a friend.” And I find it very nice to think about writing about things we don’t have access to. We will never reach the end of a story because getting there means there is no point in continuing.
Playing with the parallels between ‘Paris never ends’ and this novel. It ended with an amusing quote from his father. That’s what her mother says.
-Yes. After asking him why the world is so strange, he said, “The greatest mystery of the universe is that the universe is a mystery.”
-Your father was a majestic figure, and in a way he appeared in most of your novels. But her mother, no.
– It’s funny because dad didn’t mention his mom either. We were very excited at home. When I started writing, he would come to see me at presentations and conferences. For example, if I told you that we went to Cadaqués at 600, he would stand up and say out loud, “Wrong, lie.” I don’t understand the script.
– A very real lady, no doubt.
– During the war, Llavaneras had to work hard at home and matured very quickly. I was not silly. One day I wanted to tell him a very funny story. I went to Paris on one of the four-bed sleeper trains. One of the passengers, who looked like Johnny Hallyday, was carrying a parrot that had just said “Je t’aime”. And he continued to say. The fourth passenger on board Lyon was missing, slipped into darkness, and the bird began to shout “Je t’aime” as he went to bed. Nobody moved a muscle. I had a Polaroid and took a picture of the kid and the parrot to show my mom in the morning. When he saw her, he said to me, “You made this up”.
-Therefore, before the journalists, it was his mother who was the first to deal with the reality or indifference of his fictions.
My father had little to do with fiction, either. When I wrote ‘The Vertical Journey’ I said a book would come out that looked like it was talking about it, but it wasn’t. He asked me what the character was doing. Well, I said, he’s a politician, a nationalist, playing poker… but I’m making up what happened to him. That’s when my mom asked: “So I’m going out?” “If I don’t go out, how would you like to go out?” she replied. Wild.