With Enrique Vila-Matas one no longer knows what to expect. And perhaps the condition of possibility of his literature is there, just that, which is no less: a condition of possibility. definitely. At the expense of, and at the expense of, a narrator who is worried about the scaffolding of an artistic consciousness who can process everything that passes through the filter of the literary – that is, the impossibility of living outside the text – and turns into a reader obsessed with “writing”. stories like crazy, even leaving life itself in a ditch». As if that life and that literature were still possible. It’s like you can write and read at close range.
It can be said that Montevideo is a novel that is fictionalized with the negative and displaced impulse of a writer who never existed but who is real—from the idea that life is always elsewhere, from Milan Kundera dixit—and a quest. His own room, containing a sealed door whose opening is based on a literary quote in the form of a key. He is a self-deprived and constantly in flight, an impossible-to-catch writer who tries to concoct theories about the end of literature, but strives to lose them quickly. Let’s suppose. How not? , the predominance of a game-winning style over the plot, and the unwavering will to construct a literary landscape after the previously known moral battle to be lost.
This author claims to have landed in Montevideo in a crippling stalemate, but that is exactly what shackles him to the urge to write “this novel, set in a subtle sequence of narratives and monologues, in which real memories often replace fictional events.” . The work that has already been published and is to come by this narrator can be thought of as consisting of a single unwritten volume, as Roberto Calasso wanted it, to be found (but contemplated) on the shelves of a non-existent library run by an impure madman. In some cities, the here and now is described as contemplating a “flaming tour of mental circuits capturing and connecting distant points in space” passing Paris, Cascais, Montevideo, Reykjavik, and Bogota. Cities inhabited by an imaginary narrator who shouts to those who want to hear it that “any narrative version of a true story is always a form of fiction, because once the world is organized with words, the nature of the world changes”.
Montevideo carries the mark of confusion under his arm and swears that it is shaped by the unbreakable passion of retelling and retransmitting and reinterpreting and reinterpreting what is told and read and interpreted in an endless loop. It surrounds the books of the cast, which always accompanies a narrator with a recurring obsession: “I am by no means writing a biography of my own style, some timeless prose, if any, some little notes from life and lyrics I will seek out. Find out who I really am and who is my favorite author»: Vila-Matas? Kafka, Joyce, Sterne, Gombrowicz, Rimbaud, Walser, Borges, Beckett, Perec, Celan, Pessoa, Sciascia, Tabucchi, Pitol, Piglia, Chejfec, Roussel, Barthes, Blanchot?
Through a script between narrative and essay, Montevideo’s voice connects life with literature and masters “Eternal Doubt”, “Regime of Indecision”, the logic of “ambiguity” and “mystery”. He tries to dismantle the story and compare it to the narrative of the five tendencies of obsessive literature: “those who have nothing to tell”, “willfully say nothing”, “say nothing”, “say everything”, “why God will one day be so flawed It is the expression of those who hope that it will tell everything, including what happened,” and, finally, “those who have surrendered to the power of technology that seems to copy and record everything.” and therefore to make the writing profession expendable ». A trend for each of the five cities and an impossible city quest in each trend.
The Vila-Matas reader will recognize a family resemblance—and Dylan—in this book. In this novel, Hamlet is in This is Julio, the discursive framework that connects the tweens that are already open and that are chained together as a sign of a narrative tone that prevents the narrative voice—and the reader—from grasping the center of the plot. Cortázar and his story The Condemned Door from Endgame. Room 205 of the Hotel Cervantes (existing and real) in Montevideo is where the journey of no return is outlined and the narrator will find an exit in the form of an empty hole like Alicia’s. Let it go one step further, as Maurice Blanchot insistently claims: to live and, above all, to disappear in order to be able to read and write in a gesture that is delightfully repeated in the author’s poetry. In room 346 of the Hotel Albergo Roma in Turin, Cesare Pavese certainly passed through the door; In 205 of the Cervantes Hotel, the circumstances surrounding the narrator’s dying wish become palpable: to find the master key to the cursed door of literature and then risk disappearing completely and definitively to make this gesture, the story of a quest whirling at a Montevideo party. The avant-garde look, outlined by Vila-Matas in Chet Baker, considers his art and foresaw it through one of Roberto Juarroz’s poems in Exploradores del abismo: “Sometimes it seems that we are in the center of the party/ But/ there is no one in the center of the party/ in the center of the party There is a void/ but at the center of the void is another party».