Enrique Vila-Matas offers a reading experience that defies predictable expectations. The essence of his work seems to be a condition that makes literature possible in the first place, even when it costs a narrator who wrestles with the scaffolding of an artistic consciousness capable of filtering every experience through the lens of writing. Stories emerge with a feverish energy, as if life itself could be left in a ditch and still be read at close range.
Montevideo stands as a novel that fictionalizes a negative, displaced impulse from a writer who never existed yet remains intensely real. The premise rests on the idea that life is always elsewhere, a notion echoed by famous writers and the act of questing itself. The narrator’s room holds a sealed door that opens only when a literary quote serves as a key. He moves through perpetual flight, forever dodging capture as he attempts to theorize about the end of literature, only to discard those theories just as quickly. The author’s approach favors a winning stylistic game over plot, driven by a steadfast wish to craft a literary landscape that tests the borders of traditional moral conflict.
The narrator arrives in Montevideo in a moment of crippling stalemate, a condition that binds him to the urge to write a novel built from a subtle sequence of narratives and monologues where real memories often stand in for fictional events. What has been published and what lies ahead is best understood as a single unwritten volume, imagined by Roberto Calasso as a work to be found on the shelves of a library imagined yet run by a restless dreamer. In some cities, the present moment seems to anticipate a flaming tour through mental circuits that connect distant places such as Paris, Cascais, Montevideo, Reykjavik, and Bogota. The cities are populated with an imagined narrator who proclaims that any true story told through words alters the nature of the world itself.
Montevideo carries a sense of confusion as a tangible burden, shaped by a relentless drive to retell, reinterpret, and reframe what is heard, read, and interpreted in a cycle without end. The cast of characters surrounds the narrator, who is oddly obsessed with the idea of defining his own voice rather than writing a straightforward life biography. The imagined list of influences stretches across Kafka, Joyce, Sterne, Gombrowicz, Rimbaud, Walser, Borges, Beckett, Perec, Celan, Pessoa, Sciascia, Tabucchi, Pitol, Piglia, Chejfec, Roussel, Barthes, and Blanchot, among others, reflecting a tradition that relentlessly questions the act of authorship.
Through a blend of narrative and essay, Montevideo ties life to literature while exploring the themes of Eternal Doubt, Indecision, ambiguity, and mystery. The narrator considers five tendencies within obsessive literature and how each one confronts the question of what a story can tell. Some voices contribute nothing, some remain silent, some say everything, and others hope for a full revelation, even as the influence of technology seems to copy and record all that happens. The novel traces a path for each city and imagines an impossible quest within every trend.
Readers familiar with Vila-Matas will sense a kinship with his work, and in this book a certain echo of Dylan surfaces. The framework hints at a chorus of voices that pull at a central plot while keeping the reader on the edge of grasping the core. The voyage through the Hotel Cervantes in Montevideo becomes a pivotal moment, where the journey toward an exit resembles an opening into an empty space akin to a symbolic hole. The narrative continues to push beyond conventional endings, inviting a gesture that mirrors a desire to vanish in order to read and write with renewed intensity. A similar motif appears in another city, where a room in an Italian hotel briefly stages a passage that once mattered to a master of prose. The conditions surrounding the narrator’s wish to disappear become palpable and propel a quest that threads through a Montevideo party and beyond. The avant-garde gaze of Vila-Matas, informed by lines from Roberto Juarroz, suggests that even when one seems to be at the center of the party, there is no one truly at the center, only a revelatory void that points toward another gathering of ideas and voices.