The Illogic of Kassel

The award-winning novelist brings his trademark humour and lightly worn intelligence to the contemporary art world

One of the most richly allusive novels you’re likely to encounter... [a] thrillingly imaginative exploration of creativity

An adventure novel of ideas… Rollicking, a passionate defense of literature as an essential element of public life and, more generally, of art in a time of numbers – when the market establishes not just the price but the value of necessary things like art and thought. “Life is serious, art is joyful,” he says, and that sense of joy carries over to Mr Vila-Matas’ novel. He strikes a difficult balance between being philosophical and being lighthearted and entertaining – it’s what gives his writing sophistication and panache

A light-hearted novel about art and the avant-garde… Showing us a part of the art world that he finds a bit preposterous, but also charming, and even important [Vila-Matas] chooses humour in a way that allows him to have big ideas while relentlessly making fun of them

Like W.G. Sebald, Geoff Dyer and, more recently, writers such as Rachel Cusk, Teju Cole and Ben Lerner, Vila-Matas manages to create a productive uncertainty in the reader’s mind through his disorientating effects... One of the distinct pleasures of Vila-Matas’ books is that they function as little libraries stuffed with other authors’ works… His novels now are less like stories than like experiences of a particular atmosphere. [The Illogic of Kassel] asserts its own strange rhythm and stands as a valuable addition to Vila-Matas’ work

This summer I plan to relax with two short works by the charmingly playful, lucidly destructive Spanish novelist, Enrique Vila-Matas... Truth, fiction, history, memoir: these are always charmingly unstable categories in Vila-Matas’s writing

[A] beguiling, rebellious sojourn into the underground soul of the avant-garde

A blend of memoir, fiction and a sharp observation of human behavior… A warm and engaging read, littered with gentle humour.

Enrique Vila-Matas is widely considered to be one of Spain's most important contemporary novelists. His work has been translated into 36 languages and has won numerous international literary prizes, including the Herralde Prize, the Prix Médicis étranger and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. Vila-Matas' books have been longlisted (Montano) and shortlisted (Dublinesque) for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Never Any End to Paris was a finalist for the US Best Translated Book Award. Mac &amp; His Problem was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020.

A puzzling phone call shatters a writer’s routine. An enigmatic female voice extends an invitation to take part in Documenta, the legendary contemporary art exhibition held every five years in Kassel, Germany. The writer’s mission will be to transform himself into a living art installation, by sitting down to write every morning in a Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of town. 
 
 Once in Kassel, the writer is surprised to find himself overcome by good cheer. As he strolls through the city, spurred on by his spontaneous, quirky response to art, he begins to make sense of the wonders that surround him. 
 
'A writer who has no equal in the contemporary landscape of the Spanish novel' 
Roberto Bolaño 
 
'Vila-Matas's work made a tremendous impression on me' 
Paul Auster

Montano

A man's obsession with literature leads him to see the world through the eyes of fiction

A man's obsession with literature leads him to see the world through the eyes of fiction 
 
Literature can be contagious; it can also be our only means of salvation. That at least is the experience of Montano, the 'unreliable narrator' of Enrique Vila-Matas' prize-winning novel, a man and a writer who is so obsessed with the books of certain celebrated contemporaries that he is unable to put pen to paper or utter a word without summoning up their work or their lives, and whose malady is that he finds it impossible to distinguish between real life and fictional reality. Part picaresque novel, part intimate diary, part memoir, part philosophical musings, Vila-Matas has created a labyrinth in which writers as various as Cervantes, Sterne, Kafka, Musil, Perec, Bolaño, Coetzee, Sebald and Magris cross endlessly surprising paths, while his protagonist leads the reader on an unsettling journey from European cities such as Nantes, Barcelona, Lisbon, Prague and Budapest to the Azores and the Chilean port of Valparaíso. 
 
Yet for all the author's dazzling literary pyrotechnics, this is a novel that is always witty and accessible.

Never Any End to Paris

A virtuoso balletic pas de deux of memory and imagination... There is something reminiscent in the fictional young Vila-Matas of Woody Allen... Not only does this novel glitter with sharp ideas and observations, it may just be the best book I've ever read about Paris.

Utterly compelling...breathtakingly accomplished... I was left satisfied, yet somehow wishing this captivating raconteur had continued indefinitely

By the end of it I was fully seduced by its self-portrait of the artist as a young writer... This wonderful book only reconfirms the never-ending-ness of Paris

Vila-Matas's touch is light and whimsical, while his allusions encompass a rogue's gallery of world literature

One of Spain's most inventive and enjoyable novelists

An ironic anti-novel about the novel: it poses serious questions about the form’s limitations in being able to capture the protean reality of memory and identity but also argues for its continuing relevance (taking its cue from writers like Barthes, Perec and Queneau who appear in its pages) as a post-modernist game of ideas, a thought-provoking jeu d’esprit.

Trying to be Ernest Hemingway is never easy. 
 
After reading A Moveable Feast, aspiring novelist Enrique Vila-Matas moves to Paris to be closer to his literary idol, Ernest Hemingway. Surrounded by the writers, artists and eccentrics of '70s Parisian café culture, he dresses in black, buys two pairs of reading glasses, and smokes a pipe like Sartre. Now, in later life, he reflects on his youth while giving a three-day lecture on irony. And he’s still convinced he looks like Hemingway. 
 
Never Any End to Paris is a hilarious, playful novel about literature and the art of writing, and how life never quite goes to plan.

Dublinesque

From one of Spain's greatest writers, a witty, moving novel about art, life, death and James Joyce.

One of the most pleasurable and joyous novels of the year

A brilliant, funny novel; an expertly woven tapestry of literary allusions… Enrique Vila-Matas has created a masterpiece

Hugely entertaining…Vila-Matas enjoyed himself writing Dublinesque, that is obvious, and the reader will also enjoy – and collaborate in – this delightful literary exercise that is clever without being knowing, lightly erudite but never pretentious

Vila Matas’s novel is full of spectres, absences, near-misses… Like Becket, it is apocalypse without the drama… Dublinesque is a postmodern meditation on a high modernist text, full of cryptic crosses between fiction and reality

An extremely clever book, an obvious affection response to Joyce, to Ulysses , to all serious literature

An exquisite and original book in which literature does not make us think about life: it is life

The masterpiece of one of Spain’s leading writers

Born in Barcelona in 1948, Enrique Vila-Matas is widely considered to be one of Spain's most important contemporary novelists, and Dublinesque has been declared his masterpiece. His extraordinary oeuvre, translated into 30 languages, includes Bartleby &amp; Co, Montano (longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) and Never Any End to Paris (a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award).

SHORTLISTED FOR THE INDEPENDENT FOREIGN FICTION PRIZE 
 
'A writer who has no equal in the contemporary landscape of the Spanish novel.' Roberto Bolaño 
 
Samuel Riba is about to turn 60. A successful publisher in Barcelona, he is increasingly prone to attacks of anxiety and, looking for distraction, he concocts a spur-of-the-moment trip to Dublin, a city he has never visited but once dreamed about. 
 
He sets off for Dublin on the pretext of honouring James Joyce’s Ulysses on Bloomsday. But as he and his friends gather in the cemetery to give their orations, a mysterious figure in a mackintosh resembling Joyce’s protégé Samuel Beckett hovers in the background. Is it Beckett, or is it the writer of genius that Riba has spent his whole career trying, and failing, to find?

Bartleby And Co

Prize-winning novel from Spain - intellectual, contemporary, very funny and highly original - by one of the most admired of present-day Spanish writers.

Vila-Matas has had the brilliant idea of tracking down literature's slackers - Bartleby and Co proposes a shadowy history of literature

Ingenious... An Excellent book... A work of honesty and profound beauty

Bartleby and Co is set to become the book of the literary season... An enormously enjoyable and intelligent book, and if I am not mistaken, an important one

Told with considerable elegance and an admirable lack of melodrama

Enrique Vila-Matas was born in Barcelona in 1948. His extraordinary literary oeuvre includes Bartlby &amp; Co, Montano and Never Any End to Paris, winner of the same Premio Rómulo Gallegos that catapulted his friend Roberto Bolaño to international renown. He has been translated into 30 languages.

Marcelo, a clerk in a Barcelona office who might himself have emerged from a novel by Kafka, inhabits a world peopled by characters in literature. He once wrote a novel about the impossibility of love, but since then he has written nothing. He has, in short, become a 'Bartleby', so named after the character in Herman Melville's short story who, when asked to do something, always replied: 'I would prefer not to.' 
 
One day Marcelo sets out to make a search through literature for all those other possible Bartlebys, and with this in mind he has the engagingly original notion of keeping a diary and writing footnotes to an invisible text. His references to authors, both real and invented, provide the reader with extravagant doses of humour that are at once hilarious, irreverent and stimulating.

Enrique Vila-Matas

Margaret Jull Costa

Sophie Hughes

In this lively and inquisitive work of metafiction, a story about stories, Vila-Matas is as deliberate as he is playful, and induces the not altogether unpleasant sensation of getting lost ever deeper in a literary hall of mirrors

A writer who has no equal in the contemporary landscape of the Spanish novel

Arguably Spain’s most significant contemporary figure

The tremendously touching characters in Enrique Vila-Matas’s novels who stumble from one place to the next, not really sure where they are going, but always on a quest are so deeply comical on the one hand, and so deeply poignant on the other, that you just have to give yourself up to it because you’re in the hands of a master.

Playful and funny and among the best Spanish novelists

Vila-Matas’s bouncy prose is the highlight of this lively ride through a writer’s mind.

A metafictional paean to storytelling... Diary, essay, thriller, conspiracy theory, posthumous memoir, novel—Vila-Matas uses all the materials to construct his latest metafictional fun house.

[Vila-Matas] chooses humour in a way that allows him to have big ideas while relentlessly making fun of them

Like W.G. Sebald, Geoff Dyer and, more recently, writers such as Rachel Cusk, Teju Cole and Ben Lerner, Vila-Matas manages to create a productive uncertainty in the reader’s mind through his disorientating effects... One of the distinct pleasures of Vila-Matas’ books is that they function as little libraries stuffed with other authors’ works

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 
 
 Enrique Vila-Matas's new novel is perhaps his greatest: 'playful and funny and among the best Spanish novelists' Colm Tóibín 
 
Sixty-something Mac is not writing a novel. He is writing a diary, which no one will ever read. His wife, Carmen, thinks he is wasting his time. But Mac persists, diligently recording his daily walks through the neighbourhood during the hottest summer Barcelona has seen in over a century. But soon he notices that life is exhibiting strange literary overtones, and in the sweltering heat, he becomes ever more immersed in literature - a literature haunted by death but alive with the sheer pleasure of writing. 
 
Intricate, erudite and practically fizzing on the page, Mac and His Problem is a masterpiece of metafiction and a testament to the power and playfulness of great literature. 
 
'So deeply comical on the one hand, and so deeply poignant on the other, that you just have to give yourself up to it because you're in the hands of a master' Paul Auster 
 
'[Vila-Matas] chooses humour in a way that allows him to have big ideas while relentlessly making fun of them' Sunday Telegraph

Enrique Vila-Matas

Praise for Mac and His Problem

In this lively and inquisitive work of metafiction, a story about stories, Vila-Matas is as deliberate as he is playful, and induces the not altogether unpleasant sensation of getting lost ever deeper in a literary ...

A writer who has no equal in the contemporary landscape of the Spanish novel

Arguably Spain’s most significant contemporary figure

In this lively and inquisitive work of metafiction, a story about stories, Vila-Matas is as deliberate as he is playful, and induces the not altogether unpleasant sensation of getting lost ever deeper in a literary ...

A writer who has no equal in the contemporary landscape of the Spanish novel

Arguably Spain’s most significant contemporary figure

In this lively and inquisitive work of metafiction, a story about stories, Vila-Matas is as deliberate as he is playful, and induces the not altogether unpleasant sensation of getting lost ever deeper in a literary ...

A writer who has no equal in the contemporary landscape of the Spanish novel

Arguably Spain’s most significant contemporary figure

Books by Enrique Vila-Matas

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