ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS AN ENGLISH PAGE
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THE ENGLISH JUMP
The English Jump		 “Enrique Vila-Matas is a consistently rich and challenging contemporary Spanish-language novelist. Revered in France, a mentor to Bolaño and his Iberoamerican brood,
his prose is a model of world literature”
World Literature Today. November 2012
“In Dublinesque Enrique Vila-Matas has created a masterpiece”
Jacqueline McCarrick
The Times Literary Supplement
July 2012, n. 5704		 ”A Catalan writer who is arguably Spain’s most significant contemporary literary figure”
Joanna Kavenna
The New Yorker
September 2012		 “Enrique Vila-Matas is a great writer, and his new book Dublinesque is what great readers have been
searching for”
The Coffin Factory
July 2012
Dublinesque: A comic book that is both serious and profound. Combining the celebration of the ordinary in Schwitters or Perec with the hint of mad tongue-in-cheek apocalypse of Duchamp and Bernhard, 'Dublinesque' is imbued with its own aura: of a world becalmed after the storms that beset culture in the 20th century. Is that calm a sign of peace at last, or of the absence of any life-giving wind?
Gabriel Josipovici
 mosca
   -To finish up, given that your books frequently deal with other writers, I’d like to ask you about your friendship with Roberto Bolaño, who, as you know, has become a very popular writer in the United States. Did the friendship leave traces in your literature?
    -Meeting Bolaño in 1996 meant that I no longer felt alone as a writer. In that Spain, which was trapped in a provincialism and an antiquated realism, finding myself with someone who from the very first moment felt like a literary brother helped me to feel free and not consider myself as strange as some of my colleagues would have me believe. Or maybe it was the opposite: I was stranger still. We laughed together very much. We wrote letters to imbeciles and we talked of a beauty that was short-lived and whose end would be disastrous.

The Paris Review, translated from Spanish by Scott Esposito.
V-M and RB in Blanes. Inedit picture.
Vila-Matas and Roberto Bolaño in Blanes 1998
Trinity Ccollege. Universidad of Dublin
 DUBLINESQUE PRESS
“By lifting the heavy weight of the past, by setting irony against dogmatism and rigidity, Vila-Matas allows his characters, and us, to contemplate the future.”
— The New Yorker on Enrique Vila-Matas's Dublinesque
“The accent of Vila-Matas's project falls on an accomplished romanticism conscious of its historicity, an artist-worship taken to maturity that concurrently absents and introduces itself into the work at every moment.”
— Los Angeles Review of Books on Enrique Vila-Matas's Dublinesque
“A touching account of facing down mortality with a passion and an obsession for literature.”
— The New York Times Book Review on Enrique Vila-Matas's Dublinesque
“It is Vila-Matas' style of writing that distinguishes him as one of the best living authors today, and what makes Dublinesque a must read book.”
— The Coffin Factory on Enrique Vila-Matas's Dublinesque
“The Spanish novelist is a master of that problematic enterprise of literature: the death-defying highwire act of telling the truth through lies, of invoking reality through fiction.”
— The Millions on Enrique Vila-Matas's Dublinesque
“Both shocking and gratifying for the reader...Dublinesque offers the reader layer upon layer of secrets that only she is privy to, and the effect is thrilling. ”
— Full Stop on Enrique Vila-Matas's Dublinesque
“The novel is about the death of the author in more senses than one. Funerals make a kind of art out of death, and so does Dublinesque”
— London Review of Books on Enrique Vila-Matas's Dublinesque
“From his latest raid into the literary jungle Vila-Matas has brought home a fine specimen of that most endangered of intellectual species, the literary publisher. ”
— The Guardian on Enrique Vila-Matas's Dublinesque
“His writing is filled with withdrawal and disappearance, and so it is with Dublinesque, one of the most pleasurable and joyous novels of the year. ”
— The Independent on Enrique Vila-Matas's Dublinesque
“Hugely entertaining, witty and informed, a pleasure to read. ”
— The Irish Times on Enrique Vila-Matas's Dublinesque
DUBLINESQUE AWARDS
Dublinesca, The Cunhambebe Award in Brazil
FRANCE 2010
Prix Jean Carrière
ITALY 2011
Premio Bottari Lattes Grinzane
BRAZIL 2012
The Cunhambebe Award
GREECE 2012
Mejor ficción y mejor traduccion
en lengua española
Mujer descendiendo la escalera (Gerard Richter)
Abbreviated History
of Portable Literature
 BIBLIOGRAPHY of DUBLINESQUE
  BIBLIOGRAPHY of NEVER ANY END TO PARIS
 
UNITED STATES
Dublinesque
Dublinesque
New Directions, 2012
Trans. Anne McLean		 Never any end to Paris

Never Any End to Paris
New Directions, 2011
Trans. Anne McLean		 Montano's Malady. New Directions Publishing, 2007.
Montano's Malady
New Directions, 2007
Trans. Jonathan Dunne		 Bartleby & Co.. New Directions Publishing, 2007.
Bartleby & Company
New Directions, 2007
Trans. Jonathan Dunne
 
UNITED KINGDOM
Dublinesque
Dublinesque
Vintage, 2012
Trans. Ann McLean &
Rosalind Harvey		 Dublinesque
Dublinesque
Harvill Secker, 2012
Trans. Ann McLean &
Rosalind Harvey		 Montano, Harvill Secker, 2007

Montano
Harvill Secker, 2007
Trans. Jonathan Dunne		 Bartleby & Co., The Harvill Press, 2004

Bartleby & Co.
Vintage, 2004
Trans. Jonathan Dunne
I'M NOT AUSTER
Paul Auster
I’m Not Auster
by Enrique Vila-Matas.
Translated by Tom Bunstead
Quaterly Conversation
September 3, 2012
    “One night, a prestigious and now retired literary publisher has a very vivid and real dream that takes place in Dublin, a city he’s never visited. The central scene of the dream is a funeral in the era of the printing press, held in homage to Ulysses. The publisher would give anything to know if the unidentified character in his dream is the great author he always wanted to discover, or the ghostly angel who abandoned him during childhood. As the days go by, he will come to understand that his vision of the end of an era was prophetic.

    In Dublinesca, Enrique Vila-Matas traces a majestic journey across a bridge that connects the world of Joyce with that of Beckett, and what they symbolize: great literature and evidence of the difficulties faced by literary authors, pedigree publishers and in the end, good readers, to survive in a society that bounds towards stupidity. A robust work, which houses a great sense of humour. In short, literature at its finest.”		   Dublinesca
Dublinesca (Seix Barral, 2010) was published in 2011 by New Directions in USA and by Harvill in UK.
    «I’m leaping to confess to all of you now that I feel lucky not to yearn for my years of writerly apprenticeship. Because if I could tell you that from those years I remember the intensity, those hours consumed writing in the garret, consumed all day long and then at night, bent over my desk while the world slept, without feeling tired, electrified, working till dawn. And even beyond … If I only I could tell you something like that, but the fact is I can’t, there’s not much nobility, beauty or intensity from these minutes of my youth spent writing. I know, it’s deplorable. But this is my fate, I life without nostalgia. I don’t yearn for my purity, or stimulating enthusiasm, or intensity. It’s as if in Paris I skillfully postponed everything in order to truly feel the seduction of writing in these current years, those of my later life.» (from chapter 67) The young Vila-Matas

Never Any End to Paris
A fictional memoir by
Enrique Vila-Matas.
Translated by A. McLean.
New Directions Publishing,
New York 2011
SIX ROOMS FOR VILA-MATAS
Six Rooms for Vila-Matas
by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

V-M on WIKIPEDIA
W
Enrique Vila-Matas (born
March 31, 1948, in Barcelona)
is a Spanish novelist who has
had a long and outstanding
literary career and is one of the most prestigious and original writers in contemporary Spanish fiction. He is the author of several award-winning books that mix different genres and have been translated into thirty languages [+]
 
SOME IMAGES of THE ENGLISH JUMP
Vila-Matas in New York Public Library in the Bronx.
At the Bronx Library Center.
 In my room (TV)
In my room (TV)
A Short Conversation with Barbara Epler (New Directions)
A Short Conversation  with
Barbara Epler (New Directions)
New York, 2008.
New York, 2008.
 With Celine Curiol at Paul Auster home in New York
With Celine Curiol at Paul Auster
home in New York.
 Txell, V-M, Dominique González Foerster and Hans Ulrich Olbrist, London, Serpentine Gallery, August 2010
Txell, V-M, Dominique González-
Foerster and Hans Ulrich Olbrist,
London, Serpentine G., August 2010.
With Baroness Von Rezzori, Inge Feltrinelli and Colm Toibin
With Baroness Von Rezzori,
Inge Feltrinelli and Colm Toibin.
 With New Directions editors
V-M with New Directions editors.
 With Rebecca Carter (Harvill Secker / Random House), London, August 2010
With Rebecca Carter (Harvill Secker / Random House), London, August 2010.
 
Translator of Vila-Matas
in France
V-M and Gabastou
An interview with
André Gabastou
ENGLISH NOTEBOOK
«Mr. Vila-Matas shows that the reasons for (and the consequences of) not writing fiction can, in a funny way, be almost as rich and complicated as fiction itself» (The Economist) «Vila-Matas’s touch is light and whimsical, while his allusions encompass a rogue’s gallery of world literature» (Time Out New York)
«I’m reading Vila-Matas’s book like a novel, a very good novel in which the narrator gives us exhaustive information about the protagonist who happens to be himself. I don’t know him personally, nor am I planning to meet him, I prefer to read him and let his literature pervade me» (Pedro Almodóvar)
DUBLINESQUE (2010)
  • «Dublinesque is so good I can almost forgive his mentioning Coldplay on the same page as Beckett...» DAVID WINTERS (Literary critic. Contributing editor at 3:AM Magazine. Cambridge)
  • «A true literary treat. Dublinesca offers a joyful celebration of art and words in a creation of great narrative flow and brilliant style. An excellent novel, the best and most ambitious by Enrique Vila-Matas» S. SANZ VILLANUEVA, El Cultural
  • «His life´s masterpiece» JM POZUELO YVANCOS, ABC
  • «A masterpiece» NUÑO VALLÉS, El Confidencial
  • «An enthralling and funny text» FRANCK NOUCHI, Le Monde
  • «A magnificent composition» IGOR CAPEL, Le Canard Enchaîné
  • «The essence of everything Vila-Matas’ been building along his career, among the most original in nowadays Spanish literature» M. RODRÍGUEZ RIVERO, El País
  • «Vila-Matas proves once again, with dreamlike vigor, what in his own novel is known as “unmeasured literary fanaticism”» JUAN CRUZ, Babelia
  • «An exquisite and original book in which literature does not make us think about life: it is life» MINH TRAN HUY, Le Magazine Littéraire
  • «In these pages you find the art of using words, of improving them so that, to the readers, they are like lighthouses in the infinite darkness of nothingness» FLORENCE NOIVILLE, Le Monde
  • «The most unique, risky and new of all the narrative projects undertaken in Spain in the last three decades has reached its zenith. Because, everything considered, Enrique Vila-Matas’s last novel is precisely that: the zenith, his paramount work» J. ALBACETE, De Verdad Digital
  • «A masterpiece» SANTIAGO GAMBOA, El Espectador (Colombia)
  • «A masterpiece» MAURICIO MOLINA, Review of Mexico University
  • «The book of the decade» JA MASOLIVER RÓDENAS, La Vanguardia
  • «Extremely funny (…) One of Vila-Mata´s great talents is to make his digressions and inventions entirely absorbing» Nick Caistor, The Times Literary Supplement
Joyce shoes
DIETARIO VOLUBLE (2008)
  • «I love this book –completely unclassifiable– (…) reads like a novel, a really good one, where the narrator gives us exhaustive information about the main character who, coincidentally, is himself.» PEDRO ALMODÓVAR at his blog.
  • «Absolute literature» CARLES GELI, El País
  • «After the delectable vulgarity of Baroja, I moved on to Inconstant Diary (Dietario voluble) by Enrique Vila-Matas, which is no less delicious than any of his other major works. (How lucky are those who don’t know how to write badly when it comes so easily to others!).» FERNANDO SAVATER, El País
  • «This is an intelligent and festive book, oriented towards books by other authors (Borges, Sebald, Kafka…), and which doesn’t stop at merely analyzing them, but moreover dialogs with them as if with friends who share the same passions: generosity, the practice of writing as a game and the mixture of “seriousness” and fantasy without ever losing its impeccable rigour.» AMAURY DA CUNHA, Le Monde
  • «Javier Marías, Juan Goytisolo, Juan Marsé and Enrique Vila-Matas, the indisputable greats of Spanish contemporary  literature» EDMUNDO PAZ SOLDÁN, La tercera
  • «One of the most recognisable and unquestionable traits when it comes to discerning and understanding that a writer is truly and genuinely great, is when that writer manages effortlessly and gracefully, always, to ensure that their strongest interest and most intense obsessions and their greatest loves and even the most immense of their hatreds are also our own. Enrique Vila-Matas achieves this with disciplined passion and with unconcealed joy - Duchampian to the end – in his Dietario voluble.» RODRIGO FRESÁN, Vanity Fair


W
PARÍS NO SE ACABA NUNCA (2003)
  • «A magnificent book about Paris that blurs the line between true and false, or at least makes everything uncertain. A funny and cruel book.» RAPHAËLLE RÉROLLE, Le Monde
  • «An ingenious flight over almost everything that is written in Spain.» J.M. POZUELO YVANCOS, ABC
  • «To Paris in the seventies, Vila-Matas dedicates a book that is at once hilarious and with an irony full of compassion, although the heavy artillery of treachery points only at him.» MARCO CICALA, La Repubblica
  • «He has positioned himself as the Spanish writer of the decade.» NELLY KAPRIÈLIAN, Les Inrockuptibles


Cerezas de Verónica Rubio
EL MAL DE MONTANO (2002)
  • «A splendid novel.» FERNANDO SAVATER, El País
  • «Portentous lucidity, ironic distance and an enviable sense of humour.» J.M. POZUELO YVANCOS, ABC
  • «An excellent writer whose originality separates him from any of the other attempts of the last forty years.» RICARDO SENABRE, El Mundo
  • «El mal de Montano  is a daring, provocative, extraordinary novel.» J.A. MASOLIVER RÓDENAS, La Vanguardia
  • «I have become a fanatic of Vila-Matas, that profound yet funny Barcelonian, and my only regret is not having enough time to read all of his books.» MAURICE NADEAU, La Quinzaine Littéraire
MW
BARTLEBY & CO. (2001)
  • «A writer with an extraordinary imagination.» MATHIEU LINDON, Libération
  • «The best active storyteller.» RODRIGO FRESÁN, Página 12
  • «The most important Spanish living author.» BERNARDO ATXAGA, El Dominicial
HL
DOCTOR PASAVENTO (2005)
  • «An ingenious flight over almost everything that is written in Spain.» J.M. POZUELO YVANCOS, ABC
  • «Essential in the Spanish novel today. This novel is a powerful antibody against ordinariness.» DOMINGO RÓDENAS MOYA, El Periódico
  • «A superior novel. It sets him far and above the many earthlings who are incapable of noticing the breath of the divine.» J.A. MASOLIVER RÓDENAS, La Vanguardia
  • «The reading of this novel is an enormously fascinating experience.» ALAIN NICOLAS, L’Humanité
  • «Magnificent. We recommend that lovers of literature not only read this book, but also have it at hand for a long time.» PATRICK KÉCHICHIAN, Le Monde
  • «He has positioned himself as the best Spanish writer of the decade.» NELLY KAPRIÈLIAN, Chronic’art

DESDE LA CIUDAD NERVIOSA (2000)
  • «The forty four urban chronciles collected here are read with the same pleasure as a child with a bag of sweets. Once you have read one, you cannot stop until the bag is emplty» CARLES VILCHES, Diari de Girona
EXPLORADORES DEL ABISMO (2007)
  • «Not only one of the most original works in European literature, but also one of the most fertile.» RICARDO MENÉNDEZ SALMÓN
  • «(…)a book of strange beauty» J. ERNESTO AYALA-DIP, Babelia
  • «At this stage in the expedition - the sign of the truly great - there is already a Vila Matas Style that is impossible to remove from the DNA of this writer.» RODRIGO FRESÁN, Letras Libres
  • «Vila Matas gives us a convincing lesson in how literature, when it is art, serves to scratch around the cracks of staying alive» DOMINGO RÓDENAS MOYA, El Periódico
  • «The author goes in and out of the stories, constantly erasing the borders between reality and and fiction» RICARDO SENABRE, El Cultural
SP
EL VIAJE VERTICAL (2000)
  • «One of the most curious, original and seductive phenomena of Spanish narrative in our time.» RAFAEL CONTE, Abc

LEJOS DE VERACRUZ (1995)
  • «He digs like never before into his experience to set out, under the exaggerated moon of Veracruz, on his personal journey to the end of the night.» IGNACIO ECHEVARRÍA, El País

RECUERDOS INVENTADOS (1994)
  • «The nascent myth of contemporary Spanish literature.» ÁLVARO ENRIGUE, Vuelta

UNA CASA PARA SIEMPRE (1988)
  • «A new and brilliant reading of the multiplication of voices and lives that makes up each one of us.» MERCEDES MONMANY, La Vanguardia

HISTORIA ABREVIADA DE LA LITERATURA PORTÁTIL (1985)
  • «A work of compulsory reading for anyone interested in the evolution of the Spanish novel.» MIGUEL GARCÍA-POSADA, Abc
  • «Since his Historia abreviada…, shandy Vila-Matas has enjoyed the fervour of the Mexican readers.» CHRISTOPHER DOMÍNGUEZ MICHAEL, Vuelta
 
About Dublinesca
Dublinesca (photo de DS)
In this semiautobiographical novel, his most intimate work yet, Vila-Matas (winner of the Premio Herralde de Novela) paints a luminous portrait of a depressed man about to turn his life around. Once a respected literary publisher with a busy nightlife, Samuel Riba is now a recluse—a hikikomori (in Japanese, a misanthropist), as he calls himself—a solitary man who lives in Barcelona, engrossed in his own thoughts. Things went downhill since he was forced to close his small publishing company two years before, right when a nearly fatal drinking binge forced him to stop any alcohol consumption. Now about to turn 60, Riba is constantly revisiting his life, his parents’ expectations, his wife’s decision to become a Buddhist, and his favorite literary works. He is particularly obsessed with James Joyce’s Ulysses, which he considers the literary masterpiece of all time. Months prior, he had a vivid dream in which he and his wife were having a great time in Dublin, a city he had never visited before, until she discovers that he has been drinking again. At the doorsteps of the Coxwold pub, he embraces her and they both cry inconsolably as an overwhelming feeling of rebirth takes hold of him. Inspired by the dream and now determined to reinvent himself in this foreign land, Riba organizes a trip to Ireland with three friends. They will celebrate Bloomsday and then conduct a symbolic funeral for Riba’s publishing company right in the cemetery where Bloom buries his friend Paddy Dignam. Not long after landing, Riba has a feeling that he is fulfilling a prophecy: the hotel pub’s name is John Cox Wilde. “Lucid and logical” (as in Ulysses’s sixth chapter) but also emotionally complex, this novel is peppered with cinematographic scenes, humorous thoughts, and memorable lines. Though narrated in third person, the story takes us mainly through Riba’s thoughts, which allows readers to get a sense of his vulnerability, sense of humor, and internal conflicts. A tour de force, this novel has to be Vila-Matas best work yet.

Ximena Diego, Brooklyn, NY



A bookstore in New York
McNally Jackson Books
McNally Jackson
'18 días en Manhattan',
artículo de Vanity Fair.
(Vila-Matas in McNally Jackson)

The Last Writer

A conversation with Pedro M. Domene

PMD: If I may, I’d like to begin this interview by asking how much in your texts is fiction, and how much is autobiography?
EVM: The broad passageway that joins fiction and reality is cool and well-ventilated, and the air within blows about with the same natural ease with which I mix biography and invention.
PMD: The reason I ask is that recently there has been a lot of talk about the poet Gil de Biedma who, as you know, imbued a great deal of his work with concrete narrative elements taken from his own life.
EVM: But, I don’t exactly tell the story of my life. Rather, I create diverse characters, and I draw only on my supposedly unique identity to form and develop them (this singularity is only a presumption, of course, because in my opinion, my identity has never been ‘unique’). And I’ll tell you something else: in Dublinesca all of my characters unfold into multiple identities; they have other alter egos [...]

Paul Austers Speech

Prince of Asturias Awards, Letters 2006

I don't know why I do what I do. If I did know, I probably wouldn't feel the need to do it. All I can say, and I say it with utmost certainty, is that I have felt this need since my earliest adolescence. I'm talking about writing, in particular writing as a vehicle to tell stories, imaginary stories that have never taken place in what we call the real world. Surely it is an odd way to spend your life -sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist -except in your own head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.
[...]
It's the only job I've ever wanted.

Scott Esposito

The Fruits of Parasitism: Unraveling Enrique Vila-Matas’s Bartleby & Co. and Montano’s Malady

In these seemingly anti-literary times, authors tend to do all they can to support literature; Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas is the first I’ve seen to treat it like a disease. That’s not to say, however, that he isn’t supporting the literary in his own way. Rather, it’s just that Vila-Matas’s way of pushing the medium forward is by contemplating whether or not we’re going though a period of literary parasitism because mostly everything Western literature has to utter has been said. If Vila-Matas’s discourse suggests that we might benefit by pushing the current edifice right off a cliff, then consider it tough love [...]

Citadel of the self

Rothko Never Any End to Paris (which takes its name from Hemingway's famous memoir, A Moveable Feast), is a curious anti-memoir of the time he spent living with Marguerite Duras as a young writer in the French capital. The book, which Vila-Matas pitches with characteristic absurdist aplomb as a three-day lecture, gets off to a proper start with an anecdote about a Hemingway lookalike contest Vila-Matas claims to have entered. (I doubt he ever did.) [...]

Alberto Manguel

Montano. The survival of literature

Shelley (and later Paul Valéry) suggested that all literature might be the work of a single Author and that, throughout the ages, writers have merely acted as His (or Her) amanuenses. A visit to any large bookshop today seems to confirm this thesis: an infinitude of almost identical accounts of Da Vinci conspiracy theories, immigrant life in London or Los Angeles, dysfunctional families in Brooklyn or Glasgow, offer readers the impression of bewildering déjà vu. If literature has one Author, it’s time for Her (or Him) to change subjects. The figure in the carpet is wearing thin [...]

Ednodio Quintero

Doctor Vila-Matas

No one doubts anymore that Enrique Vila-Matas is the living –and active– writer in his country, Spain, with the greatest international projection and one of the most original of the Spanish language. It would be enough to read the novel-essay Bartleby y compañía, that prodigy of inventiveness and imagination, to confirm there is no exaggeration in that hypothesis. So far this century, the prestige of Vila-Matas has surged until reaching that place reserved for the great, as well as being a rare case of a cult writer who sustains a high level of sales and nearly unanimous acceptance from critics in the thirty languages into which he has already been translated [...]
Top 100
100 best novels written in Spanish in the past 25 years

Colombian magazine Semana published in 2007 a list of the best Spanish language novels of the last 25 years. The list, complied by 80 writers, literary critics and journalists named the 100 best novels written in Spanish.

The patio of my parents

That morning the patio of my parents’ home appeared covered in snow and I couldn’t believe it. To start with, I thought it was part of my mother’s Christmas decorations. I remember that December 25th very well. Me with a scarf inside the house, listening to my mother say that for a city like Barcelona, so abandoned by the hand of God, it was a blessing that, even if it was only the once, He should have remembered us and brought us snow on the most appropriate day, Christmas Day, with divine punctuality.

For me, Christmas Day will always be the day of the Great Snowfall. Wrapped in two jerseys and a scarf inside the house, I switched on the radio and suddenly we heard a message of peace and Christmas goodwill from Salvador Dalí, a few emotional words from the Ampurdán painter telling us that, from that day on, he planned to orient all his life toward Franco’s Spain and the family: “Isabella the Catholic, consecrated hosts, melons, rosaries, truculent indigestion, bullfights, Calanda drums and Ampurdán sardines. To sum up: my life must be oriented toward Spain and the family.”

We listened to that message in respectful silence mixed with some astonishment. The snow fell stealthily on the patio outside, as at the beginning of a Christmas tale.

“Dalí’s turned into one of us,” said my father.
Nieve en Barcelona
(Enrique Vila-Matas (2007), translation of Jonathan Dunne. Montano's malady. New York: New Directions)
East End


Bel has rented the only David Cronenberg film I haven't seen. It's about "the breakdown of communication between a loner and an inhospitable world." In the first scene, young Spider, the protagonist, is the last to get off a train, and we can see immediately that he's different from the other passengers. Something seems to have clouded his mind, he stumbles as he steps down with his small, odd suitcase. He's attractive, but it's clear he's mentally disturbed, a solitary man completely disconnected from an indifferent world. Bel asks me if I've noticed that despite the fact it's summertime Spider is wearing four shirts. Actually, no, I hadn't. I apologize and explain that I haven't had time to focus on the movie yet. Besides, I don't pay attention to those kinds of details. But it's true. He's wearing four shirts in high summer. And what about his suitcase? It's tiny and old and when Spider opens it we see it contains useless objects and a small notebook where he makes illegible notes in miniscule print.

Bel asks me about Spider's writing, and then she asks if I've noticed there's no one on the gloomy streets of the East End neighborhood that Spider's wandering around. In fact, Bel hasn't stopped asking me questions since the movie started.

"Has someone asked you to confirm that I can still communicate with the world at large?" I ask her.

Bel doesn't answer. Spider appears to be listening to, even eavesdropping on our conversation, even my thoughts. Am I Spider? I watch as he looks at the camera, shuts his suitcase, and walks through the cold, deserted streets. He acts as though he's entered our living room. He moves as though one of London's dicier neighborhoods is right outside. Spider is en route from a mental institution to a theoretically gentler place, a halfway house or psychiatric institute, coincidentally located in the same London neighborhood where he spent his childhood, and this will spur him to a fatal reconstruction of those early years. While Spider revisits years gone by, the scenes and memories that he reconstructs with supposed (only supposed) bases in fact, I wonder whether one's tangled mental life ever escapes the neighborhood of childhood.

"The insane are so strange," says Bel. "But interesting, don't you think?"

It strikes me again that she's trying to see how I react to Spider, and thereby measure my own degree of dementia. The film is a mental journey, a deranged man's travels through the East End. We see life as Spider experiences it, through the filter of the miserable mental framework of this young man with the strange suitcase and little notebook of microscopic handwriting.

"Have you seen what he's writing in the notebook?" Bel asks next.

If I were home alone watching Spider, I would put on Bob Dylan, maybe "Most Likely You Go Your Way," a song that always stimulates me.

"I've only seen the notebook," I answer.
East End, London 1934

Bel freezes the frame to try to make out what Spider is writing in said notebook. They're runes, sticks or toothpicks, bent, or so unfinished that they don't even look like scratches, and naturally they don't belong to any alphabet or hieroglyphics. They're scary. No matter how you look at them, these scratchings compose a perfect portrait of the absurdity of madness which terrifies me. Perhaps there's something of Spider in all of us. Sometimes I identify with Spider, who in turn reminds me of Il deserto rosso, the 1964 Antonioni film in which Monica Vitti plays a wanderer, a feminine version of Spider avant la lettre, a woman lost in a hermetic industrial landscape, unable to connect with her surroundings.

From what I've seen, in Spider the frame of mind makes subtle reference—especially through Peter Suschitzky's cinematography—to the style of Il deserto rosso. And just as in that film, it seems that every futile attempt to connect with the outside world indicates the inability to define a personal identity. Am I Spider? In the most memorable scene of the movie Spider weaves a tangle of strings in his room, a mental spiderweb that illustrates the terrifying workings of his mind. Regardless, these difficult attempts to recreate his identity prove useless. He walks the inhospitable streets of the East End, the cold, old paths of his lost childhood: he's lost any connection to the world and has no idea who he is.

Am I Spider? The anguish I feel casts me adrift in the dangerous territory of childhood memories, a place where I could lose myself forever. But at the last moment I escape, saved by Monica Vitti's line in Il deserto rosso, a line almost as dangerous as my own East End.

"My hair hurts."

I could say the same right now. Spider will. Spider, who wanders lost through life, doesn't know he could do what I have, and reconstruct his identity using other people's memories, he could become a unique voice, representative of a character with multiple personalities and nomadic tendencies. Am I Spider? I know only that stinking summer has arrived and, as she always does this time of year, Bel is acting like she thinks everything I do—what I say and what I eat and what I think and what I watch and what I drink, everything—I do to lose myself in the periphery of that dangerous place.

http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/east-end
Translation of "East End." Copyright Enrique Vila-Matas. By arrangement with the author.
Translation copyright 2009 by Samantha Schnee. All rights reserved.
Previous Events
OCTOBER 2009
chronotopes and dioramas
Collaboration of Vila-Matas in the catalogue of chronotopes and dioramas, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's current installation in the Hispanic Society of New York (September 23, 2009 - June 27, 2010).
MAY 2009
Vila-Matas, Auster & Eduardo Lago in Conversation
For years Enrique Vila-Matas and Paul Auster have been engaged in an extended literary conversation, spanning continents and several languages [...] See Vila-Matas, Auster & Eduardo Lago in Conversation in fickr.
MARCH 2009
Dublin Ha'penny Bridge
“My literary geography”, a conversation between writers: Enrique Vila-Matas + Julio Trujillo. The lecture was organized by the Institute Cervantes of Dublin and the Embassy of Mexico in Ireland (12/03 Dublin & 13/03 Cork).
 
MARCH 2009
STOPSMILING, March 2009 issue

Claudio Isaac interviews the novelist Enrique Vila-Matas in the newyorker magazine STOPSMILING.
JANUARY 2009
Montano's Malay at D. Gonzalez-Foerster installatión of Tate Modern, London 2008.
Vila-Matas and Montano's Malady at top five positions of the first edition of the Warwick Prize 2009 launched by the University of Warwick, one of the UK’s leading universities. The theme for the first Prize for Writing was “Complexity”, and the shortlist was announced on 22 January 2009.
SEPTEMBER 2008
The style of the happiness
“Spanish Authors in America” with the prestigious Spaniard authors Enrique Vila-Matas and Cristina Grande. The events happened on September 2nd at the Cervantes Institute in New York, and September 3rd at the Bronx Library Center in New York.
[Contact for translations: txell@mbagencialiteraria.es]
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