April 21

“I’m absolutely convinced that publishing being in the hands of businessmen is just a passing episode.”

—-Carlos Barral

Every year’s the same at around this time. The number of illiterates in this country is on the increase, but this seems to be unimportant, there are more and more Book Days and it’s up to me to explain why we have to read. Yesterday, on the radio, I was invited to explain to listeners in two seconds why they should be encouraged to read. For them literally to be encouraged, I replied. I was going to add: and at the same time to achieve the spirit’s salvation, Musil’s ideal. I didn’t say this, it struck me as excessive and also I’d have overstepped the two-second limit.

I am no longer so rigidly literature-sick. Or, rather, I begin not to understand why I must advocate reading. Let every illiterate in this country do what he wants, of course. Besides, I hate virtually the whole of humanity and I spend the day planting mental bombs against all those businessmen who publish books, those departmental managers, market directors on the wire, and economics graduates. I plant mental bombs against them and against their disciplined followers and the rest of the world in general. So I wonder why I should lend them a hand and recommend that they read books if I only wish them ill, if I only want their stupidity to grow and for them to crash, once and for all, as they travel on the train of ignorance that we all pay for, but that one day they will pay a high price for, falling into the bottomless pit of failure, taking themselves elsewhere, into a different industry. What’s more, I loathe them so much that I’d be delighted if they were obliged to read, if a perfidious decree appeared from somewhere, a drastic order to become acquainted with books, and suddenly this country’s cities turned into libraries of forced, chaotic, daft intellectual activity.

In this way the failure of these haughty illiterates’ lives would be twofold. On the one hand there would be the already in itself resounding failure of all life, to which would be added that brought about by contact with literates—nobody doubts by now that to be a writer is to tail—not to mention with books, those astonishing “extensions of memory and imagination” that we take to beaches and cause to fail, not by reading them but by burying them in an unconscious great book of sand, very different from Borges’s.

This would be my revenge for the calls to advocacy that always arrive at around this time and for the constant doubts that plague me and drive me wretchedly to say that no one can be advised to read, but also drive me to think that really, however much I don’t like it, I should advocate reading, albeit only in a stylized way by saying, for example, that there’s nothing to say, except that, without literature, life has no meaning. But, of course, I can only convince those who read of this. And the fact is many of those who read believe it’s an obligation, and they are almost more dangerous than Pico’s moles because they convey an obvious sensation of boredom, they seem not to have read that memorable statement by Montaigne: “I do nothing without joy.”

With this statement, Montaigne wished to indicate that the concept of obligatory reading is a false one. If he came across a difficult passage in a book, Montaigne left it. The point is he saw in reading a form of happiness. Like Borges, who said that a book must not require effort. Borges agreed with Montaigne, though he loved to quote Emerson, who contradicted Montaigne and, in a great essay about books, asserted that a library is a kind of magic box. The best spirits of humanity are imprisoned in this box by an enchanter, and they’re waiting for our word to come out of their silence. We have to open the book, then they awake.

That said—I wish to distance myself from any new temptation to advocacy—the company of literature is dangerous, so much so that I’m really not sure I should applaud people I value for reading a lot and getting so involved in books; you see, I wish them well, and anyone who has read Kafka, for example, is perfectly aware “how much exces­sive anxiety for nothing” (to quote Pessoa) there is in literature.

As Magris says: “Kafka was perfectly aware that literature distanced him from the territory of death and enabled him to understand life, but leaving him outside. Just as it enabled him to understand the greatness of his Jewish father, a model man, but did not exactly enable him to be like him.”

Precisely because literature enables us to understand life, it leaves us outside it. It’s hard, but sometimes it’s the best thing that can happen to us. Reading and writing search for life, but they can lose it precisely because they’re focused entirely on life and on the search for it.

It may be the melancholy of the evening in which I am writing, but the truth is I’m talking about an inextricable knot of good and evil, of light and shade inherent in reading and literature. All this is hard, why fool ourselves? It’s a difficulty that, according to Gombrowicz, good literature has as the product of an instinct to sharpen spiritual life. There are times when I would recommend reading to my worst enemies.

Precisely because literature enables us to understand life, it tells us what can be, but also what could have been. There is nothing sometimes farther away from reality than literature, which is constantly reminding us that life is like this and the world has been organized like that, but it could be otherwise. There is nothing more subversive than literature, which aims to return us to true life by exposing what real life and History smother. Magris knows this very well, he is deeply interested in what could have been, had History or human life taken another course. Anyone who’s interested in this is interested in reading. This is not advocacy. After all, there are times—like now—when I wouldn’t recommend reading even to Pico’s moles, even to my worst enemies.

Translated by Jonathan Dunne.Ěý

“I can’t even guess when I last read a book. But I’d watch movies all day if I could. Especially Marvel ones.”

Overheard on a URochester Shuttle

“In the last decade, she says, history has toppled from the king of disciplines to a numbing data set: a litany of trackable moments, the realm of machines.”

—Same Bed Different Dreams, Ed Park

I’ve been struggling with this piece for over two months now. Originally conceived of as a data-driven essay, it became unwieldy, a four-handed mess that pivoted over and again, yearning for a point to be made, a Big Idea to land.

Re-reading—and lightly editing—Enrique Vila-Matas’s Montano’s Malady (my favorite Vila-Matas, my favorite malady) has provided a structural solution that’s also a return to form. For better or worse, I don’t write essays. I don’t know how to categorize what it is that I do write, but this Vila-Matas novel that takes the form of a diary about writers who write diaries and who are literature-sick, infected with graphomania à la Fresán and the ex-writer in his “Part Trilogy,” endlessly referencing books, authors, living his life through literature, is more or less the spirit that has always inhabited this blog.

This attitude can come off as a bit elitist and a lot out of touch—par for the course when you read incessantly and the rest of the world generally doesn’t—but hopefully in the end all this handwringing about what these posts are or what their value is results in a momentary respite from the insanity of modern-day life, an intellectually stimulating journey through a journal. So here goes.

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Over the past few months, I’ve been asking as many people as I could: “How many books did you read last year? Include anything and everything. Books you listened to. Graphic novels. I’m just curious as to how many books you consumed in 2023.”

I didn’t get a ton of responses (twenty-three to be exact, which may lead to small sample size problems, but let’s go with it anyway), with total numbers ranging from 7 to 152 and averaging out at a smidge over 55.

I don’t know what I expected—and as you’ll hopefully see, the actual number doesn’t really matter. I’m chasing a different whale here.

But, but the sake of nerdy numberness, feeding my statistical-mania, I want to point out that the mode of my data set was 40, the median 43. And, once again, the mean of my dataset was 55.2, with a standard deviation of 36.4. So 67% of the people I surveyed read between 18.8 and 91.6 books last year. That’s a huge difference—reading less than one book every two weeks, versus almost reading two each week—yet, to be honest, most probably captures the reading habits of all the people you and I know. The booksellers, editors, tweeters, general readers, family.

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I’m still not sure this is the best way to start this post, but like I alluded to above, it’s a piece I conceived of as having four big beats, each overlapping a bit, creating a Venn diagram about reading (or not reading). As such, any starting point is valid, since there is no real logical development. Nothing truly linear.

For example, on December 29^th, 2023, I tried to start this piece from the exact opposite place: the semi-recent report from National Endowment for the Arts on “ in 2022.”

In the style of Montano’s Malady, I can tell you the exact situation in which this journal started being written. I was in River Falls, WI, at Kaija’s house, in front of the fireplace, ignoring Domino, our corgi, as he whined for yet another dinner before destroying yet another stuffed object. I had been reading Paul Auster’s Moon Palace, which Kaija had gifted me as part of a newfound ritual of gifting books neither of us have read for the holidays so that we can spend Christmas Day reading something “at random.”

I don’t know what I think of Paul Auster. I met him a couple times, including during his visit to Rochester back around 2011 when he told me two of the greatest baseball stories I’ve ever heard. His brand of post-modernism—coincidences and the novel as metaphor for the novel, for writing—was the shit when I was really into in college and for a few years thereafter. The New York Trilogy is a feat, Ěýit’s super fun to read and a book that asserts it’s bookness at almost every turn. It’s not unimportant to note that the three volumes that constitute the trilogy, and the trilogy itself, were first published by Sun & Moon Press (victory for the independent presses of America), run by Douglas Messerli and a series of “employees” I’m not sure ever really existed.

Nowadays, almost three decades on, aspects of Auster’s vibe seem pat, too cute. I’m not sure if that’s because the world was a simpler place back in 1995, or I was. And then there was that aggro James Wood takedown—which “Was it Fair? Was it Deserved?,” a great podcast about vicious reviews and whether they’re warranted, will be covering in an upcoming episode—sure did harsh my Auster interest, but, to be fair, reading him again in 2024, I have to admit, his books sure do go down smooth, and there’s something to be said for that. He’s fun to read, and his novels feel conventional, yet veer off down Lynchian paths but ways that are jouncy, filled with life-enhancing synchronicities rather than space-time foldings around ideas of evil. (Like Bob. Like Judy, whom we don’t talk about.)

The other time I met Paul Auster was when he did an event with Enrique Vila-Matas at the Cervantes Institute in New York for the release of Bartleby & Co. (Most people’s favorite Vila-Matas, possibly because it was first to be translated. It’s the prequel to, or flipside of, Montano’s Malady.) Declan Spring of New Directions was selling Vila-Matas’s books, the on-stage conversation about erasing the line between real-life and fiction because fiction, words, literature is a core part of the real-life of these two writers and many of us, was brilliant. There was Spanish wine. Everyone had a great time. (And my hotel accidentally charged me $5.45 for my stay instead of $545. I didn’t say a word. I’m sorry, Sohotel. I owe you one.)

Although your mileage with Auster, Vila-Matas, Fresán may vary, but there’s something comforting about slipping into a book where the narrator is an over-read intellectual thinking only in books and quotes. This sort of character—a consummate reader—is both a mirror and an aspiration; I read a ton, I get the references, but I don’t get all of them, we can’t read everything. Well, most of us, anyway.

And in America? Most people don’t read at all. As illustrated in that National Endowment for the Arts semi-recent report on “ in 2022” mentioned above.

I’ll let these statistics speak for themselves. According to Figures 8 & 9, the percentage of Americans who read a book in the previous year has gone from 54.6% in 2012 to 48.5% in 2022. With only 37.6% of those surveyed having read a novel or short story collection last year. Which, to be fair, totally dwarfs the paltry 9.2% of Americans who read a poetry collection. (I personally didn’t.)

What I found interesting about this report, which I came across after setting down Moon Palace for the night, alone in front of the fireplace, surrounded by woods, loving the silence yet craving connection, a connection that felt so distant at that time, a very bleak one in my life, the latest in a string of mental health disasters that end friendships and leave me trashed and frantic, the interesting thing about the NEA study was how unsurprising it all was. And, given the paucity of coverage of the study and its depiction of modern life—sure, I was on a hand-wringing episode of “Connections” on NPR’s WXXI, and I know others fretted after hearing these stats, but the overall shock and awe expressed at earlier iterations of this study was definitely muted this time around—it’s as if all it generated was a big shrug. Yep, people don’t read as much as they used to. What did you expect?

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In my last post, I wrote out eleven suggestions for what scheme could define this blog for the next year. None of which I’ve actually pursued. That said, as a sucker for programs and rubrics that last a calendar year—to be honest, anything cyclical speaks to me—I decided that over the course of 2024, I would read all of In Search of Lost Time (at a rate of 10 pages a day) and all twelve volumes of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (at a rate of a book per month beginning March 2024, ending in February 2025, based on the fact that the set I own starts with “Volume 1: Spring” and it’s most definitely still winter here in Rochester). Plus I want to finish Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, which bears mention her. I only have Summer left to go, and I’m saving it for when I need it. I know it will be brilliant and consume my thinking in the best possible way. It’s nice to have things to rely on.

I started writing this post for the third time two weeks ago, immediately after finishing Swann’s Way in Lydia Davis’s translation. Lydia Davis, who, for anyone unaware, was Paul Auster’s first wife. I sketched out a plan to write seven articles this year: each one appearing a day or two after finishing a volume of Proust’s epic. They would build on one another, using December’s “hoarding” post as the launching point, spiraling out into all my usual touchstones: why do we read what we read?, how have MFA programs and Amazon algorithms changed our relationship to literature?, what is value?, how should we judge success?, etc.

Part of every article, or post, or whatever, would be a reading journal with stray quotes from Proust, ideas his work inspired, funny reactions—a sort of real-time reading in the vein of the Two Month Review.

ĚýBut, to be honest, in reading Swann’s Way I took no notes. I sent along a few quotes to someone who could appreciate them and how they related to our lives, but for over half the book, I didn’t underline anything or fold over any pages, wanting my version of Swann’s Way to remain immaculate, as if the goal was to read it without leaving a trace.

That aside, quoting Proust at length in a blog post is Max Masturbatory. I could cite all the passages that, for me, reframed and annihilated jealousy. Swann’s Way contains beautiful ideas about memory, about how reputation and expectations determine reality. It’s brilliant and very quotable. As they say, it’s a damn good book.

The thing about Proust though, that I’ve become most fixated on, is how funny his gargantuan novel really is. There’s Marcel’s aunt, lying in bed, eternally unwell, very high maintenance, absurd in all her obsessions and concerns. Also, this volume includes an extended party scene where a costumed woman runs her bohemian salon from a throne, overseeing her guests, which include a doctor who can’t read human beings (a bit on the nose about the doctoring profession, if you ask me) and is never sure if they’re being sarcastic or not. His solution?: walk around half-smirking, ready to laugh if others laugh, scowl if they scowl. He creeps out everyone. And the conversations throughout! So French, so very very French. But with a hint of mockery.

Which I don’t remember from the first time I read Swann’s Way. (And then promptly stopped with his pursuit of lost time. Instead, I put off reading the rest to that mythical “someday.”) I was in awe of literature like this back when I was in my 20s. Proust was Big Literature with Big Ideas and Loads of Difficulty. A rite of passage. Not a beach read. And who has time for that?

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This is the first year I’ve ever paid attention to the Oscars. I have no time for movies given that I read approximately 120 books a year? But since I’ve seen Barbie and Poor Things and American Fiction (all adaptations of pre-existing texts, which tracks) I feel a bit more invested than usual. The fact that Oppenheimer and The Zone of Influence and Killers of the Flower Moon are also book-based adaptations is a bit of a thirst trap. That and my friend Lisa has seen almost all of them, and being able to talk to someone else about media you experience is always enjoyable. One could argue that art is less fun when you can’t tell anyone about the ending of The Curse. (Or, the only person you can talk to about it experienced the show only through written recaps.)

Although it’s getting down to the wire, the only thing preventing me from watching every “Best Picture” nominee is me. Most of the ones I haven’t seen are streaming, the others are running at the local theater I can walk to. If my heart was in it, I could be fully versed on the Oscars by March 10^th. It’s totally doable. Which is not true of the National Book Awards.

The five longlists for the NBAs are traditionally announced mid-September with finalists revealed at the start of October and winners about six weeks later. With ten titles per category, there’s almost no possibility you’ll be able to read the longlisted titles—30 if you ignore poetry and young people’s literature, which I do, because I’ll never sleep with a poet and I don’t believe in the concept of literature written exclusively for minds incapable of understanding the “real stuff,” the “adult” literature—before the finalists are announced two weeks later. Thirty books over even twenty-one days is a no go.

If you only consider the fifteen to twenty-five finalists and spread them out over six weeks . . . that’s maybe doable! Those ten poetry collections and picture books will take like 14-20 days max, and you’ll have 22 or so days left for the 15 books in the “premier” categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, and Translation. Hmm. That’s a book every 1.47 days. Which extrapolates to a rate of 248 books per year.

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In 2023, 496 titles were submitted for the National Book Award for Fiction. Overall, across all five categories? 1,931. Based on the last estimates I’ve seen—50,000 works of poetry and fiction a year from traditional publishers, 1,000,000 books via self-publishing every year—this is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of what’s being published.

Awards have biases based on the biased nature of the books submitted. But more importantly, no one human is going to read all 496 of those submissions. Even if you break it out over five judges, that’s almost a hundred titles each. Which is a lot.

There were 301 feature films submitted for the Oscars this year. Although it would be exhausting, in some ways, to watch that many movies, you could do it and still have a summer vacation.

If we assume that the average movie is 2 hours long, the average book 300 pages (which takes about 7.5 hours to read), the Oscar Academy is looking at a max time commitment of 602 hours to consume everything eligible versus 3,720 hours spent for the NBA fiction judges to do the same.

But you clearly don’t need to read a full book—or watch a full movie—to know if it’s great or trash. I’d bet you don’t need more than 40 pages to dismiss 400 of those 496 NBA-submitted titles. If you spend an hour a piece on those 400 eliminated books, you still end up at 1,120 total hours of reading, or almost double what an Oscar judge could spend seeing everything.

As a non-judge (for the National Book Award at least, although episode four of seven of this year’s Three Percent posts is about the award I do help judge), I aspire to “having a handle” on various art forms every year.Ěý Cinema, TV, books, music. Which, in three of those four areas, is impossible.

I’m arbitrarily setting this as the threshold, but I think you need to be familiar with at least 25% of the output for a particular art form before you can claim to “know” it. If you look at all the movies, all the books, all the albums for a given year, that’s beyond unrealistic. But if you see a movie a week throughout the year—you’re pretty solid. You’ve seen around 1/6 of the movies submitted for the Oscars, and, given the “power law of buzz” (see parts of episodes 3, 4, and 6 of this series of posts) by the time the “Best Picture” finalists are announced, you’ll likely have seen 67-75% of them.

If you were to read 52 books in a year—which is more or less what all of you, on aggregate, do—you’ll know a bit about the books that came out in 2024. A bit. Dedicate yourself to this year’s translations only and if you read 52, you’ll have read about 1/8 of all of them. Or, leaving translations behind, you’ll have 1/1,000 of all the fiction books that came out.

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I didn’t follow up with anyone I surveyed. But if I had my druthers, I would have asked for a complete list of each book read by each person who responded. I would look at the crossover, the themes, the metadata.

Even though this is all small sample size and assumption, I truly believe that the overlap between readers as to what books they’ve read/are reading is a fraction of what it is for movies or television.

Of the 55 books the average reader surveyed read, it’s pretty unlikely that five other survey respondents read five of the same books they read. We read across decades, we read by impulse. Every so often everyone gravitates toward a book—be it 2666 or Harry Potter—but for the most part, we drift. We pursue lines that are individual and idiosyncratic. We read D. H. Lawrence or Kathy Acker. We join book clubs, we try to convince others that these books are worth spending time on. We can’t always articulate why.

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Two Month Review is an explicit, wear your heart on your sleeve, attempt to find community in literature. When you’re literature-sick, when you see yourself through all the books you’ve read, when you feel alone in front of the fire, reading, while everyone else is living their lives, together, free from “eating pages” for a living (like coaches “eat tape”), you seek company.

But, given the numbers, finding company is unlikely.

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Episode II Coming Soon!: Will Chad find solace? Are there readers out there? Can AI help? Is ChatGPT a better NBA judge than Nick Buzanski? This and more as soon as I finish In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.

( associated with this post is copyrighted by .)

The entry below is by Mark Haber from in Houston, Texas. He is also the author of Melville’s Beard, which is available in a bilingual edition from Editorial Argonáutica.

by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (Spain, New Directions)

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 35%

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: 4%

A master writer. A collection of stories covering the breadth of his storied career. The first time in English. These are only a few reasons Vampire in Love should win the Best Translated Book Award. A reader needn’t have experienced any of Vila-Matas’s incredible novels to appreciate and enjoy these tremendous stories. Funny, eerie, worldly and strange, Vila-Matas is a master of the form. As Roberto Bolaño said: “Vila-Matas’s excellence is an undisputed fact.” An astounding collection translated by Margaret Jull Costa.

Esteemed translator Margaret Jull Costa has five books in contention for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award: by Leopoldo Alas (New York Review Books), by Lúcio Cardoso (Open Letter), by Rafael Chirbes (New Directions), by Javier Marías (Knopf), and by Enrique Vila-Matas (New Directions). Jull Costa translates from both Spanish and Portuguese and has rendered some of each language’s most well-regarded authors, including Nobel laureate José Saramago, the singular (and multitudinous!) Fernando Pessoa, Eça de Queirós, Luisa Valenzuela, and Bernardo Atxaga, amongst many others. As a working translator for three decades (her first novel-in-translation was published in 1987), Jull Costa has won a number of awards in recognition of her work and was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2014.

Despite Jull Costa’s prodigious output, in the first nine years of the award, she has only once made the shortlist—in 2015, for Medardo Fraile’s evocative short story collection, Things Look Different in the Light (Pushkin Press). With five strong works under consideration for the forthcoming prize, will 2017 be the year Jull Costa finally adds a Best Translated Book Award to her many accolades? In looking more closely at three of these books, it’s evident that her quality translations ought to have her squarely in the conversation.

Spanish novelist Rafael Chirbes passed away in August 2015, leaving behind some ten novels (On the Edge and the long out-of-print Mimoun being, as yet, his only two translated into English). is a dark, tense, and foreboding tale set in the wake of the global recession that robbed so many of so much. Easily one of the year’s finest and most important works, Chirbes’s novel stands out as a marvel of what fiction is capable of doing (and, oh, that inescapable cover!). Valerie Miles’s excellent essay, entitled “The Life and Times of he Great Rafael Chirbes,” was used as the book’s afterword and offers an incomparable glimpse of both the author and On the Edge itself (her piece also appeared on ). Below is my review of On the Edge (which originally appeared on Three Percent in December):

Let’s not deceive ourselves, man is nothing very special. In fact, there are so many of us that our governments don’t know what to do with us at all. Six billion humans on the planet and only six or seven thousand Bengal tigers: tell me—who needs protecting most? Yes, you decide who needs most care. A dying African, Chinaman, or Scotsman or a beautiful tiger killed by a hunter. A tiger with its pelt of matchless colours and its flashing eyes is far more beautiful than a varicose-veined old git like me. What a difference in the way it carries itself. How elegant the one and how clumsy the other. Look how they move. Put them next to each other in a cage in the zoo. The children gather round the old man’s cage and laugh as they watch him delousing himself or crouching down to defecate; outside the tiger’s cage, though, they open their eyes wide with admiration. The sleight of hand that made man the centre of the universe no longer convinces.

Devastating, desolate, and disquieting, Rafael Chirbes’s On the Edge (En la orilla) ought to rank as one of the decade’s finest novels. First published in its original Spanish in 2013, On the Edge was awarded both Spain’s National Prize for Literature and the Critics Prize the following year. The Spanish novelist (who passed away [in August 2015] at the age of 66) is the author of nine published novels—with a tenth due out posthumously. While billed as his English language debut, On the Edge was actually preceded in translation by Mimoun, Chirbes’s first novel, published some 22 years ago by Serpent’s Tail (and out of print since).

Set in late 2010, following the economic crisis that ravaged the Spanish economy (as well as many others around the world), On the Edge offers an unflinching glimpse of a nation despoiled and reeling. An unemployment rate of 20% (and rising), poverty, prostitution, xenophoboia, Islamophobia, immigration fears, human trafficking, violence, corruption, and environmental decay are the real-life milieu upon which Chirbes situates his unforgiving tale. Septuagenarian Esteban, tasked with end-of-life care for his terminally ill father and burdened with the stresses of his recently bankrupted carpentry workshop (and impending legal charges resulting therefrom), recounts his life, as well as his myriad failures, disappointments, and betrayals, through an unrelenting series of recollections and dirge-like soliloquies.

Taking life is easy, anyone can do that. They do it every day all over the world. Just read the newspaper and you’ll see. Even you could do it, take someone’s life I mean, obviously, you’d have to improve your aim a little (and then he did smile teasingly, the corners of his lively grey eyes etched with a web of delicate lines). Mankind may have constructed vast buildings, destroyed whole mountains, built canals and bridges, but we’ve never yet succeeded in opening the eyes of a child who has just died. Sometimes it’s the biggest, heaviest things that are easiest to move. Huge stones in the back of a truck, vans laden with heavy metals. And yet everything that’s inside you—what you think, what you want—all of which apparently weighs nothing—no strong man can life that onto his shoulder and move it somewhere else. No truck can transport it. Loving someone you despise or don’t really care for is a lot harder than flooring him with a punch. Men hit each other out of a sense of powerlessness. They think that by using force they can get what they can’t get by using tenderness or intelligence.

With shifting narratives and a chorus of other voices (including those of Esteban’s equally-ravished employees, business partners, barmates, and his father’s one-time palliative nurse), On the Edge teems with fear, frustration, anxiety, and despair. Esteban, challenged (and nearly defeated) not only by the plundering economic state, but also by decades of personal degradation (failed romance, compromised loyalties, allegiances upended, and the legacy of his father’s generations’ attitudes following the war), is forced to confront perdition—familial, social, financial, physical, emotional, and even spiritual.

Chirbes, perhaps like a detached reporter chronicling horrors and atrocities espied from the front lines, infuses an abundance of feeling into characters and setting—despite each being startlingly paralyzed by an unyielding torpor. With gifted prose and a confident style, Chirbes deftly (re)creates a world teetering on ruin and irreconcilability (however hopeful certain characters remain). Like the fetid, rancid lagoon which figures so prominently into the story, On the Edge brilliantly captures the collapse of a system once-thriving and supportive, but left in wreckage resulting from avarice, disregard, and myopia.

Rafael Chirbes, called “the best writer of the twenty-first century in Spain” by the Spanish newspaper ABC, tears asunder whatever illusions may have endured after the global economic collapse. Without didacticism or a moralizing tone, Chirbes stands amidst the debris and destruction, and, with an unflinching gaze, attests to and confirms the harrowing aftermath wrought in the wake of international recession and crises. A remarkable portrait of one man’s struggle to make sense of an encompassing personal, economic, and social decay, On the Edge_breathes life into an otherwise asphyxiating scene. Chirbes’s _On the Edge may lack in redemption (and propelling plot) what it makes up for in cautionary storytelling, but pillaged lives and economies both have never seemed so imaginatively conceived nor richly executed. Even the barrenest of wastelands may lay forlorn and neglected, but, if nothing else, Chirbes’s incomparable novel assures that great art may one day rise from even the most polluted locale.

Of course times have changed, Francisco. Life is constantly changing, it is change. It has no other purpose but to change and to keep changing, the Greeks knew this and I imagine even their ancestors knew it too, you never bathe twice in the same stream, you don’t even bathe the same body, today there’s a pimple that didn’t exist yesterday, nor did this varicose vein which, for long hours, has been making its way to the surface, or this ulcer in my groin or on the sole of my foot, and which my hyperglycemia won’t allow to heal; they are all lying, those utopians who say that this troubled life of avarice and lust will be succeeded by a peaceful world in which we will all be brothers, and where, as in the golden age Don Quijote described, we will, in a spirit of fraternal love, dine on a shared meal of acorns. There is no heavenly peace possible beneath the sheltering sky, only a permanent state of war in which everyone is pitched against everyone and everything against everything. The problem is that with so much change, everything somehow ends up pretty much the same.

Javier MarĂ­as’s reputation as a writer of high-quality literary fiction surely precedes him and if the Swedish Academy sees fit to recognize his impressive body of work (Your Face Tomorrow [translated by Jull Costa] alone ought to qualify him), a Nobel Prize would be a deserved coda to an already illustrious authorial career. his newest novel to be translated into English, is certainly not MarĂ­as finest outing (which is hardly a slight, perhaps like saying Blonde on Blonde isn’t this year’s Nobel laureate’s most accomplished album)—yet is still possessed of all the characteristic trademarks that have made him, or, more precisely, his fiction, consistently amongst the best in translation. MarĂ­as’s The Infatuations (Knopf, also translated by Jull Costa) was longlisted for the 2014 BTBA. Some thoughts on Thus Bad Begins:

Indeed, freedom is the first thing that fearful citizens are prepared to give up. So much so that they often ask to lose it, ask for it to be taken away, banished from their sight, which is why they not only applaud the very person intending to take it from them, they even vote for him.

With over a dozen of his books available in English translation, Javier MarĂ­as’s stateside renown seems to grow deservedly with each new release. His most recent novel, Thus Bad Begins (AsĂ­ empieza lo malo)—named best book of the year by Spain’s El PaĂ­s in 2014—is a domestic drama set in 1980, immediately following Franco’s regime. A brutal, loveless, spiteful, and often cruel marriage is metaphor for a distrusting populace struggling to move beyond the authoritarianism and betrayals of decades past. While MarĂ­as’s characters reveal slowly the motivations for their actions, his story (incorporating the best elements of a convincing mystery) builds toward a gripping conclusion—leaving devastated individuals and a tormented legacy in its wake.

Offering stark insight into the erosive qualities of small deceptions and minor treacheries, MarĂ­as, as always, deftly navigates realms psychological, political, and philosophical. Thus Bad Begins isn’t MarĂ­as’s strongest outing, but, that said, it is still, nonetheless, an exceptional effort (especially given that he has penned such consistently tremendous works). If written by another author, this book may well be considered the peak of said progenitor’s output, but given the Spaniard’s seemingly limitless ability to compose first-rate fiction, Thus Bad Begins pales slightly when compared to some of his other works. All the same, Thus Bad Begins invariably impresses, adding yet another resplendent feather in the cap of a (hopefully) future nobel laureate.

_“In fact, anything you’re told, anything you didn’t personally witness, is pure rumour, however wrapped up in oaths it comes, all swearing the story to be true. And we can’t spend our lives listening to rumours, still less acting in accordance with their many fluctuations. When you give that up, when you give up trying to know what you cannot know, perhaps, to paraphrase Shakespeare, perhaps that is when bad begins, but, on the other hand, worse remains behind.”

The Hamlet line from which the title is taken is wonderfully ambiguous and well befitting a novel of such emotional subterfuge. Is “worse” left behind or still yet to come?

Like far too many (most?) authors in translations, Enrique Vila-Matas has yet to enjoy the English-speaking audience he deserves—despite being championed by the likes of his friend Paul Auster. The Spanish writer has published over three dozen books, with Vampire in Love being his eighth rendered into English. A collection of short stories spanning his career, Vampire in Love offers a glimpse of Vila-Matas that hadn’t been apparent in his mostly meta-fictional novels (Bartleby & Co. [translated by Jonathan Dunne], Never Any End to Paris, and Dublineqsue are some of his best). Twice shortlisted for the BTBA (in 2008 for Montano’s Malady [translated by Jonathan Dunne] and in 2012 for Never Any End to Paris [translated by Anne McLean]) and included on the longlist for another (in 2013 for Dublinesque [translated by Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean]), Vila-Matas’s books make for an always fascinating, engaging outing (even if one doesn’t quite know what to expect beforehand, much like his prolific Argentine compatriot, CĂ©sar Aira). Vampire in Love is as good a place as any to start reading Vila-Matas. While short story collections do not sometimes garner the acclaim of their lengthier brethren, Vampire in Love can surely hold it’s own against other contenders for this year’s Best Translated Book Award:

The first collection of Enrique Vila-Matas’s short stories to appear in English translation, Vampire in Love features 19 stories from throughout the Spanish author’s estimable career. Most noteworthy (and quite surprising to this reader) is that save for a couple selections, nearly all of the stories forego the metafictional, self-referential, and literary milieu well familiar to readers of his previously translated works. The stories which compose Vampire in Love reveal an almost entirely different side to Vila-Matas’s fiction—many dealing with death, life’s hardships, and the mystery of the uncertain.

With oft-remarkable prose, wit, and more than a little playfulness, Vila-Matas’s short fiction reveals an artisan as comfortable (and as skillful) in brevity as he is in longer form. Vampire in Love ably demonstrates the wide variety of storytelling hues available on Vila-Matas’s literary palette. The standout stories in Vampire in Love include “Rosa Schwarzer Comes Back to Life,” “The Hour of the Tired and Weary,” “They Say I Should Say Who I Am,” “Greetings from Dante,” “The Boy on the Swing,” and the titular tale.

I remember—probably because it seemed to foreshadow something that would affect us later on—the long speech he made that day about how we human beings are all carriers of poisons and inner devils that can undermine our most marvelous achievements.

Publishing people love to complain about everything. The Javitz Center sucks. (This is a fact! Stupid glass warehouse. Looks like something from Cleveland.) The BEA is too expensive. No booksellers or critics come anymore. People only want free books. Books don’t sell. Stupid Grumpy Cat is clogging up the aisles. A coffee costs $17. This fair is loaded with crap thanks to you Random Harper House and the Algonquins of mediocrity. Why more Mitch Albom? I thought he was in heaven? Writing us letters? It’ll only be more unbearable in Chicago. And on the weekend they’re actually letting in regular readers. This is the worst.

It’s kind of great! Four days of being around my people, all rant-receptive, all cloaking their belief in the power of books behind a shell of unremitting misery . . . So good! I need this in my life at least once a year—it helps me feel human.

The best post-BEA storyline to me was about the Big Publisher reaction to “BookCon,” the weekend part of the show when readers flood the aisles searching for John Green and buying books (although maybe not the books by the presses whose books I usually buy). Here’s the initial reaction, as reported in

Not only are many New York City-based publishers concerned about staffing for next year’s BookCon, they’re also worried that the change in venue [Ed. Note: BEA is in Chicago next summer] will mark a return to the show’s first year, when attendance was lower and the event itself was more chaotic.

Then, a week later, also in

Heather Fain, senior v-p and director of marketing strategy at Hachette Book Group, said she’s looking forward to meeting readers from other parts of the country: “Readers don’t just live in New York. If Reed puts together the programming with big names, I think they could get a crowd to come out in any major market. And I like the idea of interacting with readers outside the Tristate Area.”

Wait, there are readers outside of New York City? I CALL BULLSHIT. I’ve said it a million times, but publishers are amazingly good at distancing themselves from their readers. Just wait—next May there will be a slew of articles about how crappy Chicago BookCon is going to be, then in June, publishers will be all “we sold a lot of books! It was great! But next year when it’s in Los Angeles . . . Well, I’m just not sure . . .”

When publishers finally realize that the main reason they exist is thanks to the passion of readers willing to pay money to come to an awful part of NYC just to meet publishers, there will be a sea change in this show. Granted, there won’t be swarms of tween girls bum rushing the Coach House booth in search of conceptual poetry, but still. I see this in my daughter who, to this day (literally), talks about how excited she was to meet JĂłn Gnarr and how The Indian is her favorite book. I told her about BEA and to her it sounded like paradise. Not for free stuff, but to see so many books and so many cool people (since cool people are people who work with books) in one place at one time. To her, it was like ComicCon but with fewer costumes.

Steve Rosato, who runs BEA, told me that NY ComicCon—which I am going to go to—draws TEN TIMES as many attendees as BookCon/BEA. This is insane to me. 150,000 people are at NYCC at any moment in time. People who paid $50 to get into a show to buy more stuff. We all love superhero movies more than experimental prose, but still, the great benefit of the various book festivals around the country—the LA Times Festival of Books, Printers Row, Miami Book Fair, now BookCon—is that there’s an opportunity to interact with these people. Instead of only interacting with fellow publishing people drowning their misery with alcohol and hate. (Although alcohol and hate are both wonderful.)

Anyway, my favorite BEA moment? Walking the aisles and finding this at the Overdrive Booth (Overdrive being a service working with libraries to allow patrons to check out audiobooks and ebooks—it’s my favorite app):

Yep, that’s an Open Letter book right next to Dan Brown, and under Gone Girl and Wimpy Kid. We made it!

Not only was on this oft-repeating mosaic of major works, but they used it as the feature book (along with The Girl on the Train, the number one best-selling book in the country) on this background image inside their booth:

I’ve always dreamt of seeing someone randomly reading one of our books on the subway, but although that hasn’t happened, this is a good runner-up dream.

and by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated by Tom Bunstead and Anne McLean (New Directions)

Vila-Matas is one of my favorites—especially Montano’s Malady—for all the formal games he plays with point of view and narrative, which he uses to upend your expectations time and again, shifting his books from half-essays into strange beasts that aren’t what we usually think of as “novels.” This is important and wonderful. And a book about a secret society of people called “the Shandies,” obsessed with “portable literature”? Yes, all the yes.

By the way, next week, Tom and I will be recording our 100th episode of the Three Percent Podcast. We’re going to make this a “listener appreciation” podcast in which we answer any and all questions from you about publishing, sports, books, whatever. Just send them to threepercentpodcast@gmail.com.

by Kamel Daoud, translated from the French by John Cullen (Other Press)

To be honest, I’m not actually all that interested in this book. I’m sure it’s fine and competent and will reach a very wide audience (especially after the Kakutani NY Times review), all of which is great for Other Press and the book. (The set-up alone—a retelling of The Stranger from the perspective of the Arab Meursault kills—guarantees this a huge book club audience.) A lot of people I respect really like this, but I can’t imagine it blowing my mind. Nevertheless, a ton of people will be talking about this, and I’m sure that conversation will be interesting to thousands of readers.

I have to say, the older I get, the less I feel like reading books that I should read in favor of ones I want to. When I moved recently, I was reorganizing my bookshelves and kept having the thought that I was saving books that I would never possibly get to before I die. Ever. It’s an anxiety-making idea, in part because of the death aspect, but also because it makes me question why I choose to read the books I do. I have no good answer to this, but I’m pretty sure The Meursault Investigation won’t be one of the 100 titles that makes the cut for 2015. Sorry.

That said, Jeff Waxman from Other Press—and all their other staff members—is a great guy doing a lot of amazing things, especially in terms of connecting small presses with booksellers. (Like at the upcoming Small Press Night at Green Apple Books in San Francisco.) Jeff is my favorite thing about Other Press. That and the Simon Critchley book they’re bringing out later this year.

by Yoel Hoffmann, translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole (New Directions)

It’s really too bad that FOX has the rights to the Women’s World Cup. Their soccer coverage is fine, but it just feels so buried seeking the games out on FOX Sports 1. Granted, ESPN aired most of last year’s World Cup, but everyone has ESPN. That’s like basic cable.

I was really surprised that last night’s USA-Australia game wasn’t on FOX proper. It was a perfect opportunity for FOX to remind the nation that FOX Sports 1 still exists, and to get a ton of people hooked into this competition. Instead they aired a rerun of So You Think You Can Dance. FOX sucks.

Bringing together my two great loves—translation and sports—here’s a picture of Peter Cole (translator of Yoel Hoffmann’s Moods) giving a talk in front of the Men in Blazers mug that George Carroll sent me.

by LĂ©on Bloy, translated from the French by Erik Butler (Wakefield Press)

The that I saw during the NBA Finals, and which brought up a lot of questions.

This commercial opens with the following rhetorical question: “What do you think of when you think of the United States Postal Service? . . . . . . Exactly.”

Exactly what??? The things that come to mind when I think of the USPS are, in descending order, 1) the phrase “going postal,” and 2) nothing. It’s like thinking about electricity or garbage collection—it’s just something that’s there and works most of the time.

I feel like the commercial should go on in this way, “You know what we here at the USPS are good at? Occasionally delivering Amazon orders. We’re better than imaginary drones at that! The Postal Service. Sounds like a band name. Hell, next time you hear this commercial think of that. USPS. Band. Name.”

I’m sure that FOX has this commercial on endless loop.

by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated from the Spanish by John King (FSG)

This book sounds like such an old man book—I love it!

In the past, culture was a kind of vital consciousness that constantly rejuvenated and revivified everyday reality. Now it is largely a mechanism of distraction and entertainment. [. . .] Vargas Llosa traces a decline whose ill effects have only just begun to be felt. He mourns, in particular, the figure of the intellectual: for most of the twentieth century, men and women of letters drove political, aesthetic, and moral conversations; today they have all but disappeared from public debate.

I think I’m going to read this over the weekend and spend hours yelling at my books to get off my lawn.

by Juan José Saer, translated from the Spanish by Roanne Kantor (Open Letter)

This is our fourth Saer book—with another coming next summer!—and the first to be translated by Roanne Kantor. (Steve Dolph has done the other three, and he’s amazing.) Roanne won the in 2009 for this book, which is how she ended up working on it for us.

Speaking of Susan Sontag, her biographer, Ben Moser, won the Internet recently for his photo of his six-year-old niece flipping out in the White House. I’m sure you’ve seen it, but if not, here’s a I get overly excited when people I know become ĂĽber-famous for something that’s not what they always do. Now, hopefully 1/1,000,000 of the people who saw that photo will buy a book that Ben has translated, edited, or written.

by A Yi, translated from the Chinese by Anna Holmwood (Oneworld)

So, China was the Global Market Focus country at BEA this year, which was interesting. I only attended a couple of the main events, but saw their various displays, which took up a sizable portion of the exhibition floor.

The New Yorker ran an about China and BEA, which includes a depressing story about A Perfect Crime:

Even the Chinese delegation’s most promising soft-power weapons, the twenty-four authors, had trouble drawing crowds. On Friday, a Chinese newspaper lamented the lack of attendees at the on-site book signings. “Where Did the Readers Go?” read the headline. According to the article, during one signing featuring the crime novelist A Yi, the author grabbed a book and tried to push it on a middle-aged American man as he walked by. A Yi soon returned, dejected. “You’d better stop,” said another author, Su Tong, jokingly patting him on the shoulder. “You’ll humiliate our country.” The article went viral in China, before being deleted. (ChinaFile has a translation ) The rest of the planned book signings were cancelled as a result.

This piece also ends with an odd quote from our favorite author to troll, Jonathan Franzen, which, obviously I’m going to quote:

When I approached Franzen at the PEN rally, he told me that, after visiting China, he’d come to understand the case for censorship. “China has known so much misery, so much social instability in the last century, that there’s this deep cultural fear of it that cuts substantially across political lines,” he said. “From the point of view of the Chinese government, trying to maintain social stability, there are reasons for censorship. And that’s a point of view that has a right to be heard, in the same way that the writers we were supporting here have a right to be heard.”

by Violette Leduc, translated from the French by Sophie Lewis (Feminist Press)

Violette Leduc was one of the coolest authors ever, and it’s so good that this is finally available in its unedited version.

Also, Feminist Press rocks and you should really listen to our recent podcast in which Feminist Press editor Julia Berner-Tobin joined us to talk about Virginie Despentes’s Apocalypse Baby.

by Alan Pauls, translated from the Spanish by Ellie Robins (Melville House)

I couldn’t get into the Pauls book that Harvill brought out a few years ago, but he’s always talked about as one of the great contemporary Latin American writers, so I’m willing to give this one a chance.

Unfortunately, Melville House doesn’t send us review copies, so I went ahead and ordered this on Amazon.

by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, translated from the French by Edward Gauvin (Dalkey Archive)

This looks really interesting: a short set of essays about the art of writing from the author of The Bathroom and Television. When he’s on, Toussaint is spectacular, and it makes me curious to see what his nonfiction is like. Also, this book is 57 pages long with a gigantic font size, so it’s one that I can definitely finish . . .

There are bunch of books I’d like to include, but don’t have the time/energy for. (In other words, I have no obvious jokes for these titles.) So here’s a short list of other things coming out in June that are worth checking out.

by Marc Auge, translated from the French by Chris Turner (Seagull Books)

by Róbert Gál, translated from the Slovak by Mark Kanak (Dalkey Archive)

by Alisa Ganieva, translated from the Russian by Carol Apollonio (Deep Vellum)

by Kati Hiekkapelto, translated from the Finnish by David Hackston (Arcadia)

Guadalupe Nettel, translated from the Spanish by J.T. Lichtenstein (Seven Stories Press)

Micheal Ă“ Conghaile, translated from the Irish by Katherine Duffy (Dalkey Archive)

“Like a New Sun: New Indigenous Mexican Poetry”: (Phoneme Books)

by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean, and published by New Directions.

This piece is by bookseller and BTBA judge, Stephen Sparks.

Few contemporary writers are as conceptually imaginative or as willing to acknowledge their debts as Enrique Vila-Matas, which comes as a breath of fresh air, especially to those of us reading in the United States, where literary insularity is the norm. Each of his books to be translated thus far—Montano’s Malady, Bartleby & Co., Never Any End to Paris, and our subject here, Dublinesque—takes as its starting point a book or writer and from that point delves into clever, incisive examinations of what it means to be a modern reader.

Dublinesque (translated by Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean) is concerned with a pivotal moment in the history of literature: what Vila-Matas refers to as the end of the Gutenberg Galaxy. It is, as one might expect, an elegy. The plot follows the downward trajectory of an exemplar of that unfortunate species, the literary publisher, whose battles with alcohol and entropy (personal and professional) constitute the lament at the heart of the book. Riba, whose career has long since dried up and whose days are spent in front of a computer, grows convinced that in order to exorcize his demons, he needs to hold a funeral for the age of the printed book. There is no better place for this than Dublin, he reasons, because Joyce’s masterpiece was the culmination of the printed book. And so he begins to plan this funeral, all while battling his own personal demons and obsolescence.

Like Vila-Matas’ other books, this is one is melancholy, focused like the others on exhaustion—it’s also a rain-soaked and haunted novel. Dublinesque nevertheless manages to maintain a degree of levity. This is due to Vila-Matas’ wistful humor and his vast knowledge of literature: the book is full of allusions, references, cameos, and digressions on such figures as Robert Walser, Juan Carlos Onetti, Emily Dickinson, Julien Gracq (!), and, more centrally, Joyce and Beckett. In typical fashion for Vila-Matas, there are also references to fictitious writers who leave the reader pining for more. Nothing impresses so much as the range of Vila-Matas’ reading and his ability to weave into his narrative strands from other works, a technique that helps to bolster his occasionally patchy plots.

To be honest, I found the thin spots in the book endearing in a way, as if Vila-Matas littered his book with trapdoors into which a reader might fall. Of all the books on the longlist, Dublinesque is the most reflexive and its concern with the state of serious literature, where it’s heading and how it got here, makes it worthy of winning this year’s Best Translated Book Award.

He dreams of the day when the spell of the best-seller will be broken, making way for the reappearance of the talented reader, and for the terms of the moral contract between author and audience to be reconsidered. He dreams of the day when literary publishers can breathe again, those who live for an active reader, for a reader open enough to buy a book and allow a conscience radically different from his own to appear in his mind. He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. Because we mustn’t deceive ourselves: on the journey of reading we often travel through difficult terrains that demand a capacity for intelligent emotion, a desire to understand the other, and to approach a language distinct from the one of our daily tyrannies… Writers fail readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it…

Once a successful publisher of important works and great authors, Riba has since closed his Barcelona-based publishing house and finds he has little to look forward to in either his personal or professional affairs. Approaching his sixtieth birthday, he despairs his increasingly solitary milieu, marked as much by his failing marriage and tenuous abstention from alcohol as by his constant lamenting over his lost career. Intrigued by the concept of the hikikomori (a phenomenon prevalent in japan, characterized by individuals, usually male, whom have chosen for themselves a life of extraordinary isolation and social withdrawal), perhaps as an explanation for his own existential malaise, Riba’s own life begins to resemble that of an awkward outcast, marked by an internet addiction that consumes as many as fourteen hours in a single day.

After recalling a “strange, striking dream he’d had in the hospital when he fell seriously ill two years ago,” Riba decides to set about planning a trip to Dublin. The impetuses for this excursion are many, not the least of which is an opportunity to stage a funeral for the age of print and “The Golden Age of Gutenberg.” The date Riba sets for this requiem is none other than June 16, the very day on which James Joyce set his Ulysses, and commemorated annually as “Bloomsday.” With plan in place, Riba enlists the company of three writer friends to join him and his venture in the Irish capital.

Vila-Matas, as in his other works already translated from the Spanish, crafted Dublinesque in a meta-fictional, semi-autobiographical fashion. Forever fascinated by the nature of enigmatic authors, Vila-Matas works into the narrative references to authors both living and dead (including Julien Gracq, Fernando Pessoa, Robert Walser, Georges Perec, Paul Auster, John Banville, Brendan Behan, Italo Calvino, Rodrigo Fresán and his late friend Roberto Bolaño). Dublinesque is also, in part, an homage to both Joyce and his fellow countryman Samuel Beckett, both of whom loom large in the plot, structure, and thematic essence of the story itself.

Riba’s wife, Celia, a museum employee and recent convert to Buddhism, shares her name with the title character’s lover in Beckett’s Murphy. As well, the rocking chair in which Riba spends much of his time in Dublinesque’s final section is an allusion to the same piece of furniture in which Beckett’s Murphy whiles away many of his days. A character resembling a young Ceckett makes several mysterious appearances and leads Riba to seek out his identity, in hopes of, perhaps discovering that this fellow is the unknown, genius writer for whom Riba has been searching for his entire career. While in Dublin, Riba delves into a Beckett biography by James Knowlson (presumably damned to fame), shortly after remembering the surprise of reading a novel that featured “a character who’s a real person.”

Riba’s fascination with (and seemingly extensive knowledge of) Ulysses figures prominently into the story, as well. Riba makes repeated mention of the modernist novel’s sixth chapter (“Hades”), wherein Leopold Bloom and others attend a funeral for Paddy Dignam. It is during the funeral scene that Bloom encounters the mysterious Macintoshed character, much as Riba espies the young Beckettian man during his requiem for “The Golden Age of Gutenberg.” Vila-Matas was himself one of the founding members of “The Order of Finnegans (La Orden del Finnegans)” (a society comprised of a small number of other Spanish writers “with the sole purpose of venerating James Joyce’s Ulysses”).

Riba’s “remarkable tendency to read his life as a literary text” is worked playfully throughout the novel, especially given Vila-Matas’s decision to employ the Joycean and Beckettian allusions that shape the narrative in which Riba lives. “Dublinesque,” the Philip Larkin poem from which the novel draws its name (about a prostitute’s passing funeral), is but another example of the way Vila-Matas incorporates actual literature into his dirge of the forsaken art. Riba, perhaps resulting from his compulsive need to bring the imagery and incidents of that formative dream (or premonition?) into reality, begins to wonder whether his own life has come to resemble not merely a work of fiction, but the entirety of literature’s arcing curve itself, from great heights to pitiable ruination:

Only he—no one else—knows that on the one hand, it’s true, there are those serious slight discomforts, with their monotonous sound, similar to rain, occupying the bitterest side of his days. And on the other, the tiny great events: his private promenade, for example, along the lengths of the bridge linking the almost excessive world of Joyce with Beckett’s more laconic one, and which, in the end, is the main trajectory—as brilliant as it is depressing—of the great literature of recent decades: the one that goes from the richness of one Irishman to the deliberate poverty of the other; from Gutenberg to Google; from the existence of the sacred (Joyce) to the somber era of the disappearance of God (Beckett).

While Riba laments the passing of the print age, with its celebration of and devotion to the duality of the writer/reader relationship, he, like the era for which he mourns, must endure the perils and hardships that inevitably accompany so splendid a fall from grace (his career, his marriage, his health). That Vila-Matas so adeptly created a work of fiction that simultaneously considers the current state of both publishing and literature (as well as the respective roles of author and reader alike), while allowing the novel itself to serve as a comment on the very subject, is nothing short of a dazzling accomplishment. Vila-Matas, under the guise of fiction, seems to make the case for a future in which the importance of good writing and meaningful stories are afforded their due attention, while the relationship between author (or publisher) and reader is enlivened anew and bolstered for posterity.

Enrique Vila-Matas is undoubtedly one of the finest Spanish authors at work today and Dublinesque offers for display his profuse literary talents. With sharp, distinct prose and often unexpected humor, Vila-Matas is indeed a compelling writer. As a complement to the four books already available in English, one hopes that many more of his two dozen novels (as well as his collections of essays) will soon find their way into translation. Vila-Matas’s writing, in addition to providing fantastic stories and striking insights, is consistently amongst the most original work being produced today, and stands in stark and refreshing contrast to the banality and bankruptcy of what all too often now passes as popular literature: “the Gothic vampire tales and other nonsense now in fashion.”

Enrique Vila-Matas was born in Barcelona in 1948. His novels have been translated into eleven languages and honored by many prestigious literary awards including the Prix Médicis Etranger. He has received Europe’s most prestigious awards and been translated into twenty-seven languages.

Here is part of his review:

“The funeral march has begun, and it is futile for those of us who remain loyal to the printed page to protest and rage in the midst of our despair.” Samuel Riba, Dublinesque’s depressive and narcissistic protagonist, stumbles upon this and other similarly prophetic sentiments in an online article proclaiming the death of print and the ensuing “disappearance of literary authors.” In the early pages of Dublinesque (Dublinesca), Enrique Vila-Matas’s most recent novel to be translated into English, we learn of Riba’s fearful and forlorn attitude as regards the future of literary publishing:

He dreams of the day when the spell of the best-seller will be broken, making way for the reappearance of the talented reader, and for the terms of the moral contract between author and audience to be reconsidered. He dreams of the day when literary publishers can breathe again, those who live for an active reader, for a reader open enough to buy a book and allow a conscience radically different from his own to appear in his mind. He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. Because we mustn’t deceive ourselves: on the journey of reading we often travel through difficult terrains that demand a capacity for intelligent emotion, a desire to understand the other, and to approach a language distinct from the one of our daily tyrannies… Writers fail readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it…

Click here to read the entire review.

Click here for all past and future posts in this series.

by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated by Anne McLean

Language: Spanish

C´ÇłÜ˛ÔłŮ°ů˛â: Spain
Publisher: New Directions

Why This Book Should Win: Vila-Matas is most definitely one of the best writers working today. His games with form and structure are unparalleled. And this ironic gem of a book includes Marguerite Duras as a character.

Today’s post is by Monica Carter, BTBA judge, writer, reader of French, and runner of She currently lives in Los Angeles.

Never Any End to Paris is a novel for anyone who has wanted to live in Paris, wanted to be a writer, went to Paris and failed its promise and offerings, tried to be a writer and failed its promise and offerings, loved Paris, hated Paris, loved Hemingway, hated Hemingway, wanted to live the life of A Moveable Feast but decades later, loved Marguerite Duras, hated Marguerite Duras, loved the idea of living in a writer’s garret, wanted to runaway to Paris to become a writer, or more specifically, a reincarnation of Hemingway himself and finally, this is a novel for everyone who likes novels. I am emphatically telling you it is virtually impossible to dislike this novel. Told from the point of view of a novelist about to give a lecture, it is clear that the “novelist” is thin scrim for the author. When the novelist was young, he spent two years in Paris trying to write a novel, The Lettered Assassin, while living in Marguerite Duras’s garret. He has returned to the city of Paris many years later as a successful writer, wondering through his old haunts with his wife and reminiscing about the unhappy years he spent failing his dream while running around Paris with the likes of Duras, Barthes, and Perec.

But what is at the core of this novel is the myth of Hemingway. Whenever someone dreams of being a writer, it’s inevitable that they will discover Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and begin plotting a way to while their days away in some Parisian cafĂ© penning the next great novel. Our narrator is no exception and even takes it a step further by convincing himself that he looks like Hemingway, despite the protestations of others and the humiliation of being kicked out of a Hemingway look-a-like contest in a Key West bar. The beauty and tragedy of Hemingway was that he created a mythic image of himself as author—a man who runs with bulls and hunts wild animals, lives a life of adventure and daring, with barely enough time to dash off brilliant novels and short stories reeking of courage and masculinity—that was destined to snuff out Hemingway the man. Since this mythic image of Hemingway has been immortalized, it has hurdled through time capturing the dreams and imaginations of any would-be writer. This ideological literary behemoth refuses to jump the shark despite the mocking undertow for its cartoonish he-man extremes perfectly reflected in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.

Writers don’t want to surrender this image go because it encapsulates a life lived as art, for art. This is why Never Any End to Paris is so brilliant. It’s a rebuttal to Mr. Hemingway in the form of a failed homage. Vila-Matas delivers in sophisticated prose, an ironic tale of trying to live the dream and being disappointed by it, with hilarious aplomb tempered by gloomy flourishes. In the end of his two-year journey, he concludes he is just a man who will find his own way through his life as a writer and it will never equal the life Hemingway created of himself as a writer. And thanks to Anne McLean’s integrity and dedication to Vita-Matas’s tone, there is no loss of his wit or self-deprecating style. This is a novel for all novelists and told as well as any tale Papa told. It is a love letter and a Dear John letter to Hemingway and should win for its creativity, honesty and courage to fail at living a dream.

In Never Any End to Paris, the narrator (always striving to bear an ever closer resemblance to Ernest Hemingway) recalls his formative days in the French capital over the course of a three-day lecture. Taking as its title a derivation on the name of the last chapter of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Never Any End to Paris is set some half a century after Papa himself sauntered around the City of Light. Vila-Matas delves as much into the hardships he (or rather, his fictionalized narrator/lecturer) endured as an undisciplined and unsure writer seeking literary immortality as he does into the milieu of 1970s paris. With an overarching metafictional theme, an abundance of name-dropping, an obvious respect for the art of literature, and the blurring of the line between autobiography and fiction, Vila-Matas’s book brings to mind the works of his close friend and fellow (adopted) countryman, Roberto Bolaño.

While broad in scope, much of the narrator’s lecture, in addition to recalling the hardships of crafting the novel, the ongoing poverty that accompanied his writing of it, and the wealth of his social engagements with Paris’ creative elite, sets about considering the nature of irony (both in general and as it relates to the telling of his tale).

You’ll see me improvise on occasion. Like right now when, before going on to read my ironic revision of the two years of my youth in paris, I feel compelled to tell you that I do know that irony plays with fire and, while mocking others, sometimes ends up mocking itself. You all know full well what i’m talking about. When you pretend to be in love you run the risk of feeling it, he who parodies without proper precautions ends up a victim just the same . . . That said, I must also warn you that when you hear me say, for example, that there was never any end to paris, I will most likely be saying it ironically. But, anyway, I hope not to overwhelm you with too much irony. The kind that I practice has nothing to do with that which arises from desperation—I was stupidly desperate enough when I was young. I like a kind of irony I call benevolent, compassionate, like what we find, for example, in the best of Cervantes. I don’t like ferocious irony but rather the kind that vacillates between disappointment and hope. okay?

As the lecturer remembers his deliberation about how best to craft a novel (The Lettered Assassin) that will cause its readers to die immediately following their reading of it, the irony of writing what could be a successful book only to be left with no one living to admire it is not lost on him.

Like Vila-Matas’s other works (or, at least those already translated into english), Never Any End to Paris is a smart, creative, and playful work; one that never deigns to take itself too seriously. It as much a quasi-autobiography as it is a celebration of literature, film, paris, irony, and the folly and determination of youth. If only La Asesina ilustrada were already available in translation, then perhaps this book would resound with an even greater clarity than it already does. On its own, however, Never Any End to Paris¹ is a fantastic book, one that surely bolsters Enrique Vila-Matas’s reputation as one of the finer spanish-language novelists at work today.

“Among the many fictions possible, an autobiography can also be a fiction.”

¹ Translated by Anne McLean, known for her english translations of Julio Cortázar, Evelio Rosero, Javier Cercas, and others.