Montevideo: A Novel (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

ISBN: 0300284837

Author: Vila-Matas, Enrique

Condition: New

The award-winning newest novel by Spains premier writer-a metafictional meditation on the limits and possibilities of literatureThe narrator of Montevideo is an itinerant writer and erstwhile drug pusher in the throes of a personal and literary transformation. Increasingly disillusioned with life in Paris and hoping for an artistic breakthrough, he ventures out in search of a new style. His quest takes him to Barcelona and then to a hotel in Montevideo, Uruguay, called the Cervantes, where seemingly both Julio Cortázar and Adolfo Bioy Casares found inspiration. Montevideo, however, is not the final stop: Bogotá, Reykjavík, New York, and St. Gallen in Switzerland are ahead on the narrators journey. But to what?In this brilliant new novel, Enrique Vila-Matas deepens and extends his inquiry into the purposes and functions of fiction: Can the products of the imagination be set on paper, coherently and faithfully? Or is literature forever destined to fall hopelessly short-consigned to be nothing more than an impoverished, inaccurate representation? Moving between cities and genres, from coarse slapstick to insightful criticism, from travelogue to metaphysical speculation, Montevideo is a narrative vortex, a labyrinthine tale of mirrors and illusions.