Overview

The award-winning newest novel by Spain's premier writer—a metafictional meditation on the limits and possibilities of literature The 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 narrator's 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.

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9780300284836

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Reviews

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“Montevideo is a beautiful, infinite novel of self-examination where, as usual with Enrique Vila-Matas, everything is real and nothing is true.”—Adam Thirlwell, author of The Future Future Praise for Enrique Vila-Matas:   “Arguably Spain’s most significant contemporary literary figure.”—New Yorker   “A writer who has no equal in the contemporary landscape of the Spanish novel.”—Roberto Bolaño   “Enrique Vila-Matas has pioneered one of contemporary literature’s most interesting responses to the great Modernist writers.”—Paris Review   “Enrique Vila-Matas is playful and funny and among the best Spanish novelists.”—Colm Tóibín   “Vila-Matas’s wildly original novels are all investigations of whether or not originality in fiction is still possible; every nook and cranny of literary history is explored and interrogated, the margin of every great novel frantically scribbled in.”—Dublin Review of Books

""Montevideo is a beautiful, infinite novel of self-examination, where as usual with Enrique Vila-Matas everything is real and nothing is true.""—Adam Thirlwell, author of The Future Future

Author Information

Enrique Vila-Matas (b. 1948) is an acclaimed Spanish novelist, critic, filmmaker, and journalist. He is the author of numerous novels, stories, and essay collections, and his works have been translated into more than thirty languages. Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott have translated some fifty books from Spanish and together were nominated for the 2024 National Book Award in Translation.

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