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Available
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Publication
Barcelona, Anagrama
Description
InBartleby & Co., an enormously enjoyable novel, Enrique Vila-Matas tackles the theme of silence in literature: the writers and non-writers who, like the scrivener Bartleby of the Herman Melville story, in answer to any question or demand, replies: "I would prefer not to." Addressing such "artists of refusal" as Robert Walser, Robert Musil, Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Duchamp, Herman Melville, and J. D. Salinger,Bartleby & Co. could be described as a meditation: a walking tour through the annals of literature. Written as a series of footnotes (a non-work itself),Bartleby embarks on such questions as why do we write, why do we exist? The answer lies in the novel itself: told from the point of view of a hermetic hunchback who has no luck with women, and is himself unable to write,Bartleby is utterly engaging, a work of profound and philosophical beauty.… (more)
Media reviews
This slender, beautiful and honest work is about invisible writers and their phantom books.
Vila-Matas has produced a postmodern paradox, something out of nothing, a positive out of a negative. His non-novel is highly original, both lucid and ludic.
User reviews
LibraryThing member Poquette
If this were a musical composition, it would be a theme and variations. The theme is this: a published author stops writing and disappears from the literary scene. The variations have to do with the whys and wherefores of individual cases and mention is made of one or two who have the opposite
The author announces in his opening paragraph what the reader has to look forward to:
I never had much luck with women. I have a pitiful hump, which I am resigned to. All my closest relatives are dead. I am a poor recluse working in a ghastly office. Apart from that, I am happy. Today most of all because, on this day 8 July 1999, I have begun this diary that is also going to be a book of footnotes commenting on an invisible text, which I hope will prove my reliability as a tracker of Bartlebys.
Who are these Bartlebys?
We all know the Bartlebys, they are beings inhabited by a profound denial of the world. They are named after the scrivener Bartleby, a clerk in a story by Herman Melville . . .
Why is it a work of fiction? Primarily because that is the way it is couched by the author. To be sure, it is unconventional, but that is the very nature of postmodernism. The point of departure is Melville's short story. Bartleby was merely a copyist, a scrivener in nineteenth century terms. He was not a writer per se. Enrique Vila-Matas has made a bit of a leap to conflate Bartleby's cessation of scrivening with published authors who have stopped writing. They are not really the same thing. But Vila-Matas has chosen to ignore this small discrepancy and has built his entire novella around a fictional Bartleby's syndrome.
Examples of Bartleby's syndrome in literature Vila-Matas calls alternatively "the literature of the No," which turns out to be a labyrinth with gradually enlarging dimensions and lacking a center, for he eventually realizes "there are as many writers as ways of abandoning literature." In his search for the writers of No, he
. . . sails very well among fragments, chance finds, the sudden recollection of books, lives, texts or simply individual sentences that gradually enlarge the dimensions of the labyrinth without a center.
This book is fun right from the beginning. The prospect of reading 86 footnotes to an "invisible text" produces an inner smile and prepares the reader to be amused. There are a couple of laugh-out-loud points where absurdity goes too far, in particular the reports of a fanciful correspondence with Derain, but mostly it reads like a fairly serious yet fascinating collection of critical essays.
Among the writers we meet are Arthur Rimbaud, J.D. Salinger, Herman Melville of course, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Franz Kafka, Thomas Pynchon and many, many others more or less connected to the literature of No, including recent acquaintances Felisberto Hernandez and Bruno Schulz
Vila-Matas is as much a philosopher as a novelist and this book is full of quotable quotes and thought-provoking passages:
• The writer has nothing to expect from others. Believe me. He only writes for himself.
• . . . a text, if it wishes to be valid, must open up new paths and try to say what has not yet been said.
• We all of us wish to rescue, via memory, each fragment of life that suddenly comes back to us, however unworthy, however painful it may be. And the only way to do this is to set it down in writing.
Most of all we want to look up the works of many of the writers discussed. Taken altogether, I loved this book. It goes directly onto the stack of books to be reread.
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problem: they write so prolifically they cannot stop and cannot finish.The author announces in his opening paragraph what the reader has to look forward to:
I never had much luck with women. I have a pitiful hump, which I am resigned to. All my closest relatives are dead. I am a poor recluse working in a ghastly office. Apart from that, I am happy. Today most of all because, on this day 8 July 1999, I have begun this diary that is also going to be a book of footnotes commenting on an invisible text, which I hope will prove my reliability as a tracker of Bartlebys.
Who are these Bartlebys?
We all know the Bartlebys, they are beings inhabited by a profound denial of the world. They are named after the scrivener Bartleby, a clerk in a story by Herman Melville . . .
Why is it a work of fiction? Primarily because that is the way it is couched by the author. To be sure, it is unconventional, but that is the very nature of postmodernism. The point of departure is Melville's short story. Bartleby was merely a copyist, a scrivener in nineteenth century terms. He was not a writer per se. Enrique Vila-Matas has made a bit of a leap to conflate Bartleby's cessation of scrivening with published authors who have stopped writing. They are not really the same thing. But Vila-Matas has chosen to ignore this small discrepancy and has built his entire novella around a fictional Bartleby's syndrome.
Examples of Bartleby's syndrome in literature Vila-Matas calls alternatively "the literature of the No," which turns out to be a labyrinth with gradually enlarging dimensions and lacking a center, for he eventually realizes "there are as many writers as ways of abandoning literature." In his search for the writers of No, he
. . . sails very well among fragments, chance finds, the sudden recollection of books, lives, texts or simply individual sentences that gradually enlarge the dimensions of the labyrinth without a center.
This book is fun right from the beginning. The prospect of reading 86 footnotes to an "invisible text" produces an inner smile and prepares the reader to be amused. There are a couple of laugh-out-loud points where absurdity goes too far, in particular the reports of a fanciful correspondence with Derain, but mostly it reads like a fairly serious yet fascinating collection of critical essays.
Among the writers we meet are Arthur Rimbaud, J.D. Salinger, Herman Melville of course, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Franz Kafka, Thomas Pynchon and many, many others more or less connected to the literature of No, including recent acquaintances Felisberto Hernandez and Bruno Schulz
Vila-Matas is as much a philosopher as a novelist and this book is full of quotable quotes and thought-provoking passages:
• The writer has nothing to expect from others. Believe me. He only writes for himself.
• . . . a text, if it wishes to be valid, must open up new paths and try to say what has not yet been said.
• We all of us wish to rescue, via memory, each fragment of life that suddenly comes back to us, however unworthy, however painful it may be. And the only way to do this is to set it down in writing.
Most of all we want to look up the works of many of the writers discussed. Taken altogether, I loved this book. It goes directly onto the stack of books to be reread.
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LibraryThing member poetontheone
A fascinating collection of anecdotes about writers who turned away from writing, or writers who, paradoxically, never wrote at all. You'd think that such a study in negation would leave bitter taste in your mouth, a loss and a sadness, but that is not the case. These accounts are often whimsical,
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and even beautiful. I found myself moved, often to laughter, while reading this work. There is also no shortage of opportunity for contemplation here, for readers and writers a like, about the very nature and purpose of literature. The book also serves as a road map to discovering a great variety of writers one would not come across otherwise. Sadly, for the non-Spanish speaker, many writers in this book are Spanish or Latin American and obscure at that, so readng them may not be an option. Despite that, you will find your pencil underlining the titles of intriguing works as well as marking beautiful passages that are to be found right here in this book. Show Less
LibraryThing member JimElkins
Dear Mr. Vila-Matas,
I have no reason to think you will ever see this. Why, after all, should you spend your time reading the reviews on the English-language Amazon site, or on LibraryThing? But I have decided to write this review as if I am writing it to you, because it's in the spirit of your
The book is a treasure trove of wonderful books, because you report on many writers that your reader will not have heard of. I marked the margins of my copy with a dozen names that I will now have to go and read. At the same time, I was delighted to find the names of many others that I know and recognize.
And that leads me to my frustration. From very nearly the beginning of the book I found myself arguing with you. Your theme, you say, is "writers of the No," meaning writers who have, for one reason or another, stopped writing. But that is the crux of the matter, that "one reason or another." Writers stop writing for many different reasons. Beckett is not the same case as Rimbaud, and Melville is not the same as Hawthorne. Some were depressed, some tired, some scared, and some -- I would have thought they would be your only subject -- stopped because they felt that modernism (a word that is weirdly absent from your book) prohibited the endless production of novels.
I can hear you saying, Well, yes, but as I say in my book, this is a vast subject, and there are many nuances and many different cases that must be judged and weighed. Exactly. They are different, and where your book falls short (sorry, I am being honest because I do not think you'll see this letter) of, say, Blanchot or even Perec (whom you cite) is where it is necessary to really slow down and think about each individual case.
PS, please, some day, read Wittgenstein's Tractatus. You wouldn't have written what you did if you'd read it, and it might have changed your ideas about other silences as well.
Still, even though this sounds negative and even, I suppose, a bit petulant (or even arch in my mimicry of your easy way of writing), the book is wonderful. It is richer, more full of ideas and writers I want to know, than any academic book I can think of.
I have no reason to think you will ever see this. Why, after all, should you spend your time reading the reviews on the English-language Amazon site, or on LibraryThing? But I have decided to write this review as if I am writing it to you, because it's in the spirit of your
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book. And how will I describe this book? It is generous, open, friendly, conversational, and also -- I hope you did not think this was only going to be a friendly review -- also infuriating, loosely written, and hopelessly scattered. The book is a treasure trove of wonderful books, because you report on many writers that your reader will not have heard of. I marked the margins of my copy with a dozen names that I will now have to go and read. At the same time, I was delighted to find the names of many others that I know and recognize.
And that leads me to my frustration. From very nearly the beginning of the book I found myself arguing with you. Your theme, you say, is "writers of the No," meaning writers who have, for one reason or another, stopped writing. But that is the crux of the matter, that "one reason or another." Writers stop writing for many different reasons. Beckett is not the same case as Rimbaud, and Melville is not the same as Hawthorne. Some were depressed, some tired, some scared, and some -- I would have thought they would be your only subject -- stopped because they felt that modernism (a word that is weirdly absent from your book) prohibited the endless production of novels.
I can hear you saying, Well, yes, but as I say in my book, this is a vast subject, and there are many nuances and many different cases that must be judged and weighed. Exactly. They are different, and where your book falls short (sorry, I am being honest because I do not think you'll see this letter) of, say, Blanchot or even Perec (whom you cite) is where it is necessary to really slow down and think about each individual case.
PS, please, some day, read Wittgenstein's Tractatus. You wouldn't have written what you did if you'd read it, and it might have changed your ideas about other silences as well.
Still, even though this sounds negative and even, I suppose, a bit petulant (or even arch in my mimicry of your easy way of writing), the book is wonderful. It is richer, more full of ideas and writers I want to know, than any academic book I can think of.
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LibraryThing member FredSmeegle
The narrator professes to be writing a chronicle of authors who cease to write because, like Melville's Bartleby,"they are beings inhabited by a profound denial of the world". Some of the authors he documents are fictional, but most are real. As a result, fiction and reality become so tightly
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interwoven that they blur together, and both appear not a little strange. For instance, I found myself researching the (probably fictional) author Cadou, on the internet, a writer and painter who liked to describe himself as a piece of furniture. But my search uncovered only other readers also attempting to determine whether Cadou existed, and an article on a university database (my search was for "Cadou painter") entitled "Witness to history: furniture and historic relics", a coincidence Vila-Matas would no doubt enjoy. Show Less
LibraryThing member detailmuse
I'm discouraged and also relieved to have abandoned this short novel.
Its premise is terrific metafiction (a writer who stopped writing now undertakes a project to explore other writers who stopped writing*) and its structure is clever (a series of 86 footnotes -- just the footnotes -- to a
Alas, my literary eyes are bigger than...; this is way over my head. Vila-Matas references dozens (hundreds?) of iconically erudite writers who span civilization’s geography and chronology. I knew enough about a few that I'd already read their work or made plans to do so; I’d at least heard of others; but so, so many more were completely unfamiliar and there was so little space to get to know them in each one- or two-page “footnote.”
So I dug in deeper, Googleing the writers and trying to orient myself until that became too ambitious to keep up. Then I Googled just those who legitimately caught my interest, often to find (to my frustration and amusement) that their existence was fictitious! There’s Clement Cadou, for example, an aspiring writer who feels overlooked to the point of feeling like a piece of furniture, and so abandons writing to become a painter -- each painting featuring a piece of furniture and titled, “Self-Portrait.” Hilarious! (And deep -- isn't it what some writers do, continually re-working an aspect of self in their writing?) Or Felisberto Hernandez (apparently a real person), reputed for refusing to write endings to his stories and whose collection of such stories, Incomplete Narratives, intrigues me (but apparently isn’t real).
So I lightened up and then felt completely adrift in the book. I struggled to the halfway point where, even though I noticed an underlying narrative forming, I let it go.
------------
* a la Herman Melville’s story Bartleby the Scrivener, about a man who makes hand-written copies of documents in an 1850s Wall Street law office. Early on, Bartleby declines his boss’s assignment to proofread colleagues’ copies by responding, “I would prefer not to.” Before long, he also prefers not to write his own copies, or leave the office, or even eat, and events follow to the logical conclusion (which is way beyond his being fired).
Its premise is terrific metafiction (a writer who stopped writing now undertakes a project to explore other writers who stopped writing*) and its structure is clever (a series of 86 footnotes -- just the footnotes -- to a
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non-existent text). Exactly to my taste!Alas, my literary eyes are bigger than...; this is way over my head. Vila-Matas references dozens (hundreds?) of iconically erudite writers who span civilization’s geography and chronology. I knew enough about a few that I'd already read their work or made plans to do so; I’d at least heard of others; but so, so many more were completely unfamiliar and there was so little space to get to know them in each one- or two-page “footnote.”
So I dug in deeper, Googleing the writers and trying to orient myself until that became too ambitious to keep up. Then I Googled just those who legitimately caught my interest, often to find (to my frustration and amusement) that their existence was fictitious! There’s Clement Cadou, for example, an aspiring writer who feels overlooked to the point of feeling like a piece of furniture, and so abandons writing to become a painter -- each painting featuring a piece of furniture and titled, “Self-Portrait.” Hilarious! (And deep -- isn't it what some writers do, continually re-working an aspect of self in their writing?) Or Felisberto Hernandez (apparently a real person), reputed for refusing to write endings to his stories and whose collection of such stories, Incomplete Narratives, intrigues me (but apparently isn’t real).
So I lightened up and then felt completely adrift in the book. I struggled to the halfway point where, even though I noticed an underlying narrative forming, I let it go.
------------
* a la Herman Melville’s story Bartleby the Scrivener, about a man who makes hand-written copies of documents in an 1850s Wall Street law office. Early on, Bartleby declines his boss’s assignment to proofread colleagues’ copies by responding, “I would prefer not to.” Before long, he also prefers not to write his own copies, or leave the office, or even eat, and events follow to the logical conclusion (which is way beyond his being fired).
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LibraryThing member proustitute
These phantom books, invisible texts, are the ones that knock at our door one day and, when we go to receive them, for what is often a trivial reason, they disappear; we open the door and they are no longer there, they have gone. It was undoubtedly a great book, the great book that was inside us,
But what about the smaller masterpieces? In one of the many vignettes collected in Vila-Matas's literary-critical-cum-novelistic meditation Bartleby & Co., the humpbacked narrator recalls a childhood friend, Pineda, who scoffed literary production, preferring instead to write only the first lines of poems; on occasion, too, he would write a whole verse on cigarette paper, after which he would then smoke his poem literally to ashes. What about the writers who write one novel, and then never produce another work—whether because they have dried up all creative energy in the initial endeavor, whether because they have lost their muse (in whatever form that might take), or just because they have been forced into relative obscurity? As Marguerite Duras observes: "To write ... is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly... To write is to attempt to know what we would write were we to write."
While Vila-Matas names these lesser-known and more marginal writers as Bartlebys, after Melville's fictional scrivener who famously "prefers not to" do anything, he is also quick to point to larger socioeconomic and literary trends that often silence writers of immense promise. (The example of Proust above is one that fits here quite relevantly, as, despite the initial rejection of his work, his social status allowed him to continue carving away at the Recherche, even publishing the first volume himself.) As far as Melville, a writer who has become virtually synonymous with literature-with-a-capital-L, Vila-Matas rightly points out that he suffered obscurity in his own lifetime, eventually forced to take on the same job as his fictional creation to make ends meet: a mere scrivener, a copyist of other people's words.
Because I mentioned Freud and Woolf above, I'm also interested in the ways in which Vila-Matas's project echoes theirs. Before Freud conceptualized the uncanny, the field of aesthetics was largely concerned only with what was beautiful; while Burke and Romantic philosophy began to change this, it's only with Freud and the advent of modernity that we see more artists turning to the grotesque, the horrors, and the ugly aspects that inform our lives and our experiences just as much as do the pleasurable aspects. Similarly, Woolf's call for literature to not ignore the very real topic of illness is one that is very much in line with Vila-Matas's thoughts here: while he does mention illness several times (and, to be clear, by writers who have abandoned writing—or even those who are "writers" but have never written a word—he does not mean those whose lives are cut short by suicide, although he does make three exceptions to this rule), it is less how illness can cut short a writer's productive years than how illness can feature in the works we come to think of as canonical, again aligning his thesis with this trend après Freud.
While Bartleby & Co. is a difficult book to review, it is a project that is so very important, one that makes readers rethink what literary production is, entails, and what it might mean to be "a writer." Do we need thousands of pages to have been produced in order to name someone "a writer," or is the person who never sets down his or her thoughts—or else abandons a writing career after one or two successful (or not) texts—as much "a writer" by right?Poetry unwritten, but lived in the mind: a beautiful ending for someone who ceases to write.What constitutes the writing life: the output or the intellectual framework and thought patterns that often inform, and sometimes do not inform, this output? As Jaime Gil de Biedma writes: "I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I wanted to be a poem."
In making his case for "a literature of the No," Vila-Matas is concerned both with Bartlebyan writers who would "prefer not to" writer, for whatever reason, and also with the intersecting matrices within and by which literature is inspired, produced, and eventually disseminated. A personal yet philosophical inquiry into the underbelly of literature, and one that questions canonical assumptions and often flips them on their categorical heads, Bartleby & Co. is a text that all writers should read, but also all readers: not only will Vila-Matas cause you to jot down names of unfamiliar writers on nearly every page of his text (although not all, as most do not exist except "in suspension in the history of the art of the No"), but he will also cause you to question rigorously just what "literature" is in the first place, and what we mean when we call someone "a writer." In fact, in quoting from Peruvian writer Julio Ramón Riberyo's The Temptation of Failure, Vila-Matas seems to agree that we all are:We all have a book, possibly a great book, but in the tumult of our inner lives it rarely emerges or is so fleeting that we don't have time to pin it down.
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the one we were really destined to write, our book, the very book we shall never be able to write or read now. But that book, let is be clear, exists, it is held in suspension in the history of the art of the No.We tend to hold aloft those works of literature that are, to put it crudely, too heavy to actually hold aloft. For some reason, literary genius, in our view, denotes extensive creative output: literary genius is Proust writing his seven-volume masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu by lamplight in his cork-lined bedroom; it is Woolf suffering a nervous breakdown after the symphonic jetties of The Waves have sapped every word from her, every ounce of creativity; it is Musil's The Man without Qualities for its examination of artistry, morality, and the social structures that oppress individuals and their relations with others. Hell, literary genius is even Freud's 24-volume complete psychological works, a monumental achievement of groundbreaking thought that continues to influence many disciplines to this day.But what about the smaller masterpieces? In one of the many vignettes collected in Vila-Matas's literary-critical-cum-novelistic meditation Bartleby & Co., the humpbacked narrator recalls a childhood friend, Pineda, who scoffed literary production, preferring instead to write only the first lines of poems; on occasion, too, he would write a whole verse on cigarette paper, after which he would then smoke his poem literally to ashes. What about the writers who write one novel, and then never produce another work—whether because they have dried up all creative energy in the initial endeavor, whether because they have lost their muse (in whatever form that might take), or just because they have been forced into relative obscurity? As Marguerite Duras observes: "To write ... is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly... To write is to attempt to know what we would write were we to write."
While Vila-Matas names these lesser-known and more marginal writers as Bartlebys, after Melville's fictional scrivener who famously "prefers not to" do anything, he is also quick to point to larger socioeconomic and literary trends that often silence writers of immense promise. (The example of Proust above is one that fits here quite relevantly, as, despite the initial rejection of his work, his social status allowed him to continue carving away at the Recherche, even publishing the first volume himself.) As far as Melville, a writer who has become virtually synonymous with literature-with-a-capital-L, Vila-Matas rightly points out that he suffered obscurity in his own lifetime, eventually forced to take on the same job as his fictional creation to make ends meet: a mere scrivener, a copyist of other people's words.
Because I mentioned Freud and Woolf above, I'm also interested in the ways in which Vila-Matas's project echoes theirs. Before Freud conceptualized the uncanny, the field of aesthetics was largely concerned only with what was beautiful; while Burke and Romantic philosophy began to change this, it's only with Freud and the advent of modernity that we see more artists turning to the grotesque, the horrors, and the ugly aspects that inform our lives and our experiences just as much as do the pleasurable aspects. Similarly, Woolf's call for literature to not ignore the very real topic of illness is one that is very much in line with Vila-Matas's thoughts here: while he does mention illness several times (and, to be clear, by writers who have abandoned writing—or even those who are "writers" but have never written a word—he does not mean those whose lives are cut short by suicide, although he does make three exceptions to this rule), it is less how illness can cut short a writer's productive years than how illness can feature in the works we come to think of as canonical, again aligning his thesis with this trend après Freud.
While Bartleby & Co. is a difficult book to review, it is a project that is so very important, one that makes readers rethink what literary production is, entails, and what it might mean to be "a writer." Do we need thousands of pages to have been produced in order to name someone "a writer," or is the person who never sets down his or her thoughts—or else abandons a writing career after one or two successful (or not) texts—as much "a writer" by right?Poetry unwritten, but lived in the mind: a beautiful ending for someone who ceases to write.What constitutes the writing life: the output or the intellectual framework and thought patterns that often inform, and sometimes do not inform, this output? As Jaime Gil de Biedma writes: "I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I wanted to be a poem."
In making his case for "a literature of the No," Vila-Matas is concerned both with Bartlebyan writers who would "prefer not to" writer, for whatever reason, and also with the intersecting matrices within and by which literature is inspired, produced, and eventually disseminated. A personal yet philosophical inquiry into the underbelly of literature, and one that questions canonical assumptions and often flips them on their categorical heads, Bartleby & Co. is a text that all writers should read, but also all readers: not only will Vila-Matas cause you to jot down names of unfamiliar writers on nearly every page of his text (although not all, as most do not exist except "in suspension in the history of the art of the No"), but he will also cause you to question rigorously just what "literature" is in the first place, and what we mean when we call someone "a writer." In fact, in quoting from Peruvian writer Julio Ramón Riberyo's The Temptation of Failure, Vila-Matas seems to agree that we all are:We all have a book, possibly a great book, but in the tumult of our inner lives it rarely emerges or is so fleeting that we don't have time to pin it down.
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LibraryThing member DRFP
What with the incessant name dropping this reminded me a lot of The Savage Detectives; though that's about where the similarities end. Bartleby & Co. is a pleasant book to read: Vila-Matas has a nice style of writing and the book isn't overly long. Yet for all its playfulness I couldn't help but
That's really all there is to this novel though. If you don't mind a post-modern book with no plot, just a lot of digressions on authors real or not, then this will be a fun distraction. If, like me, you expect a bit more character depth or plot then you'll probably enjoy the pleasant prose and the neat idea but that won't leave you feeling satisfied at the novel's end.
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think this book a little pointless. Perhaps it's just a post-modern novel and that shouldn't bother me but I would have enjoyed learning a bit more about the narrator. The snippets we're allowed to see of his life are interesting and primed me for more. I was frustrated that was all Vila-Matas provided in the way of detail.That's really all there is to this novel though. If you don't mind a post-modern book with no plot, just a lot of digressions on authors real or not, then this will be a fun distraction. If, like me, you expect a bit more character depth or plot then you'll probably enjoy the pleasant prose and the neat idea but that won't leave you feeling satisfied at the novel's end.
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LibraryThing member kgib
Raises questions about why people write, the purpose of literature, whether it's better to never write. I wrote down a ton of author names... hopefully I'll actually read some of them.
LibraryThing member thorold
Engaging short novel in the form of a set of footnotes to an invisible text, discussing the distinguished history of the "literature of No" — a book, in other words, about the art of not writing. Vila-Matas is conscious of the paradoxical nature of the subject, and even acknowledges briefly at
Jonathan Dunne's English translation seems pretty good on the whole, but there were a few things that undermined my confidence in him - for instance when he talks about "verses" of poetry when the context makes it almost certain that "lines" are meant ("versos" in Spanish could mean either). I should make more effort to improve my Spanish so that I don't have to keep reading translations...
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one point that "not writing" is not the exclusive province of a small and elusive literary élite, but is in fact practised by 99.9% of the population. He doesn't really develop the point, what he's really about is poking a bit of fun at some of the received ideas about literary greatness. Along the way, we get a good supply of entertaining anecdotes about celebrated (non-)writers.Jonathan Dunne's English translation seems pretty good on the whole, but there were a few things that undermined my confidence in him - for instance when he talks about "verses" of poetry when the context makes it almost certain that "lines" are meant ("versos" in Spanish could mean either). I should make more effort to improve my Spanish so that I don't have to keep reading translations...
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LibraryThing member le.vert.galant
A collection of meditations on writers who stopped writing that never quite gels into something coherent. The usual suspects (Melville, Salinger, Rimbaud) are discussed along with an unsurprising assortment of fellow travellers such as Kafka, Duchamp, and Pessoa. There are several writers mentioned
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that piqued my interest, Chamfort for example, and it is nice to find the story of B. Traven retold. As a grab bag of literary anecdote this is splendid, but the novel lacks insight and the fictional framework is underdeveloped. Show Less
LibraryThing member V.V.Harding
The raison d'etre of this book could be taken to be on page 177, in this, about Tolstoy: "He had renounced writing for good and, with the strange gesture of his escape, announced the modern belief that all literature is the denial of itself."
LibraryThing member jonfaith
There is a nihilist edge to this taxonomy, one which is evident and continues to persist. I find its serial interrogation necessary but not exactly fulfilling. That may be the point, it is likely the point. We can own our repetitions and accept our failing memories. We elect to refrain and endure
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likewise. Melville and Walser can offer tacit assistance. We only need dispose ourselves accordingly. Show Less
Awards
Meilleur livre étranger (2000)
Language
Original language
Spanish
Original publication date
2000 (original Spanish)
2004 (English: Dunne)
Physical description
218 p.; 18 cm
ISBN
843396822X / 9788433968227