When I received the package from Amazon with Dublinesca of Enrique Vila-Matas, I felt an aura of excitement. It was the last book of an author who exceeds even the word favorite, a constant reference in my readings and author of one of my favorite books, Brief History of Portable Literature . The book grew in expectations due to reports from friends of mine who constantly told me it was a great novel. After I read it, and kept reading, and ultimately left me cold. Not that it was a bad novel, or misspelled, or anything like that. It's just a novel empty. After thinking about it I think there are several reasons for this. The scored then, somewhat disjointed, as a way to recover from the shock:
1. That style post-Borges metaliterary I think I gave him. When Vila-Matas wrote in the eighties and nineties, the stories of Shandi and bartlebíes had as sense to claim a place literature as an experience in Spain plunged into mourning post-Franco and the intricacies of the Movida. For this reason, Vila-Matas had a better reception in Latin America, where its refined style was a great antidote for the challenges of literature prosísiticos postdictatorial and excesses of the "Post-Boom." However, between then and now, it happened Roberto Bolaño, whose work pushed to the limits of his absurd this type of work. After Archimboldi and critics 2666, a man who claims to be "the last literary editor" and who goes in search of Joyce is emptied of meaning, since its parody has already happened.
2. Dublinesca has a basic problem: there is much talent, too canon and nothing to say. Certainly looks a Vila-Matas at its most refined, beautiful prose which do not need and will spare nothing. However, this prose is not at the service of anything worthwhile. As a literary entertainment, the referents of Vila-Matas are boring. Return to Tristram Shandy or Bartleby from the Hispanic tradition was a radical act, a claim of forms of literature that did not fit the canons of the time. Back to Joyce in 2010 is an anachronism, first because there is no canonical Hispanic writer without at least an evening Joycean vein (Only in Mexico come to mind Fernando del Paso and Joseph Augustine), and second because Joyce is so central to the literary modernism that eventually completed it is impossible, even for a titan like Vila-Matas, find some interesting reference or original in their ancestry. That would require twenty years of unjust but necessary forgetting that have not yet begun.
3. The Vila-Matas jump to Seix Barral accuses a problem reaching any writer of his spirit: he is too dedicated. For this reason, we find some things that appear in the worst Carlos Fuentes or in the worst Milan Kundera: The character is the alter ego of the author bum and / or friend (in this case seems to be the prodigal son of Jorge Herralde and Vila-Matas) and the accumulation of inside jokes with friends from high literary sphere. When I found the famous editor was responsible, for example, to edit a book by Claudio Magris which incidentally is not Anagram (Clarisse ring ) threw the book to the floor. That gesture makes only a writer or a young immature and inexcusable (the amateur who fills his fiction with friends) or a star ego. This is sad because the Vila-Matas is presented in public and international media is writing a clarity that does not need such gestures. Dublinesca is the book by an author a victim of its own success.
Despite what these three considerations seem to indicate, my admiration for Vila-Matas remains unrestricted and hope that his genius again to set in one of those books liberating and surprising as it has occurred in the past. This is not just a personal hope or targeting an individual. I worry that if someone like Vila-Matas is trapped in the labyrinth of metarreferencia, you can expect of literary writing in general. May continue, to suffer the bad clone swell Borges (as Goran Petrovic, Milorad Pavic, the worst Bolaño) following through high literature today. I hope not, for the sake of writing, reading and literature in general intelligence.
