PAGES | 240 |
SERIES | Narrativas hispánicas |
PUBLICATION | 01/10/2003 |
SERIES:Narrativas hispánicas
A sardonic recollection of the author’s days as a literary apprentice in 1970s Paris. Brilliantly fusing, autobiography, fiction and essay, the author relates his experiences as a young man attempting to write his first novel in a dreary Parisian attic; a flat whose landlady is none other than Marguerite Duras. Meanwhile, the author attempts to imitate, sometimes too literally, the life the young Hemmingway describes in ‘A moveable feast’. But, as the American writer defined himself in Paris as "very poor, but very happy", our narrator often finds himself in a very different situation: "very poor and very unhappy". In Paris no se acaba nunca (also the title of the last chapter of A moveable feast), Vila-Matas gives us the story of a young debutant in life and literature, told with an original slant on the classic tale of the sentimental education of someone on the run from mediocrity, hungry for triumph in the very centre of Art. After the resonant success of his last novel, El mal de Montano, in this new novel Vila-Matas manages a harmonious and brilliantly realised synthesis of the many facets of his singular narrative style.
PAGES | 240 |
SERIES | Narrativas hispánicas |
PUBLICATION | 01/10/2003 |
TRANSLATION RIGHTS SALES
- France (Christian Bourgois and 10/18)
- Switzerland (Nagel & Kimche)
- Italy (Feltrinelli)
- Brazil (Cosac & Naify)
- Portugal (Teorema)
- Romania (Rao)
- Poland (Muza)
- Greece (Kastaniotis)
- Lithuania (Alma Littera)
- USA (New Directions)
Enrique Vila-Matas was born in Barcelona in 1948 and has published a large body of narrative since his first work in 1973. He is a regular contributor to the press. He was awarded the Prize Ciudad de Barcelona and the prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger for Bartleby y companía. In 2001 he was given the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for El viaje vertical, the most coveted award for fiction in Latin America. El mal de Montano won the XXX Premio Herralde de Novela, the Critic's Award, in 2002, the Prix Médicis Etranger 2003 and the Premio Internazionale Ennio Flaiano.