Montano

Description

A man's obsession with literature leads him to see the world through the eyes of fiction A man's obsession with literature leads him to see the world through the eyes of fiction Literature can be contagious; it can also be our only means of salvation. That at least is the experience of Montano, the 'unreliable narrator' of Enrique Vila-Matas' prize-winning novel, a man and a writer who is so obsessed with the books of certain celebrated contemporaries that he is unable to put pen to paper or utter a word without summoning up their work or their lives, and whose malady is that he finds it impossible to distinguish between real life and fictional reality. Part picaresque novel, part intimate diary, part memoir, part philosophical musings, Vila-Matas has created a labyrinth in which writers as various as Cervantes, Sterne, Kafka, Musil, Perec, Bolano, Coetzee, Sebald and Magris cross endlessly surprising paths, while his protagonist leads the reader on an unsettling journey from European cities such as Nantes, Barcelona, Lisbon, Prague and Budapest to the Azores and the Chilean port of Valparaiso. Yet for all the author's dazzling literary pyrotechnics, this is a novel that is always witty and accessible.

Enrique Vila-Matas is widely considered to be one of Spain's most important contemporary novelists. His work has been translated into 36 languages and has won numerous international literary prizes, including the Herralde Prize, the Prix Medicis etranger and the Premio R mulo Gallegos. Vila-Matas' books have been longlisted (Montano) and shortlisted (Dublinesque) for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Never Any End to Paris was a finalist for the US Best Translated Book Award. Mac & His Problem was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020.