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.
— Morten Høi Jensen, Dublin Review of Books
A fictional journey through the modern history of literary publishing.
Dublinesque opens with a renowned and retired literary publisher’s dream: he finds himself in Dublin, a city he’s never visited, and the mood is full of passion and despair. Afterwards he’s obsessed with the dream, and brings three of the writers he published on a trip to the same cemetery where Paddy Dignam was buried in James Joyce’s Ulysses, where they hold a funeral for “The Gutenberg Age.” And then he notices that he’s being shadowed by a mysterious man who looks exactly like Samuel Beckett…
In this witty and poignant novel, perhaps his finest yet, Enrique Vila-Matas traces a journey that connects the worlds of Joyce and Beckett and all they symbolize: great literature and evidence of the difficulties faced by literary authors, publishers, and good readers, their struggle to survive in a society where literature is losing influence.
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.
— Morten Høi Jensen, Dublin Review of Books
[Dublinesque] is enjoyable for its madcap energy, and its ability to relish its own absurdity and make well-worn literary references feel new.
— Bookforum
By lifting the heavy weight of the past, by setting irony against dogmatism and rigidity, Vila-Matas allows his characters, and us, to contemplate the future.
— The New Yorker
The accent of Vila-Matas’s project falls on an accomplished romanticism conscious of its historicity, an artist-worship taken to maturity that concurrently absents and introduces itself into the work at every moment.
— Los Angeles Review of Books
A touching account of facing down mortality with a passion and an obsession for literature.
— The New York Times Book Review
It is Vila-Matas’ style of writing that distinguishes him as one of the best living authors today, and what makes Dublinesque a must read book.
— The Coffin Factory
The Spanish novelist is a master of that problematic enterprise of literature: the death-defying highwire act of telling the truth through lies, of invoking reality through fiction.
— The Millions
Both shocking and gratifying for the reader…Dublinesque offers the reader layer upon layer of secrets that only she is privy to, and the effect is thrilling.
— Full Stop
The novel is about the death of the author in more senses than one. Funerals make a kind of art out of death, and so does Dublinesque
— London Review of Books
From his latest raid into the literary jungle Vila-Matas has brought home a fine specimen of that most endangered of intellectual species, the literary publisher.
— The Guardian
His writing is filled with withdrawal and disappearance, and so it is with Dublinesque, one of the most pleasurable and joyous novels of the year.
— The Independent
Hugely entertaining, witty and informed, a pleasure to read.