A very bizarre but very enjoyable book.

Catherine Lacey

Never Any End to Paris

by Enrique Vila-Matas

Translated from Spanish by Anne McLean

This brilliantly ironic novel about literature and writing, in Vila-Matas’s trademark witty and erudite style, is told in the form of a lecture delivered by a novelist clearly a version of the author himself. The “lecturer” tells of his two-year stint living in Marguerite Duras’s garret during the seventies, spending time with writers, intellectuals, and eccentrics, and trying to make it as a creator of literature: “I went to Paris and was very poor and very unhappy.” Encountering such luminaries as Duras, Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, Sergio Pitol, Samuel Beckett, and Juan Marsé, our narrator embarks on a novel whose text will “kill” its readers and put him on a footing with his beloved Hemingway. (Never Any End to Paris takes its title from a refrain in A Moveable Feast.) What emerges is a fabulous portrait of intellectual life in Paris that, with humor and penetrating insight, investigates the role of literature in our lives.

Paperback(published May, 24 2011)

ISBN
9780811218139
Price US
16.95
Page Count
208

Ebook(published May, 24 2011)

ISBN
9780811220163
Price US
15.95
Portrait of Enrique Vila-Matas

Enrique Vila-Matas

Spanish writer

A very bizarre but very enjoyable book.

Catherine Lacey

Vila-Matas’s touch is light and whimsical, while his allusions encompass a rogue’s gallery of world literature.

Time Out New York

Mr. Vila-Matas shows that the reasons for (and the consequences of) not writing fiction can, in a funny way, be almost as rich and complicated as fiction itself.

Economist