Montevideo

The award-winning newest novel by Spain's premier writer-a metafictional meditation on the limits and possibilities of literature

The narrator of Montevideo is an itinerant writer and erstwhile drug pusher in the throes of a personal and literary transformation. Increasingly disillusioned with life in Paris and hoping for an artistic breakthrough, he ventures out in search of a "new style." His quest takes him to Barcelona and then to a hotel in Montevideo, Uruguay, called The Cervantes, where seemingly both Julio Cortazar and Adolfo Bioy Casares found inspiration. Montevideo, however, is not the final stop: Bogota, Reykjavik, New York, and St. Gallen in Switzerland are ahead on the narrator's journey. But to what?

In this brilliant new novel, Enrique Vila-Matas deepens and extends his inquiry into the purposes and functions of fiction: Can the products of the imagination be set on paper, coherently and faithfully? Or is literature forever destined to fall hopelessly short-consigned to be nothing more than an impoverished, inaccurate representation? Moving between cities and genres, from coarse slapstick to insightful criticism, from travelogue to metaphysical speculation, Montevideo is a narrative vortex, a labyrinthine tale of mirrors and illusions.