Bartleby & Co.

Enrique Vila-Matas

Bartleby & Co.
Format
Hardback
Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Country
United States
Published
20 December 2004
Pages
178
ISBN
9780811215916

Bartleby & Co.

Enrique Vila-Matas

In Bartleby & Co., an enormously enjoyable novel, Enrique Vila-Matas tackles the theme of silence in literature: the writers and non-writers who, like the scrivener Bartleby of the Herman Melville story, in answer to any question or demand, replies: I would prefer not to. Addressing such artists of refusal as Robert Walser, Robert Musil, Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Duchamp, Herman Melville, and J. D. Salinger, Bartleby & Co. could be described as a meditation: a walking tour through the annals of literature. Written as a series of footnotes (a non-work itself), Bartleby embarks on such questions as why do we write, why do we exist? The answer lies in the novel itself: told from the point of view of a hermetic hunchback who has no luck with women, and is himself unable to write, Bartleby is utterly engaging, a work of profound and philosophical beauty.

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