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Unreliable memoirs. Travelling to Nantes to help his son with his writer’s block, an eminent literary critic – “literature-sick” himself - records his efforts in a journal. But Vila-Matas’ narrator, endlessly unreliable, later reveals that there is no son, and that he is the blocked writer: the narrative of the book’s first section - which gives way in turn to memoir, a dictionary-style list of novelists who kept diaries, a lecture delivered in Budapest, and a sequence of Montaignesque musings (hence the title’s homage) - is his attempt to write his way around the problem.Montano is in many ways a continuation of Vila-Matas’ previous novel, Bartleby & Co, which comprised a collection of footnotes to an invisible text. Its concerns - the limits and powers of literature, and whether there is any reason to hope that life, eventually, doesn’t pervert everything – are the same, as are its often dizzyingly virtuosic cultural leaps, from Valéry to Kafka, Proust, Dickinson and Sebald via 9/11, Nosferatu and classic film noir. It’s less a novel severely lacking a plot than an extended essay gloriously over-endowed with one. Montano by Enrique Vila-Matas, out now published by Harvill Secker.
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