Some of his characters are real historical figures, like Hans Hörbiger, the Austrian scientist who advanced the theory of successive moons and counted Hitler among his disciples. Others might as well be, like André Lebran, who is “remembered, occasionally remembered, or in fact not remembered at all, as the inventor of the pentacycle or the five-wheeled bicycle.” Some are heroic, like the Filipino José Valdes y Prom, telepath and hypnotist. Others are wholly innocent creatures or saints, like Aram Kugiungian, an Armenian immigrant in Canada, who is reincarnated or transmigrated into hundreds, maybe thousands of people, and who always says, when confronted with the evidence, that he feels “nothing unusual, in fact nothing at all, at most a vague sensation of not being alone in the world.” Not to mention Llorenç Riber, the Catalan theater director capable of wearing down not only the most brutal censors but also his occasional audiences by staging an adaptation of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Or the Canarian inventor Jesús Pica Planas, father of the revolving grill turned by four turtles or of elastic underwear for dogs in heat or of a photoelectric mouse trap complete with guillotine, to be placed in front of mouseholes. Thirty-five biographies like these make this a festive, laugh-out-loud read, a book by one of the greatest and strangest (in the revolutionary sense of the word) writers of this century, a writer whom no good reader should miss.
Words and Deeds
He was a great writer. A great man. That’s how one must always begin, said a medic from the Red Cross. The bandage before the wound. But it’s suffocating, in a way, this avalanche of praise on the day of his death. So he died in a state of perfect repose, not a single muscle of his face twitching? A statement like that, ridiculous and trivial, adds nothing to a reputation based as much on words as on deeds.
How did Luis Martín-Santos die? Screaming in agony, with the faintest of whimpers? How did Juan Benet die? Lost in a labyrinth, watching the ghosts of Spain file past through a cascade of tears or dandruff or piety? It’s suffocating, this avalanche of praise. Today I read that Arrabal, along with two distinguished friends, considered Cela to be the world’s greatest living writer. I want to think that the pain must be impairing his judgement. What impels or sustains this unanimous accord? The Nobel? Is it Benavente’s hordes, returning on crutches of oblivion? Such unanimity is frankly sickening. All this impromptu literary criticism, all these mediocre professors, all these bureaucrats on the loose.
Not even Cela, who did so many things — some of them, I want to believe, done independently and done well — deserves this. No real writer deserves this. Literature, unlike death, lives out in the open, exposed to the elements, far from the rule of government and law, except for the law of literature which only the best of the best are capable of breaking. And after all, literature doesn’t exist anymore, only the example of it.
Between the old macho and the bewildered knight, between the fleshy Dalí and the lifeless academic, between the champion prize-winner and the man with lofty contempt for all faggots, there is a secret slot for Cela at his best, as one of the great prose stylists, plural, of Spain in the second half of the twentieth century, as a human being happy with his wife Marina, as a man dangerously like us.
Vila-Matas’s Latest Book
Everything about this book is disturbing, beginning with the cover, an August Sander photograph of three young peasants dressed in their Sunday best, all three with hat and cane, gazing proudly at the camera, their pride tinged with a kind of elegance and indifference and aloofness, as if they know something about literature that the rest of us don’t. These peasants, who are as good-looking as they are young, are walking along a dirt road, what appears to be a narrow road, between sown fields or fallow fields, and they’ve turned their faces toward the camera, a pause on the road, a pause that scarcely alters those proud faces, faces sculpted for the abyss and vertigo. And that’s what awaits readers inside of Bartleby & Co. (Anagrama), Vila-Matas’s latest effort, a brief stroll, composed in the form of footnotes, through the abyss and vertigo not only of literature (though at moments that might seem to be the only subject) but of life, of the thin slice of life that each human being is dealt. In that sense this is a defiant book: defiant in its depiction of those who at a certain moment decided to give up writing, and defiant in its forays into territory where the possibility and impossiblity of writing is disputed with the not always infallible weapons of elegance and humor. Once we’ve reached this point it’s necessary, out of courtesy, to ask ourselves an increasingly rhetorical question: Is the book we have before us a novel, a collection of literary or anti-literary offerings, a miscellaneous volume that doesn’t fit any set category, a diary of the life of the writer, an interweaving of newspaper pieces? The answer, the only answer that occurs to me just now, is that it’s something else, something that might be a blend of all the preceding options, and we might have before us a twenty-first-century novel, by which I mean a hybrid novel, a gathering together of the best of fiction and journalism and history and memoir. In a way, it reminds me of another book by Vila-Matas, Para acabar con los números redondos [An End to Round Numbers], published in 1997, a wonderful book, one of the happiest I’ve ever read, which went almost unnoticed when it was clearly the best thing published in Spain that year. The spirit is the same. The poetic force is the same. Even the levity is similar. But what in Para acabar con los números redonodos was certainty and therefore an accumulation of felicities and clarities, in Bartleby & Co. is the laybrinth of the belated, like the labyrinths of the symbolist painters, and it’s also the fevered search for exits and sometimes the song or honk of the swan, and most of all it’s the courage of a writer who collects and catalogues pocket-size hells or invisible hells, which when viewed from a global perspective are pieces of a larger hell, fragments that say something not only about those writers who at a certain moment in their lives (a moment of clarity or desperation or madness) gave up writing but also about those writers who, like Vila-Matas himself, will never give up writing, and, beyond that, say something about death, and about vain gestures that may not stave off death but that save us (or can save us) nonetheless, and none of this is just about writers, as the reader only realizes toward the end, but actually about readers, about human beings of every ilk, about people who live and one day stop living, about adventurers and the dying, about people who read and people who one day stop reading, and all of it — which put this way could make us think that we’re up against the wall — is presented to us in a book of scarcely 179 pages, a book moderated by the humor and grace of Vila-Matas, a writer who has no equal in the contemporary landscape of the Spanish novel, and whose defiant attitude resembles that of the peasants on the cover in their Sunday best, though Vila-Matas is the furthest thing from a peasant I know, and Vila-Matas works on Sundays.