By Enrique Vila-Matas
Translated by Jonathan Dunne
ISBN: 9781628976113
Publication Date: 6/24/25
Shortlisted for the inaugural Warwick Prize for Writing
A dazzlingly original exploration of literature's limits—and its necessity—Montano's Malady is Enrique Vila-Matas at his most mischievous, self-referential, and intellectually provocative.
Both the narrator of Montano's Malady, José, and his son, Montano, suffer from literary illnesses: Montano has writer's block and José can only experience the world as literature. The search for a "cure" leads José around a world that is constantly mediated by his thoughts about writers and literature—from Cervantes to Sternea and Kafka to Sebald, among countless other literary touchstones—as he blends fiction and essay, memoir and criticism, with dizzying brilliance.
A sequel of sorts to Bartleby & Co., Montano's Malady is both a love letter to literature and a lament for its diminished place in the modern world.
Reviews
"The tremendously touching characters in Enrique Vila-Matas’s novels—who stumble from one place to the next, not really sure where they are going, but always on a quest—are so deeply comical on the one hand, and so deeply poignant on the other, that you just have to give yourself up to it because you’re in the hands of a master."—Paul Auster
"Vila-Matas’s excellence is an undisputed fact."—Roberto Bolaño
"One of Spain's most distinguished novelists."—Rachel Nolan, New York Times
“I don’t know Vila-Matas personally, nor am I planning to meet him. I prefer to read him and let his literature pervade me.”—Pedro Almódovar
“Vila-Matas is one of the most celebrated writers in Europe. His work has been translated into over thirty languages. His novels, artful and experimental and mixed with a strong tradition of storytelling, are ideal for anyone who’s a fan of Paul Auster, J.M. Coetzee, or Roberto Bolaño.”—Mark Haber
Biographical information
Enrique Vila-Matas was born in Barcelona in 1948, and is the author of more than twenty works of fiction, including Bartleby & Co, Never Any End to Paris (about the time he spent living with Marguerite Duras and working on his first, as of yet untranslated, novel), Dublinesque, Mac’s Problem (finalist for the International Man Booker), The Illogic of Kassel, and Vampire in Love. He is a Knight of the Legion of Honor from France and has won the prize city of Barcelona and the Romulo Gallegos (2001), the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger and Fernando Aguirre-Libralire (2002), the Herralde prize, the National Critics, the Prix Medicis-étranger, the prize of Critics Circle Chile (2003), the Premio Internazionale Ennio Flaiano (2006), José Manuel Lara Foundation Award 2006, the prize of the Royal Spanish Academy 2006. In September 2007 he won the literary prize Elsa Morante Scrittori del Mondo, which is awarded “to an important foreign author.”
Jonathan Dunne was born in Kingston-upon-Thames, England, in 1968 and studied Classics at Oxford University. He is director of the publishing house Small Stations Press. He translates from Bulgarian, Catalan, Galician and Spanish into English.