By Enrique Vila-Matas
Translated by Anne McLean
Paperback: 9781628977066
eBook: 9781628977073
Publication Date:Â June 15th, 2027
Description
A writer closely resembling Enrique Vila-Matas recounts his two-year stint living in Paris, where he aspired to author a novel under the apprenticeship of Marguerite Duras.
A masterclass in irony, Never Any End to Paris presents itself as a lecture given by the author on a return visit to Paris. The author, who is a stand-in for a young Enrique Vila-Matas, revisits his memories as a young man living in Marguerite Duras’ garret and trying to write his first novel, obsessing over the works of Ernest Hemingway as he does so. When he asks his famous landlord for advice on how to write a novel, she writes him a 13-point list, which he proceeds to carry in his pocket, consulting regularly.
With no shortage of influences, from Georges Perec, Samuel Beckett, and W.G. Sebald, to Rimbaud and Mallarmé, primarily it’s Hemingway’s account of Paris that guides him: “And what was I doing in Duras’ garret? Well, basically trying to live a writer’s life like the one Hemingway recounts in A Moveable Feast.”
Biographical Note
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, 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.”
Anne McLean studied history in London, Ontario, and literary translation in London, England, and now lives in Toronto, where she translates Latin American and Spanish novels, short stories, memoirs, and other writings by authors including Julio Cortázar, Javier Cercas, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, and HĂ©ctor Abad. Her translation of The Scandal of the Century by Gabriel GarcĂa Márquez was published by Knopf in 2019.