BTom Bowden [ World literature/poetry] : «Perhaps my new favorite among Vila-Matas’s works available in English—the usual extensive literary references, allusions, quotations, and paraphrases, couple with an inane but simple plot allowing for / requiring frequent diversions, anecdotes, and essays in which Vila-Matas’s narrator weaves fiction and «reality» together in multiple, fugue-like ways: theme and variations, playing to the narrator’s stated love of repetition, never the same way twice. «Mac’s Problem» is a celebration of the human imagination, and an encouragement to readers themselves to create.»