Montevideo by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott, Yale University Press, 2025
Enrique Vila-Matas, famous for his erudite metafiction, has further solidified his giant status with Montevideo, his latest novel to be rendered into an exquisite Kafkaesque-Borgesian-Nabokovian-Cortázarian—or, let’s just say, bonafide Vila-Matasian English by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott. Like much of the Nobel contender’s work, Montevideo’s humor develops via first-person digressions that lead the reader through a labyrinth of allusions, referencing writers both real and imagined. In only the first several pages, there is a long litany of appearances: Lucy Sante, Emil Cioran, Ricardo Piglia, Herman Melville, Miklós Szentkuthy, Antonio Tabucchi, Roberto Bolaño, Laurence Sterne, and a certain Madeleine Moore. The list expands quickly, and some of the mentioned begin to establish themselves as not only the friends and heroes of the unnamed narrator, but part of the author himself. Per usual, Vila-Matas revels in blurring reality with fiction: “. . . any written version of a true story is always a kind of fiction—the moment the world is arranged into words, it is fundamentally altered.”
The narrator (possibly a stand-in for the “real” Vila-Matas) loves literature despite suffering a bad case of writer’s block—or rather “Rimbaud syndrome,” a condition examined in a previous novel by the narrator, Virtuosos of Suspense, that “. . . became a nightmare . . . buried under my skin like the apple Gregor Samsa’s father threw at him,” and which bears a striking resemblance to Vila-Matas’s own Bartleby & Co. It speaks to the author’s mastery, then, that these perception-games welcome the reader into the text’s meandering trails instead of alienating them, threading a thrill into the minimal yet potent plot and the offbeat characters.
Montevideo is divided into six distinct and cohesive sections, each named after places that the fictional author visits (in one way or another): Paris, Cascais, Montevideo, Reykjavík, Bogotá, and Paris again. The chuckles begin during the first section, in which a younger version of the narrator moves to the City of Light with hopes of writing something “lost-generation style,” but ultimately fails to do so and ends up dealing drugs, “. . . overcome, what’s more, by a sudden indifference to culture more generally; an indifference that cost me dearly in the long run and was even reflected in the oafish title I gave to my account of those turbulent times: A Garage of One’s Own.” He goes to “lousy parties, albeit with plenty of red wine,” and always leaves his acquaintances with a goodbye that only he finds funny: “Did you know I’ve stopped writing?” This eccentric, essayistic, wryly existential sense extends throughout the sections, but especially here, the anecdotes featuring his friends Tabucchi and Moore (an artist turned writer who seems to me completely fabricated), are as sharp as a quill.
The title section, my favorite and arguably the most entertaining, centers around the narrator’s casual interest in Julio Cortázar’s atmospheric short story “The Sealed Door”; as he admits, he is no Cortázar afficionado, but his curiosity grows into a “Cortazarian paranoia” after he visits the Cervantes Hotel in Montevideo, Uruguay. Surprised to learn that the hotel staff have no idea Cortázar had set his story in Room 205, with its mysterious door leading to another room where a baby’s strange crying persists throughout the night, Vila-Matas’s narrator enters the story within the story, and despite not setting out to write about his experience, he ends up writing about his experience of not writing about his experience.
Like Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and the Icelandic sagas, Enrique Vila-Matas’s Montevideo defines literature as potentially infinite, even in its foolishness to be immortal, and that such an affinity for infinity can lead its followers always into another room, another book, another life, ad infinitum—that is, if it does not cast one into the abyss.
