Paris, in Vila-Matas’s hands, becomes less a city than a condition: a comic paranoia in which every literary inheritance is both revered and suspected. His narrator, lecturing or failing to lecture, insists on his unhappiness. The condition of being a young writer in Paris avoids nostalgia, sidesteps formation, and instead offers absurdity: a catalog of misreadings, a burlesque of seriousness, a life spent rehearsing failure.
Those who come to Never Any End to Paris by way of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast will feel the dissonance immediately. In Seán Hemingway’s “restored” edition, the final line—this is how Paris was when we were very poor and very happy—is cut. Vila-Matas retrieves that lost phrase and wears it down through repetition until the irony frays. Poor, yes. Happy, no. And not quite a writer either, except insofar as one becomes a writer through self-parody, through the accumulated mistakes of a first book whose sole ambition was to kill its readers.
The novel draws you in, then holds you at a careful distance. I admire books that stage their own instability, that refuse to resolve the boundary between voice and form. Never Any End to Paris pushes this tension toward something disguised as comedy: the recognition that each declaration of literary identity arrives too late, belongs to someone else, or has already been worn through by citation. This is neither memoir nor fiction. It is a book that knows how to hover.
Reading it, I began to suspect the narrator’s failure to distinguish novel from lecture was not a formal gimmick but the actual subject. A writer invents himself by repeating what he cannot fully believe. Paris provides the backdrop, but also the blur: the city that once promised origin, now reduced to well-worn trope. There is never any end to Paris because there never was a beginning, neither for this writer nor in this book.
I have been a Vila-Matas fan for a long time and, yet, I must say I find all his novels mostly disappointing as novels. As a rule, midway through them I start dragging my feet a bit thinking what an amazing blueprint for a novel he had laid out in the beginning and how I love all the literary allusions and philosophical musings and how I would be content with that experience only. By 3/4 of the book I already know that there is no way he will be able to find a conclusion that will be satisfying because there is no possible conclusion to something which is neither a proper novel, nor a literary criticism book.
I still am a huge admirer mostly because I figured out I have to enjoy his writings by being in the same frame of mind as if I were at a conceptual art exhibition. Every time I describe one of his novels to someone I never get into the plot or characters, I go ” It’s a collection of stories based on the premise that the current political historical events have the same magnitude of importance in the character’s lives as their personal doings. It’s inspired by Kafka who wrote in his diary two short sentences on the same day saying that the first world war had started and that he had gone for a swim that day – as if they were of equivalent importance.” I don’t recall a single story from the book. Or not enough to relate it to anybody at least.
Thanks, Claudia, that is astute and sits well with my reading of this, my first Vila-Matas book. It became evident quickly that there was no plot to discern, so I relaxed into the characterisation and literary references. By the second half of the book I was enjoying myself. I will certainly read more Vila-Matas, in fact have Bartleby and Company and Montano’s Malady on the shelves.
I have this and La asesina ilustrada on standby, Anthony, but while I’m looking forward to them both based on the two other Vila-Matas novels I’ve read, I’ve also been told by a couple of blogging friends that some of Vila-Matas’ “lesser” novels are quite erratic/not good. He does lay on the irony thick sometimes, but that really hasn’t bothered me yet.
After reading this book, I am curious about La asesina ilustrada but like many Vila-Matas novels it doesn’t appear to be translated yet.
So, the over ironic stance isn’t just a part of this book, but a Vila-Matas characteristic? It bothered me at first but the book was so enjoyable I settled into his style quite easily.
I think the irony’s a Vila-Matas staple, yes. By the way, I’d strongly recommend you try Bartleby & Co. before you try Montano’s Malady. The former’s much more focused; the latter’s kind of ragged in places.
Will do, Richard. Thanks.
If it’s anything like ‘Dublinesque’, this is a book I have to read 🙂
The consensus on my Twitter timeline is that this is better than ‘Dublinesque’.
I do sometimes get a little fatigued at the prospect of yet another book about writing, or about being an author, the endless conversation in which literature speaks to itself and to nothing beyond itself. The self-referentiality. To be fair though Vila-Matas sounds like he’s doing something genuinely clever, not mere “write what you know” stuff when all you know is writing. On the other hand, the irony here feels possibly too strong. If I read Vila-Matas I’m not sure this should be my first, despite my fondness for Hemingway.
Vila-Matas is doing something genuinely clever, much along the lines of Claudia’s eloquent comment above. The discourse becomes more important than the story, but the clever part is the way the two interact. From what I can tell, this is the best of the four that are in English translation. Three days later I am still thinking about the book, which is always a good sign that I must reread sometime soon.