In life, there comes a time, and I think it is total, that we cannot escape, where we doubt everything: that doubt is writing.

4.5 stars. Easily the most fun I have had reading in a while. I am the first admit I have harbored a cliched longing for Paris most of my adult life. I have been there twice, though heartbreak, public intoxication, a general strike and seeing my wife's compatriots treated like thugs haven't reinforced that dream. Alas I turn to Moveable Feast again and again and my thoughts drift to La Maga and the ontology of toothpaste.

There's a time tested Tristram Shandy dimension to this novel, or is it a lecture? A Catalan novelist is invited to Paris to give a three day lecture on irony. The lecture he presents is the novel, or, maybe not exactly? The house of mirrors refracts and as soon as Orson Welles cracks a brogue, the reader, or is it the novelist/lecturer is encountering Perec and Beckett on the streets of the City of Light? Many digressions are but portals to further backtracking. There is a sinuous stream of citation. Erudition leaking to cocktail party aquifer.
The title is a line from Hemingway and the attendant context is how Papa was never as poor and never as happy as when he was in Paris. The protagonist counters that he was never as miserable as he was in Paris and then he name-drops---everyone. The final third of the novel (possibly the final day of the lecture) is one of despair. This is a novel about creation, the elusiveness of bohemian actualization.

Wonderful. Now I have an uncontrollable need to read Hemingway. Thank you, Enrique.

1.5/5

On this review, there's a note that I made to myself a decade ago that perfectly illustrates how far I've come from the days and mental states that first convinced me to commit to this work: a stipulation that I not read this piece until I had gotten through the works of one referenced author or another. At the time I made that comment, I was on the verge of dropping out of college, and the awareness that there was another branch of knowhow that was extremely (if not entirely) oppositional to everything I had been trained to unquestionably imbibe as the only viable life trajectory was too sustaining to reject. Now that I've come into my own in the field of literature and its intersecting paradigms, this sort of 'experimental' piece is less groundbreaking and more busy work, and what value I took from it has everything to do with what could not be said in this book's constant adherence to what makes for polite conversation in middle to upper class society. All in all, I still plan on reading Perec, and I wouldn't mind to getting some of the less popularly adulated names if they're like Duras and have far more profound layers that I can really sink my teeth into. However, the days when I was forced into dilettantism due to lack of control over my personal finances are over, and reading about them under a film of Occidentalism and other forms of Eurocentric fapping is a banality I could do without.

Ah, Paris. I've heard it has it all. Pickpocketing, street urine, those particular French breeds of bigotry circling around Arabs and Muslims: one wouldn't miss it for the world. True, not many narrators of the various works centered in this bombastically romanticized metropolis talk about any of that, for the point of those writings is love, or life, or literature, or whatever else white folks got up to when colonialism was still going strong and it was so easy to simply exist in the lap of luxury, unquestioned and unprovoked. Vila-Matas' unnamed narrator has a Hemingway fetish and a passive aggressive streak as wide as the English channel, so when he finds himself in 'gay Paree', he emotionally mooches off of transvestites, conflates writing well with hobnobbing with the slightly known, and blubbers about about being too rich to live on the street but not rich enough to effortlessly pay the rent. Were it not for the brief moments when Hemingway was being sympathetically queer (in the most painful sense of the word) and Duras was reckoning with her life and her choices from beginning to end, this would be the most tedious narrative alive, where everyone exists as backdrop and everything is so dissociated from any roots that can't be encompassed by a namedrop as to not have any worth at all. I'm sure all the references and cut and dried allusions one could extract from this would fill several books, but for me, the most engaging part was when the narrator had his electricity cut off due to not paying his bill, as that was one reality the narrator couldn't romanticize into nonexistence.

The reason for the second star? I don't feel strongly enough about this piece to rate it any lower than I already have. Reading it was like flicking through the channels looking for something to watch, knowing how much work had gone into convincing millions, if not billions, of people of the inherent worth of everything being shown on the screen, but also acknowledging how little it did for anyone looking for something a tad more tangible. For me, the "intellectual life", the "role of literature", is everything and nothing, so you might as well commit to something more interesting than a cishet bourgeoisie wonderland and go all out with the crossdressing, or the recovery from childhood trauma, or the murder of the loathed reader, else there's no difference between reading this and watching the mainstream news. In any case, this was short enough that simply getting it off my shelf after a decade of it sitting there was worth the price of entry. I'm just glad my reading tastes are no longer dictated by an almost complete lack of relevant points of comparison.

Within twenty pages I knew I had found a kindred spirit. I have reserved every other book of Vila-Matas’s at the library, and I suspect this is the beginning of a lifelong readership. Not since Marías have I felt so immediately drawn to a writer’s unspoolings.

Best enjoyed in a cosmopolitan city in France or Spain, with a double expresso, vanilla ice-cream, and a pastry. A beautifully breezy read that blends philosophy, literature, and history in the best way possible.

I find myself consistently drawn to stories and characters which orbit the world of literature itself. This may explain why I can hold writers like Roberto Bolaño and Jacques Derrida, two seemingly disparate and disconnected individuals, in harmony. Something about writing itself, about language and speaking, connects with something within me and I can’t avoid but be spellbound. This book was very much in the vein of Bolaño—a semi-autobiographical account of Vila-Mata’s time in Paris during the 1970s, trying to write his first novel—but it was also an exercise in deconstruction à la Derrida, unraveling the lines between fiction and truth, between autobiography and deflection. At times, the read was laborious, but worth finishing.