“It bothers me that he calls me weird, the weird ones are the others,” says the author of ‘Montevideo’, full of joy after overcoming a kidney transplant
Enrique Vila-Matas (Barcelona, 74 years old) wanted to become a poet. He started out imitating Blas de Otero, but became one of the most unique and eccentric storytellers in our literary scene. His new and extremely free novel, ‘Montevideo’ (Seix Barral), revolves around mysterious doors that are impossible to cross. To places where reality, fiction and fantasy merge “Written from the point of view of the poet and essayist, it is a treatise on ambiguity,” says the author, gloomily and chatty after overcoming a kidney transplant. The donor is his wife, the half-born Paula de Parma, to whom he dedicates all his books.
–The hidden door of a room in the Hotel Cervantes in Montevideo, which Cortázar and Bioy Casares wrote about, is the ‘MacGuffin of the book’, as Hitckock would say.
The engine of a novel is usually research. In this case, the narrator, unlike the author, although they have many things in common, examines that disapproved door of the hotel in Montevideo in which reality and fiction complement each other. He wants to sleep in the room and see what happens. Three years ago he stopped writing and started experiencing situations that he thought he should tell.
The line between narrator and author is more than diffuse.
– That is why the book is a treatise on ambiguity. My freest novel. The self is not biographical. I write fiction from the space that essayists and poets usually occupy: a visible literary self. What is enacted in my books is not exactly a plot, but thinking myself under the avatar of a narrator. Although, yes, the avatar, the personality of each of my narrators, is different in every novel. There are smarter and dumber. Perhaps the one thing that unites them all is the voice or that visible literary self that recurs in every book and gives continuity to the work. ‘Montevideo’ combines narration and essay like never before.
-Hard to attribute it to a genre. It’s like dynamizing them all.
More than ever, gender is my writing.
–Has Vila-Matas become a genre in its own right?
-Yes. But when I say it, I’m very pedantic. Who knows, my work will feel very comfortable from the start. Not so those who are not known, who will find cultural references that can mislead him. But from a certain chapter he takes a highway of mystery and enters the fantastic genre.
– He rewrote the book after overcoming a kidney transplant.
-There was a first draft. Then came the transplant. I don’t want to use the euphemism of renal failure that I’ve already resorted to. There is a before and after in writing, and in between there is a time when I didn’t write. But I don’t want to emphasize this. It’s something personal.
-Plot and plot are a heavy burden on literature, says the narrator. Perhaps an advantage of your novels is that they cannot be summarized?
—Let’s say yes, though I’m not against plot novels. In this case, someone who is against conspiracies ends up writing a conspiracy. It makes me very nervous when the winner of a literary prize is asked to explain what his novel is about. Novels are difficult to summarize and synthesize.
–He also says that an author is the transformation of his style. What is yours?
– The quest for style. It would be very easy to say that I have a recognizable style, but that is not a style. Style has no end. It’s about searching. There isn’t an author I find fun, interesting, or important who hasn’t said that his writing was a quest. “If I do a perfect job, it means I’m dead,” Dalí told me. Better not do it. If you draw a perfect work, you’re done. It’s the end. Dead. The search is endless if we don’t know who we are or what we do in the world.
– Do you only write for wounded texts?
-No. Whoever says that is that he hasn’t read me much. I’ve been translated into nearly forty languages and that would be a lot of letter wounds. I thought I was writing for a very specific reader similar to me. And it isn’t. I have realized that I write for the most unusual of people.
– To be original, singular, is it a literary ambition?
-Original, no. It literally means back to the origin. Single suits me. Any writer worth anything should be. There are books for Vilamates, but not for Stephenkingsians. It bothers me a bit. It looks like a cult and it isn’t.
– Aren’t you proud to generate your own adjectives, such as Kafkaesque, Fellinian or Berlanguan?
-It is a sign of singularity, yes, forged by time and hard work. But I wouldn’t want to see in a headline that I’m proud of what I do. I’m not proud.
– Does it annoy you that you are still called eccentric or strange?
“The weird really bothers me. Actually, I think the rare ones are the others. More in this day and age with people who can climb a mountain with one foot and things like that. Rubén Darío coined the rare term to talk about special writers and Pere Gimferrer was plentiful. It is true that I am not in the center, and it is already very eccentric to say it. All the great European writers of the 20th century were far from the center. I think of Pessoa and the peripheral Lisbon. In Kafka, who was in Prague, which was not a cultural center like Paris or Zurich. Proust was in Paris and they paid no attention to him, therefore he is also eccentric, and Joyce in Trieste. The eccentrics have the great literature of forged in the 20th century.
– Vilamatic humor is also unique.
-I found out I had humor in school when a classmate asked me twenty years later if I kept my humor. I had a terrible time at school and it was tragic. My humor started from the tragedy to escape the tragic. But it was involuntary. More than humor I would like to speak of irony.
–Is it ironic to say that Raphael likes him?
– Depending on your state of mind, you can enjoy or hate a painting. I saw Raphael’s transformation after his liver transplant in a documentary. How he had even added electric to his repertoire. The state of mind I was in left me euphoric. But come on, it looks like you should post an emoji warning that it’s ironic.
-What did he save literature from?
I sought it as a way out of the youthful fear. He wrote poems about loneliness. I called one ‘Soledad al intemperie’. I entered a world of my own, in my own room, in the search for a style that can separate you from many conflicting situations in life. It is a very positive path. You belong to literature. I have found a world that I recommend to young people.
–He has big prizes like the FIL or Rómulo Gallegos. He is a recurring candidate for Cervantes and appears in the Nobel pools.
-It doesn’t take away the dream. Strange things would have to happen for him to win the Nobel Prize. Very young, when no one knew me, I dared to say that if they gave me the Nobel Prize, I would turn it down. I stayed so wide, because it was what I thought. José Luis de Vilallonga said «what a funny guy; he intends to reject the Nobel Prize when even God does not know him». If he ever reaches Spain, it will be through another writer.
What is your most literary city?
—Paris, which opens and closes the book. My head has always been in Paris, even when I wrote about Montevideo, Bogotá de Saint Gallen or Barcelona. I only lived in Paris for two years, but it was a leap of faith. My formation. Although I started writing for the generation of 27 and especially for Blas de Otero. I wanted to write like him. It was poetry that led me to literature. I didn’t insist. Poems are either very good or very bad and I don’t want to take the risk.
–Would Paris be the city of its eternal rest?
“In the company of Jim Morrison, you mean?”
–And of so many others who rest in the cemeteries of Pére Lachaise or Monmartre: Molière, Oscar Wilde, Colette, Delacroix, Maria Callas… And Truffaut or Stendhal whom he quotes in his book.
-Yes. Joined by Lautréamont, who was Uruguayan.
“Did you choose an epitaph?”
-I will answer. It is a motto of Isak Dinesen, which fits very well with this time when no one is responsible for his actions. Everyone walks away from me and I respond to everything they say to me.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
