Montano's Malady

by Enrique Vila-Matas, Jonathan Dunne (Translator)

Overview

Part picaresque novel, part intimate diary, part memoir and philosophical musings, Enrique Vila-Matas has created a labyrinth in which writers as various as Cervantes, Sterne, Kafka, Musil, Bolaño, Coetzee, and Sebald cross endlessly surprising paths.

The narrator of Montano’s Malady is a writer named Jose who is so obsessed with literature that he finds it impossible to distinguish between real life and fictional reality. Trying to piece together his life of loss and pain, Jose leads the reader on an unsettling journey from European cities such as Nantes, Barcelona, Lisbon, Prague and Budapest to the Azores and the Chilean port of Valparaiso.

Exquisitely witty and erudite, it confirms the opinion of Bernardo Axtaga that Vila-Matas is “the most important living Spanish writer.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628976205
Publisher:	Dalkey Archive Press
Publication date:	06/24/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	255

About the Author

Enrique Vila-Matas was born in Barcelona in 1948, and is the author of more than twenty works of fiction, including Bartleby & Co, Never Any End to Paris (about the time he spent living with Marguerite Duras and working on his first, as of yet untranslated, novel), Dublinesque, Mac’s Problem (finalist for the International Man Booker), The Illogic of Kassel, and Vampire in Love. He is a Knight of the Legion of Honor from France and has won the prize city of Barcelona and the Romulo Gallegos (2001), the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger and Fernando Aguirre-Libralire (2002), the Herralde prize, the National Critics, the Prix Medicis-étranger, the prize of Critics Circle Chile (2003), the Premio Internazionale Ennio Flaiano (2006), José Manuel Lara Foundation Award 2006, the prize of the Royal Spanish Academy 2006. In September 2007 he won the literary prize Elsa Morante Scrittori del Mondo, which is awarded “to an important foreign author.”

Jonathan Dunne was born in Kingston-upon-Thames, England, in 1968 and studied Classics at Oxford University. He is director of the publishing house Small Stations Press. He translates from Bulgarian, Catalan, Galician and Spanish into English.

Editorial Reviews

"One of Spain's most distinguished novelists."—Rachel Nolan, New York Times

"Vila-Matas’s excellence is an undisputed fact."—Roberto Bolaño

“Vila-Matas is one of the most celebrated writers in Europe. His work has been translated into over thirty languages. His novels, artful and experimental and mixed with a strong tradition of storytelling, are ideal for anyone who’s a fan of Paul Auster, J.M. Coetzee, or Roberto Bolaño.”—Mark Haber

"The tremendously touching characters in Enrique Vila-Matas’s novels—who stumble from one place to the next, not really sure where they are going, but always on a quest—are so deeply comical on the one hand, and so deeply poignant on the other, that you just have to give yourself up to it because you’re in the hands of a master."—Paul Auster

“I don’t know Vila-Matas personally, nor am I planning to meet him. I prefer to read him and let his literature pervade me.”—Pedro Almódovar

From the Publisher

"[Vila-Matas is] one of the most curious, original and attractive talents in contemporary Spanish writing."

ABC - Rafael Conte

"Vila-Matas's touch is light and whimsical, while his allusions encompass a rogue's gallery of world literature."

Time Out New York

"Mr. Vila-Matas shows that the reasons for (and the consequences of) not writing fiction can, in a funny way, be almost as rich and complicated as fiction itself."

The Economist