Enrique Vila-Matas

Montano

By Tom Williams

Part novel, part autobiography, part diary, part philosophical musing; Montano is a book which demands a lot of the reader. This latest offering from the Spanish writer is an intricate maze based in an obsession with literature which the protagonist finds himself helplessly trapped in.

In the first part of this book we are introduced to the narrator, the literary critic Rosario Girondo, who is disillusioned with the state of literature in Europe and declares himself “literature-sick”. Girondo’s initial ramblings are that of a scattered and disjointed mind. He attributes the decline of literary standards to wicked moles who live beneath a volcano in the Atlantic, working to ensure that the standard keeps on falling.

To cure himself of this literary sickness, the narrator decides to visit his son, Montano, who is a writer. Montano is also suffering from a kind of literary sickness; after having a novel published, he has succumbed to writer’s block. The narrator hopes that by the two meeting, both the ‘sicknesses’ will be cured. Instead, the meeting proves that Girondo needs a completely different method of curing himself. He decides to recount the whole history of literature in relation to himself.

Abruptly, however, this quest of self-rediscovery stops, and the narrator concedes that the character of Montano was entirely fictional. It is the narrator himself who is suffering from writer’s block, and so the novel takes a completely new turn. From here out, the narrator gives us his autobiography.

One of the narrator’s problems is that he cannot write without recreating the lives and works of these celebrated writers. This is also one of the problems of this novel. Vila-Matas relies on the reader as having an expert knowledge of these writers as the narrator himself. As such, the novel is at many points inaccessible, many of the accounts of these writers seem like literary in-jokes which only the avid enthusiast will understand. On the plus side, however, these accounts do offer the reader a doorway to numerous European writers.

One feels from reading this novel that Vila-Matas genuinely believes that there is a significant problem with European literature, and that one of the novel’s aims is to cure this problem by introducing the reader to various celebrated European writers, perhaps in an attempt to thwart those evil moles once and for all.