What do You think about Never Any End To Paris (2015)?
A Hemingway look alike contest in the Florida keys. Before the end is to be reached he is disqualified. His outer impression does not match the contrived inner view where he does look like Ernest, and is or will be a great writer. Using a deft wave of the hand the narrator persists in replacing what is with what he wants to be. Life viewed through irony produces absence and absence is what is wanted.In the guise of giving a lecture on irony in his work and life, the first person narrator, apparently, supposedly, Vila-Matas, speaks in the never ending smile of eternal youth. Light hearted is his literary bent revealing the true ache at the bottom of his hale words. He is and has been seeking his identity-the little boy in his dream playing soccer by himself in a courtyard in Barcelona yet surrounded by the imagined skyscrapers of New York. Later in New York he realizes that New York is not the essence of the dream but it is the little boy who he has either left or never discovered. Much like Papa Hemingway who it is theorized left the childhood where his mother had him wear dresses to the macho feats he pursued as a grown man. Once in Paris as a youthful writer, he tells his audience in the lecture hall, that he takes on all guises. He rents the garret room from Marguerite Duras, thinks of, believing himself to be the young Hemingway, poses as a drinker on a cafe’s terrace, a pretentious youthful writer playing the role of a writer in despair, a radical intellectual with the correct book carried beneath his arm, two pairs of glasses when he needs none, a pipe waiting to be smoked. He is exorcising his youth by retelling it in the form of irony. The difficulty is that everything being written, including statements about how this entire lecture is an exploration of irony, may be ironic. Who are we to know? The reader who will possibly be terminated at the end of this book? Or the palpable irony is that Vila-Matas standing at the podium-this character, Vila-Matas in the book who rarely reminds us that what we are reading, listening to, is not spoken to us but to the seated patrons of the lecture hall-is trying to locate this youth. While needing to soften this journey through the use of irony as well as Vila-Matas’ singular style of lighthearted prose, he is in essence attempting to locate this censored pretentious amalgam. This is a map he is outlining of not only the momentous era of post war Paris in the twenties with its bursting number of artists and artists to be, but his journey through the obstacles planted by hiding behind pretensions? Being caught up in the conventions of those trying to be unconventional? The, Lost Generation. Others like him trying to flee from their personal nightmares, an all consuming war leaving indelible, enigmatic, scarring? Trying to convert their horrors and loves into literature? Was their overabundance of drinking, carousing, partying on a daily basis a necessary dosage from the medicine cabinet to create a false buoyancy required to reach a chemical and biochemical bridge to the literature they sought to create? Were they lost? Judging by the literary output they produced which not only was significant at the time but has provided a basis for literature’s further experimentation and growth.This young Vila-Matas who the elder Vila-Matas is lecturing about, looking back, while the author Vila-Matas is writing the book held in our, the readers hands, asks, wanting to be told how to be a writer, how to write rather than writing. He lifts the style of his first attempt at a novel from Nabakov’s Pale Fire, The town and city from Rilke’s Letters To A Young Poet. The book he is writing, his first, the narrator will kill the reader at its end. His literary friend in Paris, greatly admired, has not written anything in years which is looked upon as an achievement. He advises the young Matas that his writing voice will depend on the situation, the place, and who is there. Nothing, Matas later thinks is immutable. Everything can be changed. Proust said the past is unlovable. He meant the past of ourselves we carry in our mind. A gritty, learned account of the narrators development of his personal life wed to the stages of a writer becoming a writer. Lecturing on, he recounts thirty years later his return to Paris, a return to Duras’s house. It was all different. He walked his favorite streets. It too being different. Feeling as a ghost, the horror of being dead and returning to where he had lived and now no one recognizes him. Knows him. In essence he is in two places at once and the disparity is true sadness. Not an act. Not something poignant. An essential despair of being human. One can avoid it by joining the tribes of convention, at odds with oneself and being what is remaindered; 65%. Or one can face the despair, suffer the inelegance, yet be completely oneself, the scars of shuddered tears, and be 100%. Vila-Matas is so open about his shortcomings, fears and pretensions. Yet during this lecture he is at face value trying to exorcise his youth through its retelling in the thick mist of irony. In irony he is absent. It may also be read that in this irony he is saying good bye to the false youth constructed to survive the childhood of finding himself untethered from a mother who sees him as, gray, and finds no pride in him-He’ll show her- but that is just another form of falsity to be killed off to uncover what is real but fled.This is a remarkably brave book, its courage peeking out from behind his smiling eloquent style. Its depth only beginning to be understood as I type a review to understanding others who will be kind enough to point out where I have gone aground and appreciate to where I have foundered but remain at sea. Beneath my fingers I watch words appear on the screen describing Vila-Mata’s boldness only the herculean strong have to look back on their life now unfiltered. But is it unfiltered? For we, the reader?Vila-Matas does what all novelists do, planting an incident or occurrence in the text. His deftness leading to the incident looking no different than others. Lost in the mulch of his prose. Its return was much, much later in the book and ended in an unparalleled moment of shock for this reader.Point of view is the main aesthetic emblem of this text. Written in first person we are not being addressed. It is an audience the writer as himself is speaking to and the reader only gets to overhear, listen in. Although it is Villa-Matas doing the speaking to the audience, the true irony is that it is him as a character in the novel which Vila-Matas is writing and we are holding in book form. We are now at least three times removed and in a curious place. Lost within the woods of irony. The only beckoned call, light, is the authors smile, a grin, an ironic grin.
—Stephen P
De uma chatice sem fim não fôssemos tão enlouquecidos por Hemingway. Meio ficção, meio autobiográfico, na vibedaquele autoelogio disfarçado de modéstia, o romance de Vila-Matas (1948, Espanha) narra a história de um aspirante a escritor que sai da casa dos pais, em Barcelona, no período final da ditadura de Franco, pra viver de mesada durante dois anos em Paris, onde escreve seu primeiro romance, A assassina ilustrada. Você terá que gostar muito da Geração Perdida e ser curioso a respeito de fofocas literárias pra curtir o livro. Senão, as folhas não lhe dirão absolutamente nada, exceto o nome de alguns cafés parisienses onde se podia encontrar les intello nos anos 1970.O romance é montado em cima do sentimento de que o narrador, em vez de passar pela cidade muito pobre e muito feliz (como Hemingway e Cia.), viveu nela sentindo-se muito pobre e muito infeliz – mas não cola. Ninguém que ganhe mesada de papai pra viver, mesmo que numa água furtada, em Paris, é muito pobre; e ele não pareceu ser nem um tico infeliz. Confuso, talvez, infeliz não. Mas pedante com certeza.O que realmente salva o romance é que amamos a personalidade de Hemingway e ela é aventada por toda a parte. No mais, uma discussãozinha irônica sobre o que seriam os mandamentos de um bom romance, entregue ao narrador por Marguerite Duras, traz um eventual charme à leitura insossa.Enfim. É Enrique Vila-Matas, que, se você não sabia ainda, é chamado de “escritor de escritores”. Tem quem ame, tem quem fique com sono. Já ganhou trocentos prêmios, publicou trocentos livros – é um cara de peso. Mas este livro é levinho.Apesar disso, rendeu ótimas citações. Estão abaixo.
—Mayra Correa e Castro
Like Ernest Hemmingway in the 1920s and Julio Cortazar in the 1950s, well-known and award-winning Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas spent two years finding himself by losing himself in the City of Lights during the 1970s. The author recounts his adventures and misadventures in the 2003 novel “Paris no se acaba nunca” which was translated by Anne McLean in 2011 as “Never Any End to Paris.” The book is supposed to be a tale about a modern day writer who is giving a seminar workshop on irony. By the end of the book, however, that facade has faded away, and the author is talking directly to his readers about his experiences.What a strange and wonderful time this young man had living in the Left Bank during the 1970s in a garret at the house of Marguerite Duras as he wrote his first novel. He crossed paths with people like playwright Samuel Beckett, author Jorge Luis Borges, actress Jean Seberg, costumer designer Paloma Picasso and other well-known people who were drawn to Paris as a center of culture and celebrity. He also knew many other young artists who would later become famous, but at that time they were just getting started in their respective careers. In fact, I encourage you to have your computer or tablet handy to google the different people that you’ll encounter in this book. I did, and now I have a new list of books I want to read.This is a wonderful book that runs the gamut of reminiscences from laugh-out-loud funny to quite quite sad. It is also in its own way a very good study of irony and an interesting meditation on the craft of writing a first novel.
—Joe Cummings
