Refined intellectual game

BADLY OF MONTANO
By Enrique Vila-Matas-(Anagrama)-316 pages-($ 49,50)

One of the so many definitions that would fit to him to badly of Montano (Prize Herralde de Novela 2002) is the one of a novelado test that adopts the form of a personal newspaper. Nevertheless, as one of the intentions of this work consists of surpassing the traditional classifications of sort, it agrees to do without academic nobody corsé.

In the first part, titled just as the book, the narrator appears like a Spanish literary critic who travels to Nantes to visit Montano, son of his first wife, who committed suicide. Whereas this one undergoes a blockade mental that it prevents him to write, his father recognizes "Literature patient" and he cannot think about which is not related to her. What we read is its newspaper that, "by a mysterious impulse", is becoming to him novel. Of return in Barcelona, the obsession of the father of Montano worsens and falls in a depression. Rose, his second woman, advises to him to travel to Chile and there Felipe Tongoy knows the actor. More ahead the critic accompanies to Rose the islands You embarrass where she, who is cinema director, will film a documentary one on the whaling ones in that Tongoy has a paper.

The second part of the book, "Dictionary of the timid love to the life", is dedicated to deny the previous section, that the narrator defines as one nouvelle. It reveals to us that he is not a literary critic, but a writer whom a blockade underwent literary and whose pseudonym, Rosario Girondo, is the name of its mother, who committed suicide. Montano does not exist; Rose is not director of cinema, but her literary agent; and Tongoy yes exists and is an actor. Here the newspaper adopts the form of a dictionary "that will nothing else count that truths" on Rosario Girondo and whose entrances send to the names of their favorite personal newspaper authors.

In the three last sections different episodes are exposed: during a delirious conference in Budapest on the subject of personal newspapers, the narrator announces that he thinks to continue his novel-newspaper "with which today happens aqui '" and blames Rose it to have deceived with Tongoy, fact that never is clarified. Later Girondo speaks of his I wander by cities of different continents and a meeting of writers in the refuge of a Swiss mountain.

Great leitmotiv of badly of Montano is Literature. It persists through all the book like an monoodd habit of the narrator, incapable to think or to feel something in pure, free state of literary connotations. Two hundreds of appointments or references to personages and authors constitute the symptoms of their "disease". This without counting eighteen references to personal newspaper writers.

In different passages it is spoken of Literature as it drugs addictive and also is related it to the vampirismo that, when representing a form of parasitic life that is fed on the life of others, is connected with the problem of the identity. From this perspective, to write is "to invent another life that could be ours, to invent a double well", "to be made happen through another one" and to read means "to be visited by ideas of others". If the practice of the autobiographical sort supposes an investigation on the identity and can be an aid for "knowing us we ourself", in last instance badly of Montano it ends up questioning the same concept of identity and also it proposes to Literature like "salvation of the spirit at a time at which the reality no longer has sense", an instrument that "allows us to include/understand the life" but, indeed for that reason, "it leaves us outside her".

The Spanish Enrique Vila-Matas, author of the vertical trip (Prize Rómulo Galician 2001), deepens the way drawn up in Bartleby and company (2000) and moves with soltura in which he calls a border area between the fiction and the reality. Armed with his mask of Rosario Girondo, who defines itself as a Quijote sent to the fight "against the destruction of Literature", "the false writers" and "granujas that controls the cultural industry", undertakes, with skill and irony, the dismantling of all conventional narrative scaffolding. Its company also constitutes a desperate adventure in search of the true Literature in whose course revive "the been brief history of the memory of this one".

Faithful to the aesthetic postulates with which she was conceived, the test-novel-newspaper avoids a tedious end and remains in "a present without direction". One is a refined intellectual game that demands a commitment of the reader to be able to enjoy it, but who does not disappoint if one decides to accept its rules. The intelligence of Vila-Matas leans in a prosa transparency that flows with naturalness and whose rigorous coherence allows him to link an incessant mutation of identities within a structure in perpetual mobility that never collapses. Thus it arises, according to the reflection of Girondo (to álter ego of the author), a constructed independent world in agreement with which Walter Benjamin considered the only work really equipped with sense in our time: "collage of appointments, fragments, echoes of other works" to which "to phrases and relatively own ideas" are added to him.