Dublinesque
Description
One night, a renowned and now retired literary publisher has a vivid dream that takes place in Dublin, a city he's never visited. The central scene of the dream is a funeral in the era of Ulysses. The publisher would give anything to know if an unidentified character in his dream is the great author he always wanted to meet, or the ghostly angel who abandoned him during childhood. As the days go by, he will come to understand that his vision of the end of an era was prophetic.
Enrique Vila-Matas traces a journey that connects the worlds of Joyce and Beckett, revealing the difficulties faced by literary authors, publishers, and good readers in a society where literature is losing influence. A robust work, Dublinesque is a masterwork of irony, humor, and erudition by one of Spain's most celebrated living authors.
Product Details
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About the Author
Rosalind Harvey is translator in residence at London's Free Word Centre. Her translation of Juan Villalobo's Down the Rabbit Hole was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.
Reviews
A touching account of facing down mortality with a passion and an obsession for literature.
The accent of Vila-Matas's project falls on an accomplished romanticism conscious of its historicity, an artist-worship taken to maturity that concurrently absents and introduces itself into the work at every moment.
The Spanish novelist is a master of that problematic enterprise of literature: the death-defying highwire act of telling the truth through lies, of invoking reality through fiction.
Vila-Matas's wildly original novels are all investigations of whether or not originality in fiction is still possible; every nook and cranny of literary history is explored and interrogated, the margin of every great novel frantically scribbled in.--Morten Høi Jensen
Dublinesque is a pleasure to read...hugely entertaining.-- (06/16/2012)
One of the most pleasurable and joyous novels of the year.-- (06/16/2012)
Vila-Matas has brought home a fine specimen of that most endangered of intellectual species, the literary publisher.-- (06/16/2012)
