Mac's Problem
Description
Mac is currently unemployed and lives on his wife's earnings. An avid reader, he decides at the age of sixty to keep a diary. Mac's wife, a dyslexic, thinks he is simply wasting his time and risking sliding further into depression--but Mac persists, and is determined that this diary won't turn into a novel. However, one day, he has a chance encounter with a neighbor, a successful author of a collection of enigmatic, willfully obscure stories. Mac decides that he will read, revise, and improve his neighbor's stories, which are mostly narrated by a ventriloquist who has lost the ability to speak in different voices. As Mac embarks on this task, he finds that the stories have a strange way of imitating life. Or is life imitating the stories? As the novel progresses, Mac becomes more adrift from reality, and both he and we become ever more immersed in literature: a literature haunted by death, but alive with the sheer pleasure of writing.Product Details
Price
$16.95
Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date
April 30, 2019
Pages
224
Dimensions
5.1 X 7.9 X 0.7 inches | 0.5 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780811227322
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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."
Award-winning translator Margaret Jull Costa lives in England.
Sophie Hughes has translated novels by several contemporary Latin American and Spanish authors, including Laia Jufresa and Rodrigo Hasbún. Her translation of Alia Trabucco Zerán's The Remainder was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize.
Reviews
Vila-Matas seems determined to test our faith, crafting tales of surrealist noir in which virtually anything can happen except happiness.
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
Diary, essay, thriller, conspiracy theory, posthumous memoir, novel--Vila-Matas uses all the materials to construct his latest metafictional fun house.
Vila-Matas's bouncy prose is the highlight of this lively ride through a writer's mind.-- (02/08/2019)
[Vila-Matas] charges the various tensions in his hybridized book: the artificial nature of plot and the apparent triviality of day-to-day existence, how life imitates art and art imitates life... Mac's Problem boasts an impressive architecture.-- (04/01/2019)
Literature is a space of twinned opposing forces: danger and refuge, death and life, and regrets and longing. Enrique Vila-Matas guides us into this treacherous realm so completely that I have learned to approach his books with a mix of excitement and dread.-- (04/30/2019)
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
Diary, essay, thriller, conspiracy theory, posthumous memoir, novel--Vila-Matas uses all the materials to construct his latest metafictional fun house.
Vila-Matas's bouncy prose is the highlight of this lively ride through a writer's mind.-- (02/08/2019)
[Vila-Matas] charges the various tensions in his hybridized book: the artificial nature of plot and the apparent triviality of day-to-day existence, how life imitates art and art imitates life... Mac's Problem boasts an impressive architecture.-- (04/01/2019)
Literature is a space of twinned opposing forces: danger and refuge, death and life, and regrets and longing. Enrique Vila-Matas guides us into this treacherous realm so completely that I have learned to approach his books with a mix of excitement and dread.-- (04/30/2019)
