Traps, ambushes and deceptions by that great illusionist, Enrique Vila-Matas

Enrique Vila-Matas has never told us the truth. Not once. He is the personification of unreliable narration. Over 53 years of writing, thirty-nine novels and at least 8,000 pages of exquisite elegance and rare humour (“we have all of eternity to be desperate”), he has consistently offered nothing but fabrications. He is frequently seen wearing black sunglasses—an accessory that suits no one quite as well as it suits him—maintaining a studied incognito in everyday reality.

To the delight of readers, he has constructed false backdrops that appear genuine and autobiographical memoirs declared to be fabrications from the first line to the last. He has set traps for us, ambushed us, presented us with fake quotations and, with sublime impassivity, orchestrated bogus plot twists that we sometimes mistook for the truth. As a result, readers invested years searching for Istituto Pierre Menard, the supposed novel by Pietro Moretti mentioned in Bartleby and Company (Feltrinelli) and set in a school where pupils are taught to say ‘no’, only to realise, as they read on, that Vila-Matas was pulling the wool over their eyes in the style of Borges, author of the short story Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote.

Trapdoors, hatches, echoes from the stairwells of literature: Enrique Vila-Matas, recently awarded Spain’s highest literary honour, the National Prize for Literature, is the very embodiment of Literature. He has built doors that lead to other doors, which open onto novels and precipices, and has devised improbable spin-offs (A Brief History of Portable Literature) by taking a sliver of a story and constantly transforming it into something else. His latest novel published in Italy, "Montevideo", is set in a hotel that really exists (the Hotel Esplendor, formerly the Cervantes – what did you expect?), where the writer claims to have gone in search of the exact point at which the fantastical burst into Julio Cortázar’s writing (in room 205). But more than anything else, "Montevideo" is set in Paris. And amongst the pages of European literature.

Vila-Matas is an illusionist and a forger with a penchant for philosophy, which he often parodies to reinforce his arguments. Certain titles alone are enough to reveal his entire agenda: Imposture, Woman in the Mirror Contemplating the Landscape, Childless Son, Invented Memories. In 2008, he published an essay entitled Deception in Literature. His protagonists are clerks who write footnotes for novels that do not exist (Bartleby and Co.), scrupulous diarists who lie all the more the more they wish to write the truth (A Problem for Mac), and individuals who live holed up in a dilapidated house and supply quotations to mediocre writers (This Senseless Mist).

Enrique Vila-Matas treats readers to novels that unfold like literary soirées: "Dublinesque", "A Touch of Dylan" and "Montano’s Pain" are drawn-out, erudite anecdotes that veer off the rails into the absurd, wringing every possible nuance from their situations. Vila-Matas pulls cylinders out of rabbits and swears allegiance just as he betrays us, inviting us to a carnival party where every prank is not only fair game, but counts double: how many mirrors, how many multiplications, in his novels. The reader is swept away, spellbound, losing bearings while trying to make sense of it all, searching for the beginning only to find the end, resting on emptiness whilst believing we rest on fullness.

Enrique Vila-Matas has taught us that reality, if it is worth anything at all, is worth it by virtue of its own unreality; so no suburbs, no character’s inner turmoil, no ‘winter of our discontent’ in Baranzate with the redemption of the underprivileged, and other such nonsense. Reality, for Vila-Matas, is always imagined. And after all, the world is made to end up in a book by Vila-Matas: after reading Vila-Matas, everything is Vila-Matasian – how could it be otherwise?

In the current climate, an author who has written “I mock realist writers who replicate reality whilst impoverishing it” deserves more than an award: a monument should be erected in their honour.