Montevideo

The award-winning newest novel by Spain’s premier writer–a metafictional meditation on the limits and possibilities of literature

The narrator of Montevideo is an itinerant writer and erstwhile drug pusher in the throes of a personal and literary transformation. Increasingly disillusioned with life in Paris and hoping for an artistic breakthrough, he ventures out in search of a “new style.” His quest takes him to Barcelona and then to a hotel in Montevideo, Uruguay, called the Cervantes, where seemingly both Julio Cort?zar and Adolfo Bioy Casares found inspiration. Montevideo, however, is not the final stop: Bogot?, Reykjav?k, New York, and St. Gallen in Switzerland are ahead on the narrator’s journey. But to what?

In this brilliant new novel, Enrique Vila-Matas deepens and extends his inquiry into the purposes and functions of fiction: Can the products of the imagination be set on paper, coherently and faithfully? Or is literature forever destined to fall hopelessly short–consigned to be nothing more than an impoverished, inaccurate representation? Moving between cities and genres, from coarse slapstick to insightful criticism, from travelogue to metaphysical speculation, Montevideo is a narrative vortex, a labyrinthine tale of mirrors and illusions.

Author: Enrique Vila-Matas
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 11/18/2025
Series: Margellos World Republic of Letters
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.10w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780300284836
Language: English