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3.5 

Never Any End to Paris

By Enrique Vila-Matas & Anne McLean
Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas & Anne McLean digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

A splendid ironic portrayal of literary Paris and of a young writer’s struggles by one of Spain’s most eminent authors.

This brilliantly ironic novel about literature and writing, in Vila-Matas’s trademark witty and erudite style, is told in the form of a lecture delivered by a novelist clearly a version of the author himself. The “lecturer” tells of his two-year stint living in Marguerite Duras’s garret during the seventies, spending time with writers, intellectuals, and eccentrics, and trying to make it as a creator of literature: “I went to Paris and was very poor and very unhappy.” Encountering such luminaries as Duras, Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, Sergio Pitol, Samuel Beckett, and Juan Marsé, our narrator embarks on a novel whose text will “kill” its readers and put him on a footing with his beloved Hemingway. (Never Any End to Paris takes its title from a refrain in A Moveable Feast.) What emerges is a fabulous portrait of intellectual life in Paris that, with humor and penetrating insight, investigates the role of literature in our lives.

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12 Reviews

3.5
“I find myself consistently drawn to stories and characters which orbit the world of literature itself. This may explain why I can hold writers like Roberto Bolaño and Jacques Derrida, two seemingly disparate and disconnected individuals, in harmony. Something about writing itself, about language and speaking, connects with something within me and I can’t avoid but be spellbound. This book was very much in the vein of Bolaño—a semi-autobiographical account of Vila-Mata’s time in Paris during the 1970s, trying to write his first novel—but it was also an exercise in deconstruction à la Derrida, unraveling the lines between fiction and truth, between autobiography and deflection. At times, the read was laborious, but worth finishing.”

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