Metafiction with an Irish heartbeat

Saturday 30 June 2012

This book is never going to fly off the shelves.

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alastair mabbott

It can't even sidle off them in the guise of a fashionably post-modern novel, as it isn't really post-modern. Dublinesque is an unashamedly literary meta-fiction which takes it for granted that Ulysses was the zenith of English literature and boldly reasserts the values of modernism by transforming Joyce's Dublin into a playground for Spanish author Vila-Matas's own imagination.

Vila-Matas's subject matter has always been literature itself. He constructs his novels from those of past masters, creating a web of literary references. The story he has concocted here is that of a publisher from Barcelona, Samuel Riba, who despairs at the encroachment of the digital age into his profession. Riba mourns the loss of intelligent and challenging works, rejected by publishers who cater only for the lowest common denominator. Retiring from publishing, he, rather ironically, becomes something of an internet addict, but nevertheless decides to go to Dublin with friends and, on Bloomsday, hold a symbolic funeral for The Book – for the era that started with Gutenberg and which he has seen dwindle away in the course of his lifetime.Riba had worried that he himself had disappeared behind the authors he published, but now he feels troubled that his life is blending into fiction. The novel proceeds like the lucid dream of a bibliophile as Riba crosses Dublin, meeting esoterically minded authors Borges and Perec, who offer their own opinions. Other than Joyce, the writers who loom largest here are Larkin, one of whose poems inspired the book's title, and Beckett, for if Joyce represents the pinnacle of the novel then who is Beckett but its deconstructor? He's also dogged by a ghostly figure who could be Beckett, or Riba himself. Stamped with the conviction that living is indivisible from reading, Dublinesque also celebrates the contract between author and reader, and the role of an active imagination in the interplay between them. His reverence for, and faithfulness to, Ulysses is palpable, Vila-Matas showing great respect for the text while reconstructing it as something new, ambitious and personal.DUBLINESQUEEnrique Vila-Matas Harvill Secker, £16.99

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Metafiction with an Irish heartbeat

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