English
In his novel from 2003 Paris never ends writer Enrique Vila-Matas from Barcelona pays a strange homage to Marguerite Duras and Ernest Hemingway, and through them, a way of being in the world that is not understood unless its learnt from books and words. In more than one sense it is a novel of sentimental education, a book about the ways in which a young man starts on the road of life and art.
The book´s title comes from the last paragraph of the autobiographical novel by Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, where the American writer says of the French capital that if you lived in it, it is a city that never ends, to which one always returns -in a different way- according to each individual. For Hemingway, as stated in the last sentence of the novel, a golden memory remains of the years of his youth in which in Paris he was very poor and at the same time very happy.
To this luminous Hemingway memory, Vila-Matas sadly and ironically stamps his own, for he too was a very poor young man in Paris, but unlike the Nobel Prize also a very unhappy being and that is what he intends to tell in his book, the first two years in the early seventies when he was very poor and very unhappy in Paris due to his ignorance of how to proceed correctly in both life and in literature, fields in which he was firmly installed in a cult of the black This nihilistic and the despairing, irreplaceable synonymous that he thought of elegant and distinguished due to his condition
Hemingway´s life of incessant action and parties gives Vila Matas the idea to become a writer, the problem arises when we become aware that to become a writer is to have the talent to write, and write well if possible. That´s when he gets advice from Marguerite Duras, which owns the attic where he lives and rents out to him for a symbolic fee that he always forgets to pay. The response of the great French writer comes as a list or decalogue of things to do when writing a novel, a decalogue that Vila-Matas strives to interpret and carry out completely what which would later become his first novel , The illustrated killer,
Intelligent humor is one of the great virtues of a book rich in anecdotes, reflections, and characters that functions as a partially autobiographical fictional story that contains ample space for lyricism, reflection and testing always great themes of literature and its particular and strained relationship with life.
Paul Oilzum
Unclassifiable and inexhaustible novel , to paraphrase its title, never seems to end, it is a ideal book to read when you rent apartments in Paris
Translated by: Marc
