Mi libro del año

With all the fuss about other Spanish and Spanish-speaking novelists, I want to shout the name of Enrique Vila-Matas above the din. Montano's Malady is my novel of the year so far and Words without Borders has a new review:

Vila-Matas follows, sometimes quite literally, in the footsteps of authors as various as Cervantes, Montaigne, and Musil in a bi-continental search for the purpose of literature in a shifting world that seems evermore to question the need for literature. [...] [The narrator] attempts to commune with the writers who have inspired his battle "against the enemies of the literary" and reconcile his dreams for literature with the competing limitations of his own mundane life as a writer and husband.. [...] Montano's Malady is a touching and perhaps hopeful inquiry into what it means to be a reader, or writer, in an increasingly unliterary world.