Who is the editor of portable literature

His intelligent playfulness and his fervor for written language are visible on every page and highlighted by this excellent translation. Vila-Matas is a master, one of the most gifted contemporary Spanish novelists.

I was so fascinated by his humor, the incredible knowledge he has of all kinds of literature, his compassion for writers, and his fearlessness in taking on literary subjects and making that part of what he is writing about. Keep up to date with New Directions.

Contrast this desperate fervor for the unsullied experience with the work of a writer like W. Sebald, whose lamentation of the ephemeral experience is palpable, though his meditation on the matter does not engender resistance.

Sebald knew that the totality of things can only be seen in succession, like a current of information. He captured instances from that stream, turning each moment into a universe in itself, much like the physics of Zeno's arrow. With relative confidence one might suspect this as the reason why Sebald, another heir of Borges, causes such anxiety for someone like Montano-the-Critic, upon receiving a review copy of The Rings of Saturn.

In The Rings of Saturn there is a tragic completeness to one's own history, tragic insofar as it is invariably obscured by the passage of time. Sebald built new worlds out of moments in time, appropriating photos, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera, launching into dream-like ambulation from just a single one of these instances "It takes just one awful second, I often think, and an entire epoch passes".

In this way there is a kind of auto-undermining of the certainties of facts and history, even his own. Sebald knows this is the only truth. Where he expresses a blissful yet melancholy acceptance of this, in Vila-Matas there is contempt for it: not isolating moments as the seeds for new worlds but revising an entire century of writing and assembling a veritable collage of rewritten histories, exposing their malleability.

Despite Montano's anxieties in one novel and the persistence of the Shandies in another, Sebald and Vila-Matas resonate rather well with each other, even beyond the Borgesian in their DNA; both are concerned with what the Shandies would call portability.

For Sebald, life invades the literary and fundamentally changes upon impact, being made portable in a pile of paper. For Vila-Matas, literature antagonizes the world, gouging out its most 'portable' qualities and mangling them in the gears of its formal machines. The poetics of play in Vila-Matas versus those of the most carefully constructed page in Sebald become somewhat less distinct once understood as responses to a similar inquiry: to what extent can literature condense?

To what extent can it be condensed? The Shandies in A Brief History and the fishermen in The Rings of Saturn are not dissimilar to one another: "They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness.

In that same emptiness several Shandies might contemplate suicide as an inextricable aspect of the literary experience. This notion of a death that provokes the infinite capabilities of literature is most likely an homage to and parody of Maurice Blanchot, whose name is amply checked throughout Vila-Matas's writing; art destroys the symbols of the everyday as it appropriates them, and in turn our attempts to return the alterity of art to a more comprehensible state be it through criticism or translation break down and transform it into something else again.

The negation is eternal, and chasing these threads through the void is central to the Shandy mission, so naturally the group shambles around, hilariously trying to plug the void with stuff. Any interpretation, even Bunstead and McLean's translation, is an endeavor to make portable—to comprehend.

The book does occasionally stumble as so much 'postmodern' art often does: where certain moments in Portable Literature may have been poignant in the author's mind, they are occasionally flippant in execution. But these instances are few, hardly diminishing its strength as a sophisticated investigation into the possibilities of writing and its histories.

Here is a novel in which one can observe Vila-Matas's theory of reading unfold in real time, made manifest in the strange and frivolous undertakings of what really amounts to a collective of eccentric readers, a cohort with whom we have all too much in common.

Early in the novel he tells us:. I detested all those ominous voices very common in my country that displayed their supposed lucidity and frequently proclaimed fatalistically that we were living in a dead time for art. I guessed that, behind this easy tittering, there was always a hidden resentment deep down, a murky hatred towards those who occasionally try to gamble, to do something new or at least different.

Yet we can never quite believe that Vila-Matas believes himself. Indeed, he immediately undercuts this view with a notably less affirmative revision:. Rather than resolving to answer this question one way or the other, the novel plays potential positive and negative readings of the Documenta avant-garde off one another without fully foreclosing either, creating an ever-thickening fog of ambiguity.

Far from being a diatribe against contemporary art, then, The Illogic of Kassel turns out to be an absurd and enigmatic comedy, recounting an avant-garde art-inspired epiphany that to the untrained eye looks a lot like a nervous breakdown. The problem seems to lie somewhere in the very nature of the aesthetic experience on offer at Kassel, which the narrator finds both regenerating and strangely isolating.

Art is art, and what you make of it is up to you. If art becomes indistinguishable from the world, does it not risk swapping its critical energy for a socially impotent and ultimately status quo-affirming pluralism? Does art not thereby risk colluding with a social order that wants to teach us that it too is not a binding or repressive structure, but is simply whatever we choose to make of it?

And indeed, the longer he remains in Kassel, the more impossible it seems to become for him to communicate with anyone else he meets.