Jonathan Lee
Art for Whose Sake?
The Illogic of Kassel
By Enrique Vila-Matas (Translated by Anne McLean & Anna Milsom)
Harvill Secker 220pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
‘There’s a fine line between fiction and non-fiction,’ Kinky Friedman once wrote, ‘and I think I snorted it somewhere in 1979.’ The wry protagonist of Enrique Vila-Matas’s new novel, The Illogic of Kassel, translated by Anne McLean and Anna Milsom, might be inclined to sympathise. The book is narrated by a sixty-something Catalan novelist who takes ‘happy pills’ that blur the boundary between experience and imagination. His life has been lived so comprehensively through books that he’s begun to think he exists ‘inside someone else’s novel’. To free himself of the niggling feelings of inauthenticity that come to him at night, he decides he needs to ‘escape from literature and open up to other artistic disciplines’.
An opportunity to fulfil this ambition comes one day with the kind of mysterious phone call that would be at home in the first chapter of a Paul
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Rivalries are intense and dangerous, and someone has to die.'
@NJCooper_crime on new thrillers by @HenryCPorter, @k_faulkner, @annafbailey, @mserinkelly, @JoelDicker, @AlanJParks, @whartonswords and more.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/april-2021-crime-round-up
This spring, give the gift of reading.
Give a friend a gift subscription to Literary Review for only £33.50.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/spring21/
'It’s long been known that there is an optimum reproductive window and that women enjoy a considerably shorter one than men. For both sexes this window is opening and closing earlier than it used to.' (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-end-of-babies