Dublinesca

by Enrique Vila-Matas

Samuel Riba se considera el último editor literario y se siente hundido desde que se retiró. Un día tiene un sueño premonitorio que le indica claramente que el sentido de su vida pasa por Dublín. Convence entonces a unos amigos para acudir al Bloomsday y recorrer juntos el corazón mismo del Ulises de James Joyce.

Riba oculta a sus compañeros dos cuestiones que le saber si existe el escritor genial que no supo descubrir cuando era editor y celebrar un extraño funeral por la era de la imprenta, agonizante ya por la inminencia de un mundo seducido por la locura de la era digital.
Dublín parece tener la llave para la resolución de sus inquietudes.

Niebla y misterio. Fantasmas y un sorprendente humor. Enrique Vila-Matas regresa con una novela que parodia lo apocalíptico al tiempo que reflexiona sobre el fin de una época de la literatura. Una novella deslumbrante, abierta a las más diversas lecturas, un verdadero regalo poblado de sorpresas. Simplemente genial.

Genres: Fiction, Spain, Spanish Literature, Ireland, Literature, Novels, Contemporary

325 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Enrique Vila-Matas is a Spanish author. He has written several award-winning books that mix genres and have been translated into more than thirty languages. He is a founding Knight of the Order of Finnegans, a group which meets in Dublin every year to honour James Joyce. He lives in Barcelona.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas is an extravagant fictional tribute to Ulysses by James Joyce.
The Beginning of the new millennium, the onset of the new digital age, the old Gutenberg era of print is in decline… The old publisher, living in Barcelona, finds himself out of business…

Riba has a tendency to read life like a literary text and sometimes to see the world like a tangled mess or a ball of wool.

He feels being thrown into the spiritual void, standing on the threshold of apocalypse…

It doesn’t escape Riba that it’s characteristic of the imagination always to consider itself to be at the end of an era. For as long as he can remember he’s heard it said that we are in a period of maximum crisis, a catastrophic transition toward a new culture. But the apocalyptic has always been there, in every era.

Consequently, he decides to go to Dublin for Bloomsday – a commemoration and celebration of James Joyce’s Ulysses – and there with his friends, in the chapel of Glasnevin Cemetery, to hold a requiem for the end of the Gutenberg era and the late glory of the old publishing days.

Joyce’s book is a sort of universal synthesis, a summary of time; a book designed to make a few anecdotal gestures signal an epic, an odyssey in the most literal sense of the word. That’s why whoever had the idea for a requiem had the greatest idea of all.

Times change, epochs come and go, but literature remains a permanent keeper of human knowledge and memory.

[Guille · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leer una nueva novela de Vila-Matas es como encontrarse con uno de esos amigos con los que da igual el tiempo que podamos llevar separados que la relación se renueva al instante en el momento exacto en el que la dejamos: un amigo un tanto esquivo, contradictorio, enigmático y hasta incomprensible en ocasiones. Aunque bien pudiera ser ese precisamente el secreto de su éxito conmigo, pues también podría yo decir algo parecido a eso que una vez le leí al propio autor: “siempre me funcionó una manera muy simple de averiguar si algo me gusta o no: me atrae lo que no entiendo; si lo entiendo, lo abandono corriendo.” No entender algo implica posibilidades que no terminan de fijarse y, puede que sea lo más importante, te obliga a involucrarte como parte activa y relevante del libro que se lee.

Otra vez he vuelto a encontrarme con una novela en la que es fácil perder el hilo o, mejor dicho, perderse entre los muchos hilos que este Vila-Matas-Spider (de la película de David Cronenberg) nos tiende en su búsqueda de lo extranjero, su necesidad de misterio, de entusiasmo, sobre este tiempo falto de genios y buenos lectores, sobre la literatura que le enamora y el futuro de “la novela” (de la que incluye en el libro toda una teoría en cinco puntos). Y junto a todo ello siempre hay un drama existencial, como este desastre, este espanto que es envejecer.

“Vejez, enfermedad, clima gris, silencio de siglos. Aburrimiento, lluvia, visillos que aíslan del exterior. Fantasmas tan familiares de la calle Aribau. No hay que buscarle paliativos al drama de sus padres y al suyo propio, envejecer es un desastre. Lo lógico sería que todos los que ven declinar sus vidas gritaran de espanto, no se resignaran a un futuro de mandíbula colgando y babeo irremediable, y aún menos a ese brutal despedazarse que es la muerte, porque morir es rasgarse en mil pedazos que empiezan a desperdigarse vertiginosamente para siempre, sin testigos."

Todo lo convierte en algo interesante, como debe hacer un buen escritor. Aquí se combinan, algo bastante habitual en él, significativas casualidades con intrigantes fantasmas o traviesas apariciones de gente que no te esperas, presencias que nos observan y que desaparecen en la niebla. Todo se mezcla en los libros de Vila-Matas en un tratamiento que no siempre puede ser recubierto con esa ironía que busca la levedad “como reacción al peso de vivir”, la levedad que en definitiva implica no tomarse en serio, hacerse ficción, esa gran solución que está tan cerca del fin perseguido, en este caso de forma muy seria, por ese budismo de su mujer y al que tanto teme el protagonista.

Y sin embargo, es muy consciente de que por mucho que lo intente nunca podrá mejorar lo…

“… ya dicho por tantos otros acerca de las grietas que separan las expectativas de la juventud y la realidad de la madurez. Lo ya dicho por tantos otros sobre la naturaleza ilusoria de nuestras elecciones, sobre la decepción que culmina la búsqueda de logros, sobre el presente como fragilidad y el futuro como dominio de la vejez y de la muerte.”

Son las grandes cuestiones que libro tras libro Vila-Matas indaga sin resolver: por qué hablar de lo que ya está todo hablado, por qué cuestionar lo que es imposible de conocer, por qué intentar atrapar lo que es inasible, cómo defenderse de lo irremediable, como bregar con “el pasado ya inalterable, el presente fugitivo, el inexistente futuro”. Al final es el arte, la literatura en este caso, el que ofrece el gran paliativo de la vida (¿realmente?). Una literatura y unos autores que conforman la columna vertebral de cada uno de sus libros y que sustenta todo los demás con el fin de llegar a ser ese “escritor capaz realmente de soñar a pesar del mundo; de estructurar el mundo de manera diferente”.

Una literatura que siempre es para Vila-Matas tanto una forma de estar como una forma de ser y tanto su enfermedad como su cura, una forma de vivir permanentemente en la extrañeza, una forma de indagar en “esa gran verdad que cuentan las mentiras”. Al fin de cuentas uno puede siempre pensar que quedan “miles de conexiones de luz por restablecer (con la palabra) en la gran oscuridad del mundo” o, lo que a lo mejor es lo mismo, “quizá tienen razón los días laborables”.

[Gorkem · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bazı kitaplar vardır ki okuma sürecine girdiğinizde farkında olmadan sizi içindeki tüm atmosfere hapseder ve kendi içindeki akışı günlük yaşamınızda da devam ettirdiğini hissedersiniz. Dublinesk benim adıma uzun zamandır İrlanda'ya gitme planları yaptığım bir planlama içindeyken karşıma çıktı ve ilginçtir ki kitabı okuduğum bu dönemde de aşırı kapkara bir hava, yağmurlu ve kasvetli bir süreçte benle birlikte seyahat etti ve sıklıkla Joyce ilgili seminer emailleri almam da çabası oldu.
Bu nedenle, bu kitap hakkında yazacaklarım çok fazla kişisel olacağını şimdiden belirtmeliyim.

Giriş: Vila-Matas'ı Anlamak

Enrique Vila- Matas, okuru once afallatan ve oluşturmuş olduğu "melez edebi tarzı olan denemeci kurgu" anlatımı ile okuru bu nasıl bir kitap diye sarsan ve büyük olasılıkla da okurun okuduğu kitabı yarım bıraktıran ya da bitirip nefret duygusu yaratan bir yazar. Benim de ilk okuduğumda, Montano Hastalığı- Jaguar Yayınları, 2017 benzer şeyleri hissetmiştim. Şunu itiraf etmeliyim ki, bitirdiğimde Vila-Matas'ın sesi ve anlattığı şeyler beynimde sürekli dönüp dolaşıp en sonunda bu yazarı çok sevdiğimi kendime ilan etmemle sonuçlanmıştı. Keza, Bolaño'ya akıl hocalığı -yaptığını öğrendikten sonra hayranlığım daha da tavan - yapan bir yazardan bahsediyorum.

İçerik: Samuel Riba unutlamayacak bir karakter

Dublinesk, Vila-Matas açısından aynı zamanda yarı-biyografik etkiler içeren, Barcelonalı 60 yaşına yaklaşan birçok önemli eserin çevrilmesine ve yazarın kazandırılmasına ön ayak olmuş, editörlük yaptığı yayınevi satılıp emekli olmak zorunda kalmış, alkolik, umutsuz,evli olmasına rağmen yalnız, tüm çevreden kendini izole etmiş, unutulmuş, internet bağımlısı, edebiyata abartılmış fanatizm sürecinde benimsemiş ve hayatı da edebiyat gibi okuyan Samuel Riba'yı okuyoruz.

Riba'nın bir hastalık sonrasında Dublin ile görmüş olduğu bir rüyanın etkisiyle çevresinde kendisiyle iletişimi kopartmamış arkadaşlarıyla gezi düzenleme isteğiyle olaylar başlıyor.

Riba'nın fanatizm düzeyindeki Joyce sevgisi, nitelikli edebiyatın değerinin popüler edebiyat yüzünden yok olduğunu düşünen karakterimiz, Dublin gezisiyle "Gutenberg Galaksisi" adını verdiği, edebiyatın en yoğun yükseliş içinde olduğu döneme göndermeler yaparak kendi çaresizliğini yenme düşüncesindedir. Romana adını veren Philip Lark'ın "Dublinesque"şiiri ile Riba'nın terkedilmiş gerçek edebiyatı sanatsala dönüştürme isteği ve tabii ki Riba'nın "hayatı edebiyat olarak okuma takıntısı/eğilimi", yaratıcısı Vila-Matas'ın eklemiş olduğu Joycevari ve Becketvari anlatım ve kurgusu içisinde eğlenceli olarak ilerlemesiyle başlıyor ve ilerliyor.

Kitapta bizlere, Samuel Beckett, Paul Auster, Julien Gracq, Claudio Magris, Georges Perec, Hugo Claus, Borges, Carlo Emilio Gadda, olup olmadığı muammalı olan Vilém Vok, müzisyen olarak Tim Waits, Bob Dylan ve Dropkick Murphy's, yönetmen olarak David Cronenberg Spider Filmi ve ressam Hammershoi ve Hopper eşlik ediyor.

Sonuç

Kitabın okunurluk açısından sıkıntılı olduğunu düşündüğüm bir kaç durum var:

1.Öncelik İthaki Yayınevi: Yayınevi olarak kendilerini bir kez daha neden sevmediğimi bu kitapta hatırlatmış oldu. İthaki, son derece özensiz, edisyon sürecinde hiç kontrol etmemiş gibi hareket ettiği kitaplardan biri. Kitapta birçok anlatım bozukluğu, anlamı değiştirecek derece de yazım yanlışlıkları bulunan ve bu nedenle de olarak kitabın ritminin bozulmasına neden olan hatalarla dolu. Gene de okunabilir, fakat bazı kısımları ister istemez ingilizcesinden kontrol etmek zorunda kaldım. Çevirmenin çok başarılı bir iş yapmış olsa da kitabı İthaki mahvetmiş. Keşke, Vila-Matas'ı İthaki haricinde başka ciddi bir yayınevi tarafından basılsaymış demeden edemiyorum!

2.James Joyce ve Ulysses : Dublinesk, yoğun şekilde Joyce'un anlatımına gönderim yapan bir kitap. Ki Vila-Matas, Dublin Gezisini Ulysses 6, Bölüm: Hades üzerinden yapıyor.

Çok açık vermeden, Vila-Matas Hades bölümüyle hem kendisine hem de Riba'nın sosyal bir grup içindeki izolasyonuna, Riba'nın çağın getirdiklerine karşı yabancılaşmasına ve kendi hayatıyla olan her türlü kısır döngüye karşı çaresizliğine gönderme yapmaktadır.

Ulysses'i okumayan ve Joyce'u ve anlatımını sevmeyen biri okur için yapılan gönderimler hava da kalabilir mi sorusunu ortaya çıkarıyor. Çünkü Riba'nın araştırdığı şeyler Dedalus ve Bloom arasındaki maneviyat ilişkisiyle çok doğrudan ilintili. Joyce'u hala sevip sevmediğini düşünen bir okur olaraksa beni Vila-Matas'ın edebiyat zekası ile Riba karakteri tam tersi kitabın içine daha da çekti.

Sonuç olarak, herkesin sevebileceği bir kitap değil fakat,benim sevdiğim bir kitap oldu Dublinesk. Dublinesk, Vila-Matas'ın ince mizah zekasını, birbirinin karşıtı olan Gutenberg-Google Çağı, Joyce-Beckett üstünde yansıtmalar yaparak başarılı bir ve doyumsuz bir okuma keyfi sunan bir kitap.

Okurken zevkten ve heyecandan çok hızlı gittiğimi görüp bekletme zorunluluğu hissettim. Son bölümde gözlerimin doldu. Riba'yı garip bir şekilde çok sevdim.

Açıkcası Riba karakterini okuduğum her kitapta bir hayalet gibi yanımda olacak ve bir yerlerde hep Green Fields of France çalacak gibi hissediyorum.

İyi Okumalar!

10/7,5

[Fionnuala]

Down stucco sidestreets,
Where light is pewter
And afternoon mist
Brings lights on in shops
Above race-guides and rosaries,
A funeral passes.

So goes the first verse of Philip Larkin's Dublinesque, a poem set in Dublin in the early years of the 20th century. The images Larkin uses evoke perfectly the Dublin of Leopold Bloom from James Joyce's Ulysses. The poem therefore provides a very apt title for Enrique Vila-Matas's requiem for the age of print in which he nominates Joyce's writing as the pinnacle of literary achievement of the entire Gutenberg age (Joyce himself would probably have proposed Shakespeare).

It was this idea of a tribute to the era of print as the world moves further into the digital age that attracted me to Vila-Matas's Dublinesque. As ebooks become more and more widely read, I'm concerned like many others about the future of paper-and-ink publishing and I'm hoping that there will always be incentives for publishers to continue printing quality writing.

However Vila-Matas doesn't address the challenge of how to preserve paper-and-ink publishing in this book. Instead, his main character, ex-publisher Samuel Riba, is so certain of the passing of the age of print that he decides to hold a funeral service to mark it in the very cemetery where, on the 16th of June, 1904, Leopold Bloom attended Paddy Dignam's funeral in Ulysses.

This is just one of the many parallels that emerge as the reader makes his way, along with Riba and three co-mourners, just as Bloom did, to Glasnevin cemetery on Bloomsday over a hundred years later. In fact, Vila-Matas cites Ulysses at such length and with such frequency that Dublinesque becomes an elaborate homage to Joyce's book interspersed with nods to Samuel Beckett, Philip Larkin and many other famous literary names.

It is all very clever and the first half worked really well for me, especially as I too was visiting Dublin and found myself at Finnegan's pub in Dalkey where one of the scenes in Dublinesque takes place. The second half of the book I found less interesting; perhaps it went on just a bit too long even though the entire book is scarcely a third as long as Ulysses itself.

For me, one of the main merits of Dublinesque was the inspiration to pick up Ulysses again and tackle it properly - the first time I picked it up, I stopped half way through - I had small children then and not much quiet time to read. Now I've read it again but this time I've appreciated it a lot more. Maybe that's an age thing or maybe Riba had prepared the ground for me. One thing I'm sure of however, Riba doesn't stand a chance against Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in the character stakes; he's but a pale shade in comparison.
But perhaps that is exactly what Vila-Matas was trying to do: summon Bloom's ghost...or at the very least, the man in the macintosh...

[Ana Cristina Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es complicado. No es exactamente ficción. Es una reflexión. Un monólogo que te hace viajar por el cerebro de Vila-Matas y de paso a la Literatura – como si fuera un lugar, una ciudad encantada y estática que ofrece sus encantos al turista. Pero cuidado, el autor ya nos advierte:

Porque no hay que engañarse: el viaje de la literatura pasa muchas veces por terrenos difíciles que exigen capacidad de emoción inteligente, deseos de comprender al otro y de acercarse a un lenguaje distinto al de nuestras tiranías cotidianas.

Es mi primera experiencia con Vila-Matas, autor al que había evitado por tener la impresión – cierta – de una gran densidad intelectual, de intertextualidad, de metaliteratura y otros calificativos disuasorios para quien busca entretenimiento en la lectura. Y sí, hay todo eso, y una selección de autores a cual más abstruso y que presentan al lector con desafíos como el mítico Ulises de James Joyce, que es la piedra angular de esta obra. Pero me lo he pasado bien y he disfrutado porque el autor posee dos cualidades impagables: el humor y una levedad que no sabría cómo definir, pero que te atrapa y te hace pasar páginas.

¿De qué va Dublinesca? Del miedo a envejecer, de lo pasajero de las cosas, del declive que percibimos a nuestro alrededor cuando quizá es sólo el nuestro lo que nos angustia. Pero el tratamiento del tema que hace Vila-Matas es divertido, es un funeral gozoso, un réquiem exultante, como en el poema de Larkin (ver abajo) o en la despedida de McNulty en la serie The Wire.

Riba es un editor retirado (quizá el Herralde de Anagrama) que se enfrenta al cierre de su negocio y al comienzo de la senectud. Desengañado de la literatura y apartado de la vida social debido a su problema con el alcohol, se encuentra convertido en ‘hikikomori’, como esos adolescentes japoneses que viven encerrados en su habitación prisioneros de la pantalla del ordenador. Su mujer, Celia, se ha convertido al budismo y él siente que lo deja atrás enfrentado al vacío vital. En un intento desesperado de recuperar el entusiasmo perdido, planea un viaje a Dublín con tres amigos, para celebrar – durante el Bloomsday joyceano – el funeral por la gran literatura y la Galaxia Gutemberg, que han sucumbido a la embestida de lo digital.

Sigue pensando que sería un suicidio darle a Ricardo cualquier pista acerca de sus intenciones de celebrar allí un réquiem por la Galaxia Gutenberg. Ricardo podría pensar, y tampoco estaría tan equivocado, que el funeral se lo quiere dar Riba a sí mismo: unas pompas fúnebres por su condición actual de parado, de editor medio fracasado, de vergonzante ocioso y autista informático.

Creo que no voy a decir mucho más – que podría – pero sería hacer metaliteratura sobre metaliteratura, así que mejor dejarlo aquí y el que quiera leer que lea.

Simplemente, anotar que el título, Dublinesca, corresponde a un poema de Philip Larkin sobre el entierro de una prostituta de Dublín, a la que Vila-Matas de alguna manera equipara con la literatura. El mejor resumen de la obra es este poema con su cortejo grotesco, burlesco, este desfile de prostitutas con sombreros de flores, que es al mismo tiempo un funeral y una celebración de la vida y el amor.

Dublinesque

Down stucco sidestreets,
Where light is pewter
And afternoon mist
Brings lights on in shops
Above race-guides and rosaries,
A funeral passes.

The hearse is ahead,
But after there follows
A troop of streetwalkers
In wide flowered hats,
Leg-of-mutton sleeves,
And ankle-length dresses.

There is an air of great friendliness,
As if they were honouring
One they were fond of;
Some caper a few steps,
Skirts held skilfully
(Someone claps time),

And of great sadness also.
As they wend away
A voice is heard singing
Of Kitty, or Katy,
As if the name meant once
All love, all beauty.

[Oscar · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Dublinesca’ es un hermoso viaje por la literatura, es toda una fiesta para los amantes de la vida hecha literatura. Tenemos la visión de un Vila-Matas imbuido por las citas y la metaliteratura, que no gustan a todo el mundo, por lo que el autor tiene una cierta fama de pedante y aburrido. Nada más lejos de la verdad. ‘Dublinesca’ es un conmovedor viaje literario, apasionado y apasionante, que te arrastra en esa búsqueda existencial de la mano del bueno de Samuel Riba.

Samuel Riba, el protagonista, es un barcelonés que roza los sesenta años. Tenía una editorial que le reportó cierta fama por la calidad de su catálogo, ya que Riba se preocupaba mucho tanto de los escritores como de las obras que editaba. Ahora Riba vive inmerso en los libros, enfermo de literatura como el propio Vila-Matas.

[…] tenía una notable tendencia a leer su propia vida siempre como un libro.

¿Cuántas veces ha tenido que oír que leía su vida de un modo anómalo, como si fuera un texto literario?

Riba, abstemio desde hace dos años, cuando estuvo muy enfermo, vive con su mujer, Celia, que quiere convertirse en budista, y también visita todos los miércoles a sus padres, a los que les habla de los viajes que ha realizado a distintos países por razones de trabajo, asistencia a ferias y demás. Entre sus aficiones está navegar por Internet durante horas y horas, buscando confirmación a sus ideas sobre literatura, o simplemente mirar por la ventana para observar lo cotidiano.

Entre sus meditaciones, se encuentra el pensamiento de la muerte de la imprenta, de la Galaxia Gutenberg, a favor de la era digital. Y es que se está acabando un modo de hacer las cosas. Es entonces cuando improvisa una viaje a Dublín para el 16 de junio, justamente el Bloomsday, el día en que transcurre la famosa novela ‘Ulises’ de James Joyce, cumbre literaria donde las haya, y de este modo, imitando al capítulo sexto de esta obra, celebrar un funeral en homenaje a la era Gutenberg. Y este es el nudo de la historia, el llamado “salto inglés” de Riba, que ya está harto de lo francés y quiere ahora probar con lo inglés. Aunque también habría que añadir la otra gran obsesión de Riba, la búsqueda de ese gran genio autor de obras maestras que nunca pudo encontrar para publicarle, obsesión que arrastrará durante su periplo dublinés.

No cabe duda de que ‘Ulises’ y James Joyce son importantes en la novela, pero también lo son Beckett, Larkin, Yeats, Vilém Vok, Georges Perec, Edward Hopper, Borges y muchos más. El texto de Vila-Matas contiene referencias constantes a estos autores, pero que nadie se crea que esto hace de ‘Dublinesca’ una novela aburrida y pedante, todo lo contrario, porque Vila-Matas, si algo sabe hacer bien, es insertar subtextos en sus historias como nadie, haciendo de ello una obra más amena aún si cabe.

Los escritores fallan a los lectores, pero también ocurre al revés y los lectores les fallan a los escritores cuando sólo buscan en éstos la confirmación de que el mundo es como lo ven ellos.

‘Dublinesca’ es todo un festín para el lector avezado, un viaje melancólico y poético, no exento de humor. Vila-Matas ha escrito su obra más profunda hasta la fecha. Maravillosa.

A Riba siempre le ha parecido que los libros que uno ama apasionadamente producen la sensación, cuando los abres por primera vez, de que siempre estuvieron ahí: aparecen en ellos lugares en los que no has estado, cosas que uno antes nunca ha visto ni oído, pero el acople de la memoria personal con esos lugares o cosas es tan rotundo que de algún modo acabas pensando que has estado allí.

[Sepehr · Rating 2 out of 5]

باید زمان پیری‌م میخوندم.
ولی الان واقعا هر صفحه‌ش با زجر خوانش همراه بود :/

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dublinesque is a wonderful portrait of sorrow, escapist dreams and sinister returns. Vila-Matas'
novel is bitterly human, riddled with loss and solitude. It reveres Literature, but then knocks it to the floor as vanity. It offers dreams and travels as hope. Loneliness always follows. Addiction and ageing haunt relentlessly.

The narrative follows Riba, or rather it chases him, a retired publisher who is sober for two years after near-death indulgence. His publishing house is defunct, his vocation near-extinct in the absence of intrepid, active readers. He begins to project. His efforts lead to Dublin. He offers a requiem, one to coincide with the cemetery scene in Ulysses. Dublinesque proceeds from there. It only references Sterne, Joyce, O'Brien, Beckett, Gracq, Perec, Larkin and a few dozen others. This novel illustrated what I cherish about literature and what I loathe about life.

[Myriam V · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es una historia divertida y triste, leve y compleja. El protagonista, Riba, está obsesionado con la literatura, como todos los personajes de Vila-Matas y quizá el mismo Vila-Matas y también sus lectores, porque si no estaban obsesionados pueden contraer el mal en estas páginas.

Riba es un editor en quiebra por culpa de “la competencia siniestra de los libros con historias góticas y Santos Griales”, tiene un matrimonio tambaleante, y “una imagen pésima, de excéntrico pasado de rosca”.

Riba está viejo y desde que dejó la bebida está más lúcido y sensible. El mundo que él conoció se termina, y por una serie de casualidades calculadas, decide viajar a Dublín el 16 de junio, día en que transcurre la acción del Ulises de Joyce, a celebrar el Bloomsday y los funerales de la era de la imprenta.

Invita a unos amigos pero no les cuenta sobre las exequias para que no crean que quiere celebrar su propio funeral, así que se supone que va a dar el salto inglés: “Salir del embrollo afrancesado”, ser más ligero.

Riba es el último editor y quiere hacer un réquiem por la muerte del lector activo y de “la vieja y gran puta de la literatura”. No sabe bien en qué consistirá pero cree que sería bueno emparentarlo con el capítulo sexto del Ulises. Pero este viaje para él es eso y mucho más:

"Su obsesión tranquila por unos funerales en Dublín, por despedir con salvas —o lágrimas, aún no sabe— a la era de la imprenta. Su obsesión tranquila por volver a vivir un momento en el centro del mundo, por viajar al centro de sí mismo, por alcanzar grados importantes de entusiasmo, por no morirse de pena después de haberlo perdido casi todo".

Leí el Ulises hace poco, está fresco en mi cabeza y me dio un placer extra en la lectura de Dublinesca. Aparte el capítulo sexto es uno de mis preferidos. Hay analogías entre Riga y Bloom, pero a la vez Riga tiene algunas características de Stephen, anda por estas páginas nuestra Molly, andan las calles de Dublín, anda Vila-Matas y anda Joyce. Anda la gran literatura y anda el lector.

[Fernando · Rating 3 out of 5]

"¿De qué le sirvió aparentar que tenía un oficio extraordinario y que disfrutaba tanto con él? Claro que siempre será mejor ser editor que no hacer nada, como ahora. ¿Nada? Prepara un viaje a Dublín, un homenaje y un funeral a una época que desaparece. ¿Acaso eso no es hacer nada?"

En la contratapa de mi edición de "Dublinesca" se puede leer como adelanto que "Samuel Riba se considera el último editor literario y se siente hundido desde que se retiró. Un día tiene un sueño premonitorio que le indica claramente que el sentido de su vida pasa por Dublín. Convence entonces a unos amigos para acudir al Bloomsday y recorrer juntos el corazón mismo del Ulises de James Joyce. Riba oculta a sus compañeros dos cuestiones que le obsesionan: saber si existe el escritor genial que no supo descubrir cuando era editor y celebrar un extraño funeral por la era de la imprenta, agonizante ya por la inminencia de un mundo seducido por la locura de la era digital. Dublín parece tener la llave para la resolución de sus inquietudes."
El viaje de Riba, a secas, como se lo conoce, un editor literario de la vieja época, no es una montaña rusa de sucesos pero sí de emociones interiores. Está un crisis existencial que eclosiona un año antes de cumplir sesenta años. Es un ex alcohólico que lleva dos años sobrio con un matrimonio al borde de la ruptura final y un sinfín de interrogantes que le atormentan y cree fehacientemente que Dublin tiene las respuestas para arribar a algún tipo de situación ideal. Siente que la epifanía del funeral doble entre el Bloomsday", o la conmemoración que anualmente se realiza en Dublin todos los 16 de junio, ya que es la fecha en la que transcurre toda la novela "Ulises" de Jame Joyce y el que él mismo emprenderá para "despedir" en cierta manera a la era Gutenberg, que traducido a lo coloquial sería conmemorar la muerte de la literatura impresa a manos de la era digital que hoy en día nos domina a todos lo llevará al un desahogo total en su acomplejada visa.
A fin de cuentas él es el último editor de esos de antes, de los que se arruinaban económico con tal de defender a esos escritores que consideran geniales y que darán que hablar. Y vaya si James Joyce sabía acerca de la postergación de su obra debido a que los editores no querían publicarla, tal es el caso de su volumen de cuentos "Dublineses", que tardó casi cuatro años en ser publicado. Y en cierta medida el Vila-Matas y su personaje Riba concuerdan con las vicisitudes literarias de Joyce.
Algo de eso se percibe en la novela del propio Joyce cuando Stephen Dédalus, personaje también de "Ulises" defiende estos ideales"-Usted es un artista, ¿no es verdad, Dédalus? -dijo el decano levantando la cara y guiñando los ojos descoloridos-. El fin del artista es la creación de lo bello. Qué sea bello, eso ya es otra cuestión."
Allí está la conexión con Riba. La estética y la creación también es fiel e inherente al editor. En alguna parte del "Dublinesca", Riba dice que "el autor es el fantasma del editor". Ambos comparten la misma esencia y es la obra la que los une y canaliza ese positivismo creativo que es esencial y necesario para que una obra sea.
La elección del "Ulises" de James Joyce y especialmente el cortejo fúnebre del capítulo 6 de la novela enlaza en forma precisa la búsqueda que Riba va a pertrechar en la capital de Irlanda junto a sus amigos Javier, Ricardo y Nietzky, algunos de ellos acompañándolo sin saber realmente el motivo del tour fúnebre, celebratorio y literario que van a emprender.
Riba tiene un hervidero de ideas, sensaciones y sentimientos encontrados en mente y alma. Su matrimonio con la mujer de toda su vida, Celia, naufraga. Está emocionalmente al límite y prácticamente quebrado económicamente con el agregado de una posible recaída en el alcohol.
Tal vez, este emprendimiento le proporcione el alivio que no encuentra para terminar dignamente sus día de editor que también marca y define el fin de una época de la literatura.
Por el lado de Vila-Matas, uno de los autores contemporáneos que realmente aprecio leer me encuentro con un escritor que lo ha leído absolutamente todo ("Las mismas necesidades que se necesitan para escribir se necesitan para leer"" afirma por allí), no solamente a Joyce y su "Ulises", sino que en "Dublinesca" nos encontraremos con numerosas referencias a la literatura en sí, como también a novelas, autores, poemas y cuentos, todos ellos colocados estratégicamente en la novela para que el resultado final sea un armonioso contrapunto entre el argumento planteado por el autor y la historia llevada adelante por sus personajes.
Con tal solo dos libros leídos ("Bartleby y compañía" y este), siento que tengo que seguir buscando otros títulos en la obra de Enrique Vila-Matas.
Con "Dublinesca" estoy más que satisfecho.

[Lee Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Transmigration of souls through time and space via intertextuality transport. Vila-Matas is his own deal but he's also maybe like Markson meets Auster meets a careful dedicated craftsman who juggles thematic balls almost to the point of whirlwind (not necessarily a good thing toward the end since it maybe seems too managed and thereby loses a sense of the noble natural looseness of life?). You don't need to know Joyce or Larkin or Beckett or Borges, but it probably helps to have some familarity with them, to catch it (and care) when the modified first line of Beckett's "Murphy" starts a chapter. Felt like it went on 60 pages too long as it repeated and maybe sort of resolved everything emphasized in the sparkling first half or so -- felt like it wasted way too much space wrapping things up (almost a quarter of its total length). Would've liked a little more boldness at the end on the part of the author or narrator. Lost a little steam for me when they finally get to Dublin, but so much fun when recruiting fellow travelers for a funeral for the pre-Google Gutenberg age. Loved all the mentions of writers from Bolano to Auster to Handke to Larkin to a one-off David Grossman cameo during the Bloomsday reading, among tons of others real or not (Vilém Vok doesn't exist -- I googled!). To list the themes would require repeating most of the book: chief among them is age, genius, publishing, writing, New York as center of world and what that means, relationships, solipsism, the internet, alcoholism, the ever-present apocalypse, books, books, more books, and maybe how all these come together into a sort of religion almost like a Buddhism-less Buddhism that simultaneously saves and destroys you? Consistently charming, smart, self-negating, probing, opinionated, forever at war with idiocy, and deeply deeply in love with books (in a way that's perfectly non-romantical and therefore doesn't make you wanna puke), I got the sense that Samuel Riba is probably a lot like the author -- and therefore things felt real (until the end, in part because of plot mechanics [it's not a spoiler if I type "young Beckett ghost fog!"] and, again, in part because of excessively crafty repetition/resolution) and so ultimately I rooted for this bundle of thought processes, be it Riba or EVM or the intertextually animated amalgamated spirit of Beckett, Joyce, Borges, Vuk, et al. Uneven, as they say, but really enjoyable for the likes of me (not everyone -- you sort of have to love books and writers and "high lit" in general, or at least really want to learn about this stuff -- this is the sort of book that leads to a longer "to-read" list). Some reservations for me, ultimately, but not enough to undermine my affection for EVM, which after reading Bartleby & Co. last summer hath now progressed to the next level. Will read at least two more titles soon before proclaiming my love . . .

Representative quotation addition, 7/26/12: "He'd published lots of important authors, but only in Julien Gracq's novel The Opposing Shore did he perceive any spirit for the future. In his room in Lyon, over the course of endless hours spent locked away, he devoted himself to a theory of the novel that, based on the lessons apparent to him the moment he opened The Opposing Shore, established five elements he considered essential for the novel of the future. These essential elements were: intertextuality; connection with serious poetry; awareness of a moral landscape in ruins; a slight favoring of style over plot; a view of writing that moves forward like time."

[Enrique · Rating 4 out of 5]

Como siempre muy grande Vila Matas. Me ha gustado en especial las continuas referencias a Joyce y Beckett, la gran diferencia entre sus literaturas, ambas enormes (de acuerdo 100% con V.M) y que yo no había sabido diferenciar tan claramente como lo aprecia el autor, a saber: Joyce es el el gran autor del detalle de forma abundante, de todos los detalles desde todos los puntos de vista (en Ulyses), y Beckett es el maestro de lo ínfimo, al no poder escribir con la enormidad de Joyce, se hace el gran especialista en dejar su prosa en lo mínimo, en recortar y mostrar las mínimas rutinas y las pequeñas miserias de la penosa vida que arrastran las personas.
Dublinesca lo veo como la gran metáfora del fin de la labor editorial y posteriormente del fin del escritor.
Por último me pareció interesante el enfoque de V.M. de una obra como es Ulyses, que queda ensalzado por tres obras sucesivas: 1) La Odisea de Homero, que es el origen de la posterior obra de Joyce, 2) El Ulyses de Joyce es una lucha de L. Bloom en busca de su destino tras mil avatares, como Odiseo (Ulises), y 3) Por último Dublinesca entra en el Ulyses de Joyce y le hace un enorme homenaje (y por extensión a la Odisea) y nos muestra a un protagonista Riba, en una imposible búsqueda de su Ítaca en lo que supone el final de su vida profesional, social y declive físico y moral. Es el fin.

[jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

"the funeral march has begun, and it is futile for those of us who remain loyal to the printed page to protest and rage in the midst of our despair." samuel riba, dublinesque's depressive and narcissistic protagonist, stumbles upon this and other similarly prophetic sentiments in an online article proclaiming the death of print and the ensuing "disappearance of literary authors." in the early pages of dublinesque (dublinesca), enrique vila-matas's most recent novel to be translated into english, we learn of riba's fearful and forlorn attitude as regards the future of literary publishing:

he dreams of the day when the spell of the best-seller will be broken, making way for the reappearance of the talented reader, and for the terms of the moral contract between author and audience to be reconsidered. he dreams of the day when literary publishers can breathe again, those who live for an active reader, for a reader open enough to buy a book and allow a conscience radically different from his own to appear in his mind. he believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. because we mustn't deceive ourselves: on the journey of reading we often travel through difficult terrains that demand a capacity for intelligent emotion, a desire to understand the other, and to approach a language distinct from the one of our daily tyrannies... writers fail readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it...

once a successful publisher of important works and great authors, riba has since closed his barcelona-based publishing house and finds he has little to look forward to in either his personal or professional affairs. approaching his sixtieth birthday, he despairs his increasingly solitary milieu, marked as much by his failing marriage and tenuous abstention from alcohol as by his constant lamenting over his lost career. intrigued by the concept of the hikikomori (a phenomenon prevalent in japan, characterized by individuals, usually male, whom have chosen for themselves a life of extraordinary isolation and social withdrawal), perhaps as an explanation for his own existential malaise, riba's own life begins to resemble that of an awkward outcast, marked by an internet addiction that consumes as many as fourteen hours in a single day.

after recalling a "strange, striking dream he'd had in the hospital when he fell seriously ill two years ago," riba decides to set about planning a trip to dublin. the impetuses for this excursion are many, not the least of which is an opportunity to stage a funeral for the age of print and "the golden age of gutenberg." the date riba sets for this requiem is none other then june 16, the very day on which james joyce set his ulysses, and commemorated annually as "bloomsday." with plan in place, riba enlists the company of three writer friends to join him and his venture in the irish capital.

vila-matas, as in his other works already translated from the spanish, crafted dublinesque in a meta-fictional, semi-autobiographical fashion. forever fascinated by the nature of enigmatic authors, vila-matas works into the narrative references to authors both living and dead (including julien gracq, fernando pessoa, robert walser, georges perec, paul auster, john banville, brendan behan, italo calvino, rodrigo fresán and his late friend roberto bolaño). dublinesque is also, in part, an homage to both joyce and his fellow countryman samuel beckett, both of whom loom large in the plot, structure, and thematic essence of the story itself.

riba's wife, celia, a museum employee and recent convert to buddhism, shares her name with the title character's lover in beckett's murphy. as well, the rocking chair in which riba spends much of his time in dublinesque's final section is an allusion to the same piece of furniture in which beckett's murphy whiles away many of his days. a character resembling a young beckett makes several mysterious appearances and leads riba to seek out his identity, in hopes of, perhaps discovering that this fellow is the unknown, genius writer for whom riba has been searching for his entire career. while in dublin, riba delves into a beckett biography by james knowlson (presumably damned to fame), shortly after remembering the surprise of reading a novel that featured "a character who's a real person."

riba's fascination with (and seemingly extensive knowledge of) ulysses figures prominently into the story, as well. riba makes repeated mention of the modernist novel's sixth chapter ("hades"), wherein leopold bloom and others attend a funeral for paddy dignam. it is during the funeral scene that bloom encounters the mysterious macintoshed character, much as riba espies the young beckettian man during his requiem for "the golden age of gutenberg." vila-matas was himself one of the founding members of "the order of finnegans (la orden del finnegans)" (a society comprised of a small number of other spanish writers "with the sole purpose of venerating james joyce’s ulysses").

riba's "remarkable tendency to read his life as a literary text" is worked playfully throughout the novel, especially given vila-matas's decision to employ the joycean and beckettian allusions that shape the narrative in which riba lives. "dublinesque," the philip larkin poem from which the novel draws its name (about a prostitute's passing funeral), is but another example of the way vila-matas incorporates actual literature into his dirge of the forsaken art. riba, perhaps resulting from his compulsive need to bring the imagery and incidents of that formative dream (or premonition?) into reality, begins to wonder whether his own life has come to resemble not merely a work of fiction, but the entirety of literature's arcing curve itself, from great heights to pitiable ruination:

only he--no one else--knows that on the one hand, it's true, there are those serious slight discomforts, with their monotonous sound, similar to rain, occupying the bitterest side of his days. and on the other, the tiny great events: his private promenade, for example, along the lengths of the bridge linking the almost excessive world of joyce with beckett's more laconic one, and which, in the end, is the main trajectory--as brilliant as it is depressing--of the great literature of recent decades: the one that goes from the richness of one irishman to the deliberate poverty of the other; from gutenberg to google; from the existence of the sacred (joyce) to the somber era of the disappearance of god (beckett).

while riba laments the passing of the print age, with its celebration of and devotion to the duality of the writer/reader relationship, he, like the era for which he mourns, must endure the perils and hardships that inevitably accompany so splendid a fall from grace (his career, his marriage, his health). that vila-matas so adeptly created a work of fiction that simultaneously considers the current state of both publishing and literature (as well as the respective roles of author and reader alike), while allowing the novel itself to serve as a comment on the very subject, is nothing short of a dazzling accomplishment. vila-matas, under the guise of fiction, seems to make the case for a future in which the importance of good writing and meaningful stories are afforded their due attention, while the relationship between author (or publisher) and reader is enlivened anew and bolstered for posterity.

enrique vila-matas is undoubtedly one of the finest spanish authors at work today and dublinesque offers for display his profuse literary talents. with sharp, distinct prose and often unexpected humor, vila-matas is indeed a compelling writer. as a complement to the four books already available in english, one hopes that many more of his two dozen novels (as well as his collections of essays) will soon find their way into translation. vila-matas's writing, in addition to providing fantastic stories and striking insights, is consistently amongst the most original work being produced today, and stands in stark and refreshing contrast to the banality and bankruptcy of what all too often now passes as popular literature: "the gothic vampire tales and other nonsense now in fashion."

*translated by rosalind harvey (juan pablo villalobos's down the rabbit hole) and anne mclean (vila-matas's never any end to paris, javier cercas, evelio rosero, ignacio padilla, and julio cortázar)

[Argos · Rating 2 out of 5]

Deneysel edebiyat mı, fantastik edebiyat mı, absürd edebiyat mı karar veremedim. Tanıtımında modern edebiyat deniliyor. Roman desem tam değil, deneme desem o da değil. Garip bir kitap.
Bir kere Ulyses'i okumadan kitabı anlamak mümkün değil, yetmez çünkü J. Joyce ve S. Beckett hakkında da çok şey bilmeniz lazım. Hatta Enis Batur gibi bir edebiyat kurdu x 2 olmanız lazım.
Yazar gerçekten olağanüstü edebiyat ve entellektüel birikimli ama oradan bir söz, buradan bir dize vs ile tam bir beyin salatası olmuş.
Neden okuyup bitirdin diye sorarsanız ULYSES'e iki kez başlayıp 30-40 sayfadan fazla gidemediğimden belki bunu bitirirsem iyi olurmuş gibi geldi bana :)

[Pedro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un editor cuya empresa (y su vida) están llegando a su fin, decide viajar a Dublín, tras los pasos del Ulises, de Joyce. Muy bueno; muy triste.

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dublinesca (título inspirado num poema de Larkin) é um daqueles livros em que me é difícil organizar o pensamento e escrever algo sobre ele; quer pela riqueza de assuntos que trata, quer pela forma como estão expostos.
Este é o segundo livro que leio de Vila-Matas e, mais uma vez, fiquei fascinada pela sua paixão, não só pela literatura, mas também pelos escritores.

Samuel Riba é um homem de meia idade, cuja vida foi forçosamente alterada, pela falência da sua editora, e se transformou num autista informático (Kikikomori), solitário e alcoólico reincidente. Numa viagem interior, povoada de fantasmas, Riba procura um sentido para a sua vida, seja através da realização do sonho de encontrar o escritor genial que pudesse publicar; seja procurando o potencial escritor dentro de si.
Para fugir do marasmo da sua existência, e com o objectivo de se encontrar a si próprio, viaja com três amigos a Dublin, e, no Bloomsday (feriado em que se homenageia o livro de Joyce), enterram, simbolicamente, a era Gutenberg - vítima da era digital - num requiem inspirado no capítulo sexto do Ulisses.

Esta leitura suscitou-me me uma vontade irresistível de ler certos autores, e, simultaneamente, alguma frustração por ainda não os ter lido, ou ter lido muito pouco: Samuel Beckett, Philip Larkin, Georges Perec, Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, e tantos outros.
Além do desejo de ler outros autores, este livro deu-me coragem e incentivo para continuar a minha árdua aventura do dia 16 de Junho de 1904...

Um livro apaixonante, para os apaixonados pela literatura.

"Riba leu o suficiente na sua vida para saber que, quando procuramos compreender a vida mental de outro homem, nos damos conta muito depressa de quão incompreensíveis, mutáveis e brumosos são os seres que partilham o mundo connosco. É como se a solidão fosse uma condição absoluta e insuperável da existência."

[Kaveh Rezaie · Rating 5 out of 5]

یک کتاب بسیار خاص و شگفت‌انگیز و فراموش‌نشدنی...
سبک روایت داستان من را هر لحظه ذوق‌زده می‌کرد...پر از ارجاع به داستان‌ها و نویسنده‌ها و فیلم‌ها و آهنگ‌ها...و البته شالوده اصلی، اولیس جویس است...وهم و خیال و خواب و واقعیت و گذشته و حال و آینده، جوری کنار هم هستند که من را به خلسه می‌برد.

ترجمه بسیار عالی است.

[Jean Ra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un editor que ya ha cumplido en los sesenta años, y que lleva treinta años de trayectoria en el mundo editorial, se siente incapaz de aceptar el paso del tiempo, que entra en la vejez, bebe alcohol de una forma deportiva, cosa que ha afectado a su vida, la ha degradado y provocado problemas orgánicos. Y su editorial ha tenido que cerrar. Mucho se comentó en el momento de su publicación que Vila-Matas había adoptado como modelo para crear a este Samuel Riba a su antiguo editor, a Jorge Herralde de Anagrama, con quien comparte ciertos puntos biográficos, algunos autores editados, su ubicación geográfica y otros datos más. Vila-Matas admitió algunas veces que sí, pero que también de él mismo, que a su vez también tuvo algunos problemas con el levantamiento olímpico de vidrio. En él se encarna la idea del declive y el crepúsculo, que Vila-Matas asemeja también al final de la era editorial, de la era Gutenberg, reemplazada por el mundo digital.

En Dublinesca el alcohol es la ruina y el infierno. Por el contrario, la gloria y la luz lo representan la literatura. La novela es un largo homenaje al Ulises de James Joyce. No sólo parte de la novela transcurre en el Bloomsday, también se comentan numerosos fragmentos, se introducen algunos datos biográficos de Joyce y de la influencia que la novela ha tenido. Vila-Matas intenta ensanchar el prisma y también pasa al lado de Flann O'Brien y otros autores que desconozco, luego, ya con más convicción, a Samuel Beckett, que se convierte en el avatar del declive, sus referencias literarias sirven para construir ese escenario ruinoso, de crepúsculo final, en la que ciertas referencias a Swedenborg nos hace dudar si el final no es una representación alusiva de la muerte del autor/narrador (teoría también referida dentro del texto).

En este año de retomar las novelas de Vila-Matas, ahora sí, encuentro en Dublinesca un título que leo con agrado aunque sin el entusiasmo que Mac y su contratiempo, Esa niebla insensata o El mal de Montano. Dentro de la novela también la película Spider de David Cronenberg es referida de forma generosa, hasta el punto que comprendemos que es un modelo para Vila-Matas. Se transmite, al igual que en ese largometraje de Cronbnerg, un tono lacónico, una sobriedad mustia y un clima reconcentrado, carente de eventos destacables, ese mundo de declive personal se construye sin muchos ingredientes de otras novelas de Vila-Matas. Hay humor e ironía, pero en pequeñas raciones. La peripecia del narrador se hace monótona, seguramente de forma intencional y el trasfondo literario, de referencias que se mezclan con la narración o bien que aparecen en el trasfondo, como comentarios literarios, no me resultaron en esta ocasión atractivos, no hay un momento en el que pudiera decir que saltó la chispa.

Por lo demás, Dublinesca es una parada obligada para todos los amantes de la literatura de Vila-Matas. Por suponer el cambio de editorial. Por su abordaje de Joyce y Beckett. Porque también inaugura cierta fase artística en la que Vila-Matas cada vez prescinde de elementos y herramientas de la novela clásica para desarrollar sus relatos. Vale.

[Maria Thomarey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ωραίο αλλά πολύ δύσκολο βιβλίο. Θέλει την αμέριστη προσοχή του αναγνώστη και παρότι δεν πιστεύω στις κατηγοριοποιήσεις ανάλογα με την εποχή μάλλον το διάβασα σε λάθος εποχή παρόλαυτα

[Steffi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Der ehemalige Verleger Riba, inzwischen knapp 60 Jahre alt, ist extrem belesen und auch an anderen Künsten wie Film und Musik interessiert. Sein eigenes Leben – wenn er nicht gerade in fiktiven Welten schwelgt – bewegt sich zwischen kinderloser Ehe und wöchentlichen Besuchen bei seinen Eltern. Nachdem sein Verlag bankrottging und er dem Alkohol abschwören musste, geht er kaum noch aus dem Haus und verbringt stattdessen ganze Tage vor dem Computer. Auch in früheren Zeiten war er, was sein eigenes Leben anging, nur bedingt risikofreudig: Das zweimal besuchte New York schien ihm als der ideale (aber nie verwirklichte) Lebensort; London besuchte er (wegen mangelnder Englischkenntnisse) nur einmal und kam dabei über das bürgerliche Bloomsbury nicht hinaus. Gleichzeitig aber träumte er immer noch davon, einen großartigen, neuartigen Autor zu entdecken und zu verlegen.

Sowohl von Autoren als auch von Lesern erwartet er Offenheit für Neues: „Er träumt von dem Tag, an dem die Literaturverleger wieder aufatmen können, jene, die sich ein Bein ausreißen für einen aktiven Leser, einen Leser der aufgeschlossen genug ist, um sich ein Buch zu kaufen, und bereit, sich auf eine radikal andere Denkweise als die eigene einzulassen.“ Doch Riba, der das eigene Leben immer nur als Assoziation seiner eigenen Lektüre wahrnimmt, lässt selbst einen auch nur ansatzweise radikalen Mut, sich neuen Erfahrungen zu stellen, vermissen. So liebenswert er jedem Literatursüchtigen erscheinen muss, verstehe ich ihn auch als Warnung, die Literatur/die Kunst als Ersatz für das wirkliche Leben zu sehen. Bezeichnend auch seine Aussage (der ich ja auch bis zu einem gewissen Grad zustimmen mag): „Die Welt ist schrecklich langweilig, oder, was dasselbe ist, was an ihr interessant sein könnte, ist es nicht, solange es nicht von einem guten Schriftsteller erzählt wird.“ Naja, vielleicht nicht immer langweilig, sondern auch bedrohlich?

Dieses Buch ist zudem (oder in erster Linie?) ein Buch über Literatur, dann Literatur und wiederum – Literatur. Über Sehnsuchtsorte (mit Dublin und New York auch zwei meiner literarisch-geprägten Sehnsuchtsorte), die bei der Lektüre entstehen, darüber wie manische Leser beginnen, ihr Leben als Roman zu betrachten. Die Liste der erwähnten Autoren ist lang (allen voran natürlich Jame Joyce mit Ulysses), man kann sich aus diesem Buch eine Lektüreliste erschließen, mit der man Jahre beschäftigt wäre. Von einigen Autoren hat man bereits gehört, andere sind wenig bekannt, beispielsweise habe ich Brendan Behans Werk „New York“ (wurde allerdings nie ins Deutsche übersetzt) gleich auf meine Leseliste gesetzt.

Und dann kann man ja noch die zitierten Filme schauen. Hier muss man den Film „Spider“ hervorheben, gedreht von David Cronenberg, mit Ralph Fiennes und Gabriel Byrne. Da ich den Film kenne, kann ich ihn wärmstens Liebhabern von abseitigen Filmen empfehlen. In Dublinesk spielt er eine wiederkehrende Rolle. Erstaunt hat mich nur, dass Vila-Matas nicht erwähnt, dass dieser Film auf einem Roman von Patrick McGrath beruht.
Dann gibt es da noch die ganzen Songs, die Riba im Laufe der Geschichte hört oder an die er sich erinnert.

Hinzu kommen die Autoren und Bücher, die kein reales Vorbild haben. Das Werk „Das Zentrum“ des von Vila-Matas erfundenen tschechischen Autors Vilèm Vok würde ich zu gerne lesen.

Dieses Buch ist gleichermaßen Verlockung all den kulturellen Zitaten nachzuspüren und sich in ihnen zu verlieren, als auch Warnung, den Bezug zur Realität zu verlieren. Die Verlockung ist groß! Gleichzeitig möchte ich aber auch alle Leser warnen, die nicht bereit sind sich auf eine Geschichte einzulassen, bei der Autorennamen nur so rieseln, oft ohne weitere Einbettung in die Geschichte, mal leitmotivisch, mal mittels Zitaten. Wer sich von solch bildungsprotzigem Namedropping leicht verärgern lässt, sollte die Finger vom Buch lassen!

Nichtsdestotrotz möchte ich hier allen die Liste kulturellen Anspielungen zur Verfügung stellen – ungefähr in der Reihenfolge der Erwähnung, ohne Gewähr auf Vollständigkeit:


Genannte Autoren:
James Joyce (natürlich; immer wieder, alle möglichen Werke, v.a. Ulysses)
Julien Gracq: Das Ufer der Syrten
Antonin Arthur (wird in Dublin verrückt )
Claudio Magris: Ein Nilpferd in Lund
George Perec: Der Mann, der schläft
Hugo Claus: Der Kummer von Flandern
Carlo Emilio Gaddafi
Julis Renard
Philip K. Dick
Robert Walser
Stanislav Lem
Fleur Jaeggy
Jean Echanoz
Philip Larkin
Marguerite Duras
W G. Sebald
Paul Auster: Die Erfindung der Einsamkeit / Brooklyn Revue
Siri Hustvedt
Arabal
Martin Amis
Michon
Idea Vilariño
Proust
W. B. Yeats
José Emilio Pacheco
Julian Barnes: Cross Channel
Borges: Der Tod und der Kompass
Emily Dickinson
Sterne
Roberto Bolaño
William Carlos Williams
John Banville (aka Benjamin Black): Nicht frei von Sünde
Brendan Behan: New York (erscheint als Barney Boyle in Benjamin Blacks „Nicht frei von Sünde“), Bewohner des Chelsea Hotels
Eduardo Lago
Rodirigo Frisán
Eduardo Mendoza
Augosto Monterrosa: Reise ins Zentrum der Welt
Dylan Thomas
Rimbaud
Hart Crane
Saul Bellow
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Pessoa
Maurice Blanchot
Philippe Sollers
Julia Kristeva
Romain Gary
Mark Strand
Dante
Italo Calvino
Guido Cavalcanti
Boccaccio: Dekameron
Peter Handke: Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied
Flann O’Brian: Aus Dalkeys Archiven
Elizabeth Bowen
Joseph O’Neil
Matthew Swanney
Colum McCann
Claire Keegan
Oscar Wilde
Jaime Gil de Biedma
Henry Vaugham
Samuel Becket: Das letzte Band, Murphy, Endspiel, Warten auf Godot
Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita; Vorlesungen (z. B. zu Ulysses)
W. C. Fields
Juan Carlos Onetti
Wallace Stevens: Die irischen Klippen von Moher (Gedicht)
Heinrich von Kleist
David Grossman
Samuel Johnson
Gustave Flaubert
Marcel Schwob
Raymon Queneau
Stendhal
Céline
Henry Vaughan
Hölderlin
Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
Virginia Woolf
Arto Paasilinna
Hobbs Derek
Andrew Breen
Houellebecq
Bram Stoker

Comic
El Jabato

Filme/Regisseure/Schauspieler
Charles Walters: High Society
Cronenberg: Spider
Antonioni: Die rote Wüste
Godard : Alphaville
Resnais: Tote la mémoire du monde
Truffaut: Fahrenheit 451
Chris Marker: La jeteé
Jacques Demy: Die Regenschirme von Cherbourg
Catherine Deneuve
John Ford: Die Hafenkneipe von Tahiti
Julie Christie
Marlon Brando
Joseph Mankiewicz: Julius Caesar
James Mason
Stanley Kubrick: Lolita
Woody Allen
Orson Welles: Im Zeichen des Bösen (mit Marlene Dietrich)
Sergio Leone
Harpo Marx
John Huston: Die Toten

Musik
Les Surfs: Without asking you who you were
Bob Dylan: Most likely you go your way
Billie Holiday
Tom Waits: Downtown Train
Brassens: Les copins d’abord
Rita Mitsouki: Le petit train
Richard Hawley: Just like the rain
Johhny Cash/Bob Dylan: That’s all right Mama
Francoise Hardy: Partir quand même
Liam Clancy: Green Fields of France
Javier de Galloy: Walk on the wild side
Beatles: This Boy
The Lass of Aughrim (irisches Volkslied)
Frank Sinatra: The best is yet to come

Bildende Künstler
Vilhelm Hammershøi
Edward Hopper: Stairway
Marcel Duchamp
Van Gogh
Vermeer

[Hakan · Rating 4 out of 5]

bir emekli edebiyat editörü, aynı zamanda eski alkolik, birdenbire dublin'e gitmeye karar verir. joyce ve beckett'ın şehrinde, bloomsday'de bir cenaze töreni düzenleyecektir: edebiyatta ve hayatında biten bir dönemin, kapanan bir çağın cenazesi.

ispanyol yazarın usta işi romanı dublinesk okur için hem edebiyatın izinde dublin sokaklarında, hem de artık içki içmeyen kahramanının fazlasıyla ayık zihninde bir yolculuk: hem keyifli hem zorlayıcı, hem su gibi akan hem de ağır.

yazar, joyce ve beckett'ı sadece kahramanın hikayesi içinde ele almakla kalmıyor, romanın genel yapısıyla da bu yazarların eserlerini çağrıştırıyor. dublinesk, hem joyce'un zenginliği ve renkliliğinden hem de beckett'ın soğukluğu ve karanlığından izler taşıyor. dublinesk'e edebiyat ve hayat romanı denebilir, edebiyat ile hayat ya da edebiyat ya da hayat.

[Jim Elkins · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poor Portraits of a Country's Literature

I've never felt such disappointment with any new novel by any writer. "Bartleby & Co." is a wonderful novel with a poignant and convincing theme. "Montano's Malady" is a quirky elaboration on the same theme of a writer's hobbled imagination. Together, I thought, they made Vila-Matas one of the most memorable voices in contemporary fiction.

This book is hugely, irremediably disappointing, and I do not think I will read another of his books.

There are two reasons for my disappointment: one is relative to my own experience with Ireland, and the other is, I think, endemic to the book, to Vila-Matas's project, and to his sense of literature. I do not see how he could address the second issue, and that is why I won't be following his work in future.

First, about Ireland.
I have twenty years of experience visiting Ireland. (I'm writing from Ireland now.) So I knew from the reviews and the book's title that I might have some difficulty with the way Vila-Matas characterizes the country. There are definitely solecisms, misjudgments, clichés, generalizations, and blindnesses, but in the end I didn't mind them. It is still possible to read this book as a journey, on the part of a foreigner, to a country he has never seen; the narrator knows that he knows nothing about Dublin except its literature. He's read widely in Irish modernism -- he knows "The Dalkey Archive" as well as secondary literature on Joyce and Beckett, and he is fully aware that to him, the country is a literary construction. I agree with Terry Eagleton (who wrote, I think, the best review) that Vila-Matas makes some mistakes, but that they aren't a problem given the book's theme her is the projection of literature onto reality, rather than the discovery of some real place.

Second, about Vila-Matas's sense of literature.
When I wrote on "Montano's Malady" and "Bartleby & Co," I noted that Vila-Matas's sense of literature is mostly comprised of aphorisms from novels and poems, and stories about writers' lives. Literature is a kind of high gossip, a dramatis personae for daydreams, and source of practical philosophy. That is as it is, and even though it omits most of what I care about it in literature, it works in his books. What doesn't work is when the choice of authors means that Vila-Matas's mind is filled with aphorisms and gossip from the mid-twentieth century. "Dublinesque" is full of easy references to the 2010s, including remarks about Google, texting, and the internet. The narrator, a middle-aged man named Riba, has just retired as an editor, and the book has many references to real, living authors, including Paul Auster. But when it comes to Ireland, Vila-Matas's literary world is "Ulysses," snippets of Beckett (but mainly his life), and quick quotations and anecdotes about Flann O'Brien and Brendan Behan.

There is something quite depressing about that. At first I thought it was because I missed Roddy Doyle and Fintan O'Toole and Paul Muldoon and Luke Gibbons all the other dozens and hundreds people who are actually alive and writing in Ireland now. But it's even worse than that: as Terry Eagleton noticed, there are hardly any references to "Finnegans Wake," which has all the topographic references Vila-Matas's plot requires, and is even titled after a funeral, which is the central theme of the narrator's trip to Dublin in the first place.

But let's say that I stop worrying about all that, and let the author have the literary world of his choosing. An insuperable problem still remains: Vila-Matas's prose is flat in comparison with Joyce's (it's clear that this would also be true in the Spanish, because the narrative is so light on specifics); his character's thoughts are more abstract and duller than Joyce's (they seem to depend, in their best moments, on Pessoa); and his uneventful plot is less interesting than Joyce's uneventful plot. Here is how Eagleton puts this:

"Very little happens in the novel, but a lot less interestingly than in Ulysses. Whereas Joyce’s work installs us inside three very different heads in turn, Vila-Matas imprisons us within Riba’s desultory consciousness, and the effect can be claustrophobic. Confused, reclusive and with only a tenuous grip on reality, he spends much of his time glued to a computer, and appropriately enough for a publisher, regards his life as a kind of text. It is, however, an unreadable one, full of chance connections and random associations, difficult to scan as a whole. Riba doesn’t believe that things logically cohere, and sees art as an attempt to foist intelligibility on them; but if that is what Dublinesque itself is up to, it is hard to feel it succeeds. What unity the book has is a matter of literary allusions and cross-connections, as a reference to a novel leads to one to a film, which leads to one to another novel. It is a high-cultural version of Bloom’s associative mental habits, one rooted in art rather than in reality." ("London Review of Books," July 19, 2012)

Having read this book, I can see that "Montano's malady" goes much deeper than the literary puzzle of how to write the next generation of fiction. Vila-Matas lives entirely inside a vacuous, nearly empty world of literary anecdotes and histories, with no texture, nothing sharp or fascinating or intrusive. The very thing he is fascinated by, literature, is itself so hollow in his imagination that it is nothing but a reverberating echo chamber of allusions. That may be one way forward for the novel -- I still love "Bartleby & Co." -- but it is a universe away from Joyce, and Vila-Matas's inability to see that as a problem is apparently irremediable.

[Inês · Rating 3 out of 5]

Como se classifica enquanto leitor? A resposta a esta pergunta diz-lhe se está ou não preparado para ler "Dublinesca".
Este é um livro para leitores maduros, leitores que tragam Joyce num bolso e Beckett no outro. É uma homenagem aos grandes autores, aos grandes editores, e (porque não dizê-lo?) aos grandes leitores.
Partilhe a angústia de Samuel Riba, um editor literário aposentado que sofre pelo fim da era Gutemberg, e celebre um requiem pelo "mundo derrubado da edição literária, mas também pelo mundo dos verdadeiros escritores e dos leitores com talento".
Façamos todos um minuto de silêncio pela morte daquela era em que, pelo bem da humanidade, nunca seria dada a E. L. James uma página em branco.

(silêncio)

Não nos deixemos intimidar por um livro extremamente literário, que dá trabalho, que nos insulta e nos atira à cara o tanto que ainda nos falta ler.
Não se sinta mal, caro leitor, se não conhecer alguns destes nomes, preocupe-se se não conhecer nenhum. Isso significará que ainda tem um longo caminho para percorrer. Mas não tenha pressa, tome o seu tempo, estes escritores nunca ficarão fora de moda e, sendo certo que já morreram, se se puser já a andar é bem provável que ainda os alcance.
Vamos a isso? Encontramo-nos na meta!

«Pois um editor literário não acaba por ser um ventríloquo que cultiva à volta do seu catálogo as mais variadas vozes distintas?»

«A Lua brilha, não tendo outra alternativa, sobre o nada de novo.»

[Ramazan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yaklaşık dört gün önce başladım Dublinesk'e ve dört gündür bu kitap dışında çok az şey dahil oldu hayatımın günlük akışına. Rüyamda dahi Riba'yla karşılaştım hatta. Belki Matas'ın bahsini ettiği Cronenberg, Spider filmi, Beckett ve Joyce gibi ortak noktalardan belki de artık Matas yazınını daha iyi tanımamdan; Montano Hastalığı ve Kassel'de Mantık Aramak'tan çok daha fazla sevdim. Dünyasında kalmayı ve Matas'ın edebi atlasında daha fazla dolaşmayı çok isterdim ama bitti. Tamamen kişisel bir yorum olduğunu belirtmekle birlikte; büyük bir bağ kurdum eserle. Ortak paydada olan herkes de sevecektir bence.

[Makis Dionis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even if this is a weekend celebrating Scottish tradition and poet Robert Burns i will pay a visit to an Irish pub due to Mr Matas

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es ist der 25. Juni, mein zweiter Urlaubstag. Ich liege auf dem Sofa und lese „Dublinesque“. Zwischendurch schaue ich immer wieder aus dem Fenster und den Böen zu, die den Regen fast horizontal durch den Garten peitschen. Vor 30 oder 40 Seiten hat Riba, die Hauptfigur des Romans, berichtet, dass es in Barcelona erstaunlich viel regnet für Mai. Das gleiche ist wahr für Eutin und den Monat Juni. Wo kommen nur alle die Gewitter und Regengüsse her? Dass eine Bekannte Ribas in der Tate Modern eine Ausstellung zum Thema Klimakatastrophe machen will, könnte wahr sein oder Fiktion. Ich habe darauf verzichtet, das zu googeln (richtig, Google, das Ende des Gutenberg-Zeitalters), denn im Grunde macht es keinen Unterschied. Vila-Matas webt in seinen Text eine Vielzahl existenter Namen und Buchtitel ein, so dass der Leser stellenweise Gefahr läuft zu vergessen, dass er einen fiktiven Text liest, in dem die Benennung von Autoren wie Behan, Joyce und Beckett einen schriftstellerischen Zweck erfüllen. Andere Autoren wieder hat Vila-Matas frei erfunden.
„Dublinesque“ ist ein Buch, in dem alles zum Paratext wird. Literatur, Musik und Film, der Autor und sein Leser kommentieren und ergänzen sich, so dass ein unendlich komplexer Gobelin vor unseren Augen gewebt wird. Und ganz unmerklich wird der Leser, werde ich selbst Teil dieses Romans.
Als ich kurz einschlafe, sehe ich im Traum einen Buchtitel vor mir: "The Interrupted Language. How Reality Disturbs the World of Books". Wunderbar, wie das Unterbewusstsein sich weiter mit Vila-Matas Thema der Intertextualität beschäftigt. Jemand sollte unbedingt dieses Buch schreiben (oder gibt es das gar schon?).

Vila-Matas beschreibt, wie Riba sich als Mensch hinter dem Katalog der von ihm verlegten Bücher mehr und mehr verliert. "The list of books I have published seems to have obscured forever the person behind the books." Geht es dem leidenschaftlichen Leser nicht vielleicht ganz ähnlich, dem Leben und Lesen zu einer Einheit verschmelzen: "But hasn't he been accused many times of reading his life as if it were the manuscript of an unknown author?" Sind die Regenwolken über meinem Garten die gleichen, die Riba schon vor einigen Wochen gesehen hat? Oder ist es gar der irische Regen?

Seit Riba aus gesundheitlichen Gründen dem Alkohol entsagt hat, der dem möglicherweise zuvor introvertierten jungen Mann geholfen hat, zum extrovertierten Alpha-Wolf im Verlagswesen zu werden, ist sein gesellschaftliches Leben implodiert. Er trifft sich kaum noch mit seinen Bekannten und Geschäftspartnern aus Angst, er könnte rückfällig werden und wieder mit dem Trinken anfangen. Und seit er sich auch noch vorzeitig in den Ruhestand begeben hat, sitzt er den ganzen Tag nur noch vor seinem PC und verlässt zur größten Besorgnis seiner Frau Celia das Haus überhaupt nicht mehr. Sein Leben findet nunmehr ausschließlich in der Welt der Texte statt. Wen also wundert es, dass Celia sich dem Buddhismus zuwendet?
Mittwochs muss er seinen Eltern (wie alt mögen die sein, wenn sie am Bloomsday ihren 61. Hochzeitstag feiern?) Bericht über sein Leben erstatten, was ihm nicht leicht fällt. Wie soll er erklären, dass er auf einer Konferenz in Lyon nur im Hotelzimmer gesessen, eine Romantheorie verfasst und anschließend verbrannt hat, ohne den Veranstaltungsort oder den Veranstalter je zu Gesicht bekommen zu haben? Ribas Romantheorie lautet in Kurzform: "Essential elements of the future novel: intertextuality, connections with serious poetry, awareness of a moral landscape in ruins, a slight favouring of style over plot, a view of writing that moves forward like time", und an diese Theorie hält sich der Autor Vila-Matas, von dem sie letztlich ja auch aufgestellt wurde.

Schließlich rafft sich Riba zu einem Plan auf: Er will nach Dublin reisen und dort am Bloomsday ein Requiem für die Gutenberg-Galaxis und Joyce halten. In Dublin angekommen verhält sich Riba sonderbar passiv und seine Begleiter haben einen größeren Anteil am Requiem als Riba selbst. Kein Wunder, dass Riba sich vom schöpferischen Joyce schließlich ab- und dem zögerlich-passiven Beckett zuwendet, in dessen immer radikaleren Reduktionen bis an die Grenze zum Schweigen heran Riba sich bzw. seinen Weg eher zu erkennen scheint.
Worum geht es in “Dublinesque”? Es geht vor allem um das Älterwerden, an dessen Ende unausweichlich der Tod steht, um das Vergehen der Zeit Tag für Tag; es geht um das Wesen der Literatur, um ein Leben mit und für sie.
Riba begibt sich auf eine phantasmagorischer Reise nach Dublin, um dort den Menschen zu finden, der er selbst in einem früheren Prä-Herausgeberleben einmal gewesen ist, bevor er hinter dem Katalog der von ihm herausgegebenen Bücher verschwunden ist.
Geister und Erinnerung spielen auf seiner Reise eine sehr viel größere Rolle als Ribas drei Bekannte, die ihn begleiten. Aber welche Reise, welche Bekannten? Denn recht eigentlich bedarf es keiner anderen Personen, um Riba Anregung und Gesellschaft zu bieten. Er ist eins mit den Texten und Figuren der Literatur, und vergessen wir nicht: Riba selbst ist Literatur. In seinen wiederholten Spiegelungen erinnert er an Marcel, den Ich-Erzähler der Recherche, der mehr als Proust und zugleich doch nicht dieser ist.
Für diese Suche nach dem eigenen Ich ist es erforderlich, dass Riba Abstand zu seinem Leben als Herausgeber gewinnt. Was also ist naheliegender, als ein Requiem für das Gutenberg-Universum aufzuführen, und welcher Anlass geeigneter als Bloomsday, an dem Riba Joyce und den Ulysses als bedeutende Exponenten der Literatur gleich mit zur Ruhe legen kann? Gilt das Requiem nicht aber auch Ribas eigener verschütteter Jugend, frage ich mich.

Eine zentrale Aussage des Romans ist für mich folgende: Bücher sind das, was sie mit uns machen. "Remembering Behan's book, thinks Riba, has been a good way to continue preparing for his trip to Dublin, to move further away each day from the interior neighbourhood that's holding him hostage, and so slowly approach wider horizons."
Intertextualität fungiert als Mittel, sich selbst zu erkennen / zu konstruieren: "...how the futility of any attempt rationally to construct the outside world necessarily implies the inabilityto create an identity for oneself."

Als ich schließlich im letzten Drittel des Romans ankomme, drängt sich das Thema Buddhismus, eingeführt in den Roman durch Celia, für mich langsam aber unaufhaltbar in den Vordergrund. War die Lehre nicht so, dass man so oft wiedergeboren wird und Runde um Runde dreht, bis man endlich erleuchtet ins ewige Nirwana eingehen kann? Diese Grundidee scheint Vila-Matas als Kompositionsprinzip zugrunde gelegt zu haben. Wir begleiten Riba dabei, wie er wieder und wieder die gleichen Krisen durchläuft, sich ähnliche Fragen stellt und nach Erleuchtung sucht. Und ich drücke ihm herzlich die Daumen, dass er endlich erlöst ins große Nichts eingehen kann und das Buch zu einem Ende findet.
Ab dem 3. Teil des Buches (Juli) bin ich mir nicht mehr sicher, was Fiktion und was real sein könnte. Riba, zum Alkohol zurückgekehrt, sitzt wie Becketts Murphy in Dublin in einem Hotelzimmer auf einem Stuhl fest, der Alkohol hat ihn noch handlungsunfähiger gemacht, sofern das überhaupt möglich ist. Ist Riba wirklich in Dublin, und falls ja, und er das Trinken wieder angefangen hat, warum ist Celia dann noch bei ihm? Waren seine Eltern, die mindestens 80, eher 90 Jahre alt sein müssen, wirklich mit ihm zu Besuch in London und haben sich die Ausstellung in der Tate Modern angesehen?
Ca. 200 Seiten lang hat es mir nichts ausgemacht, die Handlung in der Schwebe zu lassen und zu akzeptieren, dass alles vielleicht eine Fantasie in der Fantasie (sprich: im Roman „Dublinesque“) ist. Aber nun erschöpft mich dieses Buch. Um es noch deutlicher zu sagen: Ich muss mich durch die letzten 50 Seiten regelrecht durchkämpfen. Wie ärgerlich, wo ich bisher so begeistert war.
Vila-Matas formuliert es so: "What fascinated him most about the book was the central story in which nothing seemed to happen, but in reality lots of things were going on, because in fact that story was full of brutal micro-events, in the same way that, although we don't always notice, many things happen in our apparently listless daily lives".
Das klingt anspruchsvoll / ansprechend, aber mir ist einfach zu viel Wiederholung in der Nicht-Handlung. Immer wieder greift Vila-Matas die Motive und (Traum)Figuren auf, doch der erwünschte Effekt lässt sich nicht mehr steigern, sondern hat für mich den Zenit überschritten.
Dieser Roman ist sehr speziell und ich glaube, dass jeder Leser seine eigenen Erfahrungen damit macht und ihn anders bewerten wird. Ähnlich wie bei Finnegans Wake werden sich zwei Leser vermutlich nicht einmal darauf einigen können, worum es im Kern des Buches wirklich geht. Mein Fazit: Große Literatur, zum Ende hin aber doch ermüdend.



It´s the 25th of June, the second day of my holiday. I am lying on the sofa reading “Dublinesque”. Occasionally I look out of the window and watch gusts make the rain fall almost horizontally in the garden. 30 or 40 pages ago Riba, the central character of “Dublinesque”, reported on astonishingly long rain periods in Barcelona for the month of May. The same is true for Eutin and the month of June. Where do all these thunderstorms and rainfalls come from? It might be true that a friend of Riba´s is having an exhibition in Tate Modern dealing with climate catastrophes, it also might be fiction. I refrained from googling this (right, the end of Gutenberg) because it would make no difference at all. Vila-Matas is weaving in in his text a lot of names of authors and books which actually do exist, so the reader has to be aware to not forget he is reading a work of fiction. Behan, Joyce and Beckett for example are named for purpose while other authors are fictitious.
In „Dublinesque“ anything becomes paratext. Literature, music, films, the author and his reader are commenting on each other and complement one another, and so a most complex tapestry is woven. Impalpably the reader, impalpably I become part of this novel.
While I fall asleep for a moment I dream about a book with the title: "The Interrupted Language. How Reality Disturbs the World of Books". It´s amazing how the sub consciousness deals with Vila-Mata´s intertextuality; someone has to write this book (or has it already been written?).
Vila-Matas tells us about Riba, who has lost himself as a person behind the catalogue of books he has published in his life:
"The list of books I have published seems to have obscured forever the person behind the books."
But doesn´t the ardent reader suffer the same fate, when life and reading becomes one: "But hasn't he been accused many times of reading his life as if it were the manuscript of an unknown author?" Are the rainclouds above my garden the same clouds Riba has seen some weeks ago? Or is it even the irish rain?
Riba stopped drinking alcohol for reasons of health. But maybe it was the alcohol that helped the introverted young man Riba once had been to become an alpha-wolf of a publisher. Now his social life is imploding. For fear of starting to drink again he avoids having engagements with former colleagues and friends. And since he is retired he spends all of his time at home, sitting in front of his computer, not leaving the house. His wife, Celia, is anxious about this new Riba who spends his whole life inside the world of literature. Little wonder she starts to fancy Buddhism.
On Wednesdays Riba habitually goes to see his parents. How old might they be? On Bloomsday they will have their 61st wedding anniversary. Riba tells them about his journeys as a publisher. But how shall he explain to them his last trip to Lyon where he didn´t even meet the organizer but sat in his hotel room and wrote a short theory about the novel and then burned it?
His theory in short read: "Essential elements of the future novel: intertextuality, connections with serious poetry, awareness of a moral landscape in ruins, a slight favouring of style over plot, a view of writing that moves forward like time", and it´s this very theory Vila-Matas is applying to “Dublinesque”.
Finally Riba pulls himself together and decides to undertake a trip to Dublin. There he plans to perform a Requiem for the Gutenberg-galaxy and for Joyce. But when Riba and his three companions arrive in Dublin it´s strange to see how Riba becomes more and more passive and almost an onlooker at the Requiem he had been planning for Bloomsday. He retreats even more to his inner world and his concentration shifts from Joyce and his creative abundance to the Oblomov-like Beckett. Maybe Beckett´s radical reductions up to the limit of silence reflect Ribas Situation better.
And yet Riba is still looking for the one author who is gifted and who will change Riba´s life.
Now what is “Dublinesque” about? I think it´s about passing time, getting older and realizing that each day you come a little closer towards death; about the character of literature, about living with and for it.
Riba sets off for a phantasmagorical journey to Dublin in order to find the person he himself has been in a former pre-publisher life, before he was obscured by the catalogue of books he published. In quest for his lost self Riba has to gain some distance towards his life as a publisher. So what could be more obvious than a Requiem for the Gutenberg-galaxy, and what reason more suitable than Bloomsday when Riba can bury Joyce and his Ulysses as exponents of 20th century literature too? But isn´t it also a Requiem for Riba´s own lost youth?
Ghosts and memories are more important on his journey than his three companions. But why takes Riba his friends along to Dublin? He hardly needs anybody’s company and is captured in his inner world composed of texts and literary figures only. And since I mentioned it: Riba himself of course is literature. In his repeated reflections he resembles Marcel, the first-person narrator of the recherche, who must not be mixed up with Proust.
One central conclusion in the novel seems to say: books are, what they do to your life.
"Remembering Behan's book, thinks Riba, has been a good way to continue preparing for his trip to Dublin, to move further away each day from the interior neighbourhood that's holding him hostage, and so slowly approach wider horizons."
Intertextuality is used by Vila-Matas as a means of self-awareness or self-construction:
"...how the futility of any attempt rationally to construct the outside world necessarily implies the inabilityto create an identity for oneself."
As I read on and finally arrive at the last part of the novel the topic of Buddhism brought on by Celia takes more and more space in my head. Didn´t it say that you are born time and time agian until you have perfected yourself and reach nirvana? Vila-Matas seems to have taken this idea as a principle of composition. We see Riba facing the same sort of crisis again and again, asking the same questions and looking for satori. And I keep my fingers crossed for Riba that he might enter the big nothingness and the novel will come to an end at last.
Over 200 pages I had no problems not knowing what is actually happening and what might be a daydream. That maybe all I read might be a dream within a dream. But now I am exhausted and wish the book to come to an end. So Riba (still / again?) is in Dublin, drinking again, and sitting like Murphy on a chair unable to move. But then why is Celia with him? And have his parents, who must be 80 or 90 years old, really visited the exhibition in Tate Modern with him? By now I don´t care too much about the answers which is too bad since I loved this book so very much in the beginning.
Vila-Matas says: "What fascinated him most about the book was the central story in which nothing seemed to happen, but in reality lots of things were going on, because in fact that story was full of brutal micro-events, in the same way that, although we don't always notice, many things happen in our apparently listless daily lives".
That sounds appealing and challenging, but I don´t want another repetition with nothing happening at all.
„Dublinesque“ is an extraordinary novel and readers will come to different conclusions. I imagine that it might bear a slight resemblance to Finnegans Wake: you will possibly not even find an agreement concerning the core statement.
“Dublinesque” is a great book, but the last part is tiresome and I would have preferred it to be 80 pages shorter.

[Ignacio Germán · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pertenece a la cada vez ya más rara estirpe de los editores cultos, literarios. Y asiste todos los días conmovido al espectáculo de ver cómo la rama noble de su oficio —editores que todavía leen y a los que les ha atraído siempre la literatura— se va extinguiendo sigilosamente a comienzos de este siglo.

Así arranca esta formidable novela. Riba, editor retirado, antes alcohólico y ahora abstemio, de algún modo frustrado, hikikomori, enclaustrado, sesentón que guarda ciertos vestigios del chico que un día fue —esa relación con sus padres aún se mantiene, aún les debe un periódico informe de sus quehaceres, de sus idas y venidas, de sus planes—, se ve, ahora, sin apoyos y sin esa luz que antes le guiaba. Ya no asiste a congresos, no tiene escritores ansiosos tras él, no puede seguir engrosando ese selecto y personal catálogo, y, además, el ocaso de la Galaxia Gutenberg está demasiado cerca.
Riba —personaje más que persona— tiende a leer su vida como un texto literario. La literatura cobra vida, es real, no tanto ficción, o quizá la realidad sea ficción, y él se guía por sus lecturas y observaciones propias del lector audaz que ha sido siempre.
Necesita celebrar un funeral por esa era Gutenberg que llega a su fin, casi inevitablemente; necesita ir a Dublín, celebrar el Bloomsday, recrear el punto central del Ulysses de Joyce; ofrecer, al fin, un funeral literario por esa era que tuvo en su seno a los más grandes escritores con Joyce como cúspide y que ahora está acabada. Ya no quedan genios.
Para ese viaje iniciático va a contar con unos amigos escritores que presenciarán con él el ritual, que le acompañarán en Dublín mientras Riba le da vueltas a esa búsqueda del genio escritor que buscó y nunca encontró, que nunca pudo editar.
En Dublín tendrá lugar la consumación de aquel sueño premonitorio que tuvo sobre su recaída con el alcohol, temerá por la prevista reacción de Celia, por su futuro acabado, pensará en Joyce y en Beckett y en la sombra de Spider y en Dublín y en Nueva York como su centro del mundo y en sus padres y en este viaje que puede que acabe sin acabar.
La narración en torno a Riba es adictiva, y uno —no sé si hago esta observación más generalizada de la cuenta— se familiariza con el personaje pronto, fácilmente, lo compadece, pocas veces lo juzga, también se divierte con él y se sume en ese viaje mental que se crea en torno a él, al mundo cíclico que necesita un funeral tras otro, a su mundo.

Bueno, estoy empezando a leer a Vila-Matas (error no haberlo hecho antes) y sospecho que pronto asaltaré buena parte de su obra, si no toda. Es un escritor fresquísimo, de una solidez notable, con una buena carga de referencias y ¿metaliteratura? que a algunos tantos nos gusta; un estilo fluidísimo y diestro, sin dudas. Tremedamente recomendable.

http://ignacio-german.blogspot.com.es/

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dublinesque should have a big banner on its cover stating, “Serious readers only.” Because this is, at its core, a book about literature and readers. Take this comment by Mr. Vila-Matas’ key character (and perhaps in some sense, alter ego): “The same skills needed for writing are needed or reading. Writers fail readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it…”

Well, Mr. Vila-Matas does not fail his reader. This is an ambitious book, on its surface about a retired and ailing Barcelona publisher named Samuel Riba, who decides to journey with three friends to Dublin during Bloomsday on June sixteenth, where he can retrace the path of James Joyce’s Bloom (from Ulysses). While there, he wishes to say a requiem for the culture of the Gutenberg age (that has now morphed into the Google age) and at the same time, say a requiem for himself, a literary publisher very much in decline.

It helps to have at least a familiarity with Ulysses; Riba (and by extension, his creator) provide fascinating interpretative snippets as the book propels forward. It also helps to know Philip Larkin, who wrote the poem Dublinesque, about an old Dublin prostitute who, in her last hour, is accompanied by a few co-workers along city streets. And if the reader happens to know Samuel Beckett, Paul Auster, John Banville, David Cronenberg (cinema’s last real director, according to Riba), William Yeats, and other artistic luminaries, so much the better.

There are many golden nuggets about the craft and purpose of writing (Riba kept striving to find a writer “truly able to dream in spite of the world: to structure the world in a different way. A great writer: at once anarchist and architect.”) There are also great insights into our collective journey through mortality: going “from the existence of the sacred (Joyce) to the somber era of the disappearance of God (Beckett).” It’s about holding on to enthusiasm and doing what we need to do. (“You haven’t made us come to Dublin so you can turn yourself into a metaphor, have you?” queries one of Riba’s friends.) It’s about the unlived past and our continued existence.

Mostly, though, it is a book of ideas, beautifully translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean and Rosalind Harvey. It’s not a book to love – Riba keeps us at arm’s distance and we get to know his musings and philosophies, not his heart – but it is a book that makes us think and stand up and take notice. For that, I am assigning it 5 stars.

[Κατερίνα Μαλακατέ · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://www.diavazontas.blogspot.gr/20...


Αν κάτι μόνο έπρεπε να σχολιάσω για τη «Δουβλινιάδα» του Ενρίκε Βίλα Μάτας θα ήταν αυτή η φράση «Με έκανε να θέλω να ξαναδιαβάσω τον Οδυσσέα». Κι αυτό δεν είναι μικρό επίτευγμα γιατί δεν συγκαταλέγομαι σε αυτούς που εκστασιάστηκαν. Ίσως βέβαια η απόσταση που με χωρίζει από κείνη την πρώτη ανάγνωση, κοντά μια δεκαετία, και τα βιβλία που χώρεσαν σε αυτό το χρονικό διάστημα, να έχουν το λόγο τους κι αυτή τη φορά να κατορθώσω να δω την σημαντικότητα του επιτεύγματος του Τζόυς.

Στο βιβλίο του Μάτας, τώρα. Πρόκειται, όπως σε όλα τα βιβλία που Ισπανού που έχω διαβάσει, για έναν ύμνο στη λογοτεχνία, στη γραφή και στην ανάγνωση. Ο συγγραφέας πραγματεύεται κι εδώ αυτό που ξέρει πολύ καλά, τον φόβο για το τέλος της λογοτεχνίας, της ζωή και του κόσμου. Σπάνια υπογραμμίζω σε βιβλία, όμως εδώ το έκανα με δυο φράσεις. Αυτή, ως αρχή του δεύτερου κεφαλαίου:

«Αν μια μέρα, όμως, έβρισκε αυτόν τον πολυπόθητο συγγραφέα, αυτό το φάντασμα, αυτό το αερικό, δύσκολα ο άνθρωπος αυτός θα έλεγε καλύτερα αυτό που έχουν ήδη πει τόσοι άλλοι για το χάσμα που χωρίζει τις προσδοκίες της νιότης και την πραγματικότητα της ωριμότητας, αυτό που έχουν πει τόσοι άλλοι για την απατηλή φύση των επιλογών μας, για την απογοήτευση που έρχεται όταν προσπαθούμε να πετύχουμε πράγματα, για το παρόν ως κάτι εύθραυστο και το μέλλον ως επικράτεια του γήρατος και του θανάτου.»

Και τούτη που επανέρχεται στο κείμενο συχνά πυκνά:

«η ζωή είναι μια διαδικασία κατεδάφισης»

Ίσως γιατί χωρίς καν να το καταλάβω έπαψα κι εγώ πια να είμαι τόσο νέα, η υπαρξιακή αγωνία του εκδότη Ρίβα που βγήκε στη σύνταξη έχοντας πίσω του έναν αξιοπρεπή κατάλογο βιβλίων της παγκόσμιας λογοτεχνίας αλλά χωρίς να καταφέρει να ανακαλύψει εκείνη την ιδιοφυία που θα έκανε τη διαφορά στους καιρούς μας, αυτού του ανθρώπου που στον απολογισμό τους βρίσκει μόνο σπαράγματα λογοτεχνίας αλλά δεν μπορεί να δει τα συντρίμμια του εαυτού του, με τάραξε. Η ιδέα της επίσκεψης στο Δουβλίνο στην Bloomsday και της κηδείας της εποχής του Γουτεμβέργιου, που στην αρχή με ξένισε, μετά μου φάνηκε απολύτως ταιριαστή, και το όλο εγχείρημα μου άφησε γεύση πρωτότυπου αριστουργήματος. Γιατί ο Βίλα Μάτας μπορεί να μην λειτουργεί με την εκρηκτική ευφυΐα του συγγραφέα που κάτι παραπάνω θα είχε να πει από τον προηγούμενο για τη ζωή και το θάνατο, αλλά τα καταφέρνει με τη φιλόπονη έρευνα ενός ανθρώπου που πραγματικά αγαπά την ανάγνωση.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas is the story of a Spanish retired publisher, Riba, whose marriage and newly-sober life is not-so-slowly crumbling as he sits endlessly before his computer screen, reminding himself of the Japanese youth who become recluses hidden with their computers. After a near-fatal collapse caused by drinking, he has quit both alcohol and social life. His wife Celia is converting to Buddhism and his elderly parents lovingly oppress him-or so he feels-with his love. In a desperate move to reclaim his life, Riba decides to take the "English" leap (from Barcelona to Dublin) and with the few friends he has left give his eulogy to the Gutenberg printing press and the written word. He targets his visit for June 16th, "Bloomsday", the day on which James Joyce's Ulysses takes place.

This is the skeleton upon which the book hangs. The story? Maybe a meditation on writing, writers, and readers. I loved the mix of the real and imaginary, the real writers Riba "published" in Spain in his search for genius, the ultimate novel that would change the world. Although I read the book in translation and feel limited in my judgments about the writing, the translation indicated a writing that is both dense and lyrical with powerful images. The introduction of Samuel Beckett towards the end of the book as Riba seems to be plunging to his own "ground level of being" was resonant.

I loved the book. After sitting with it for a little while, I hope to reread it and explore the images more fully as well as the interesting almost circular structure of the book. I strongly recommend it, especially to passionate readers "of a certain age" (as the French say-in this case, 50+). An interesting rumination on our choices in life, why we think we make them, why we actually make them, and the consequences they have.