Customer Reviews

Bartleby & Co.

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Bartleby and Co. is an excellent entrance to get into the extremely rich literary work of the Barcelonian writer Enrique Vila-Matas. Described as a "series of footnotes of an invisible -unexistent- book", it compiles, following a labirinthic order, the observations of an early-retired writer about a pretty recurrent phenomenon among writers that he calls the "negating literature" (literatura del no). Mixing reality and fantasy, Vila-Matas gives account of the most interesting cases of writers, like Bartleby or Salinger, who stopped writing for good at some point in their lives. It is also a marvelous tour through contemporary literature and, at a higher level, it can be seen as a metaphor of abandonment and negation that explores the reasons we have for writing and telling stories and also as a homage to all those brave men and women who have decided to devote their live to writing, who have taken such a dangerous (and slippy) path.

A great follow up for this book, if you liked it, is "El Mal de Montano" (I'm not sure it's translated to english already).

Dear Mr. Vila-Matas,

I have no reason to think you will ever see this. Why, after all, should you spend your time reading the reviews on the English-language Amazon site? But I have decided to write this review as if I am writing it to you, because it's in the spirit of your book. And how will I describe this book? It is generous, open, friendly, conversational, and also -- I hope you did not think this was only going to be a friendly review -- also infuriating, loosely written, and hopelessly scattered.

The book is a treasure trove of wonderful books, because you report on many writers that your reader will not have heard of. I marked the margins of my copy with a dozen names that I will now have to go and read. At the same time, I was delighted to find the names of many others that I know and recognize.

And that leads me to my frustration. From very nearly the beginning of the book I found myself arguing with you. Your theme, you say, is "writers of the No," meaning writers who have, for one reason or another, stopped writing. But that is the crux of the matter, that "one reason or another." Writers stop writing for many different reasons. Beckett is not the same case as Rimbaud, and Melville is not the same as Hawthorne. Some were depressed, some tired, some scared, and some -- I would have thought they would be your only subject -- stopped because they felt that modernism (a word that is weirdly absent from your book) prohibited the endless production of novels.

I can hear you saying, Well, yes, but as I say in my book, this is a vast subject, and there are many nuances and many different cases that must be judged and weighed. Exactly. They are different, and where your book falls short (sorry, I am being honest because I do not think you'll see this letter) of, say, Blanchot or even Perec (whom you cite) is where it is necessary to really slow down and think about each individual case.

PS, please, some day, read Wittgenstein's Tractatus. You wouldn't have written what you did if you'd read it, and it might have changed your ideas about other silences as well.

Still, even though this sounds negative and even, I suppose, a bit petulant (or even arch in my mimicry of your easy way of writing), the book is wonderful. It is richer, more full of ideas and writers I want to know, than any academic book I can think of.

I have written the most magnificent and brilliant review of this book, quite possibly the best-written review ever posted on Amazon. However, in writing something, anything, one realizes the limits of language, the unsolicited twists words make on a mind's unadulterated thoughts. Hence, the review for this book is on the shelves of universal literature, among the greatest books and reviews never written.

Thank you Mr. Vila-Matas

As a long-time admirer of Melville's Bartleby, I loved this book. I loved its celebration of refusal and devolution. A novel that refuses to be a novel, the book is an especially good read for aging writers who may not have "fulfilled their creative potential" as the self-help goes. Though most of us know of the long silences of writers like Salinger, I had little idea how many writers have gone silent and for the most subtle of reasons.

The book is named after the title figure in Herman Melville's short story "Bartleby the Scrivener." Melville's Bartleby is profoundly disengaged from life, and he responds to virtually every request, even those simply asking him to do his job as a scrivener or copy clerk, "I would prefer not to". Vila-Matas uses Bartleby as the prototype for authors who, in one way or another, preferred not to write. Presented as a series of footnotes to a "text that is invisible", BARTLEBY & CO. explores that denial and variants thereof through literature. Among the variants are writers who (somewhat paradoxically) never wrote, writers who vowed not to write again, those with writers' block, those who committed suicide, or those (like Thomas Pynchon) who are especially secretive.

In many respects, the book is an extended essay -- in turn, meditative, irreverent, witty, and (alas) also boring. But it is set in a context that is fictional, almost fantastical: the narrator (named Marcelo) is a reclusive hunchback, unsuccessful with women, who ultimately is fired from his job because he takes off too much time to pursue his obsession with "the literature of the No". The "footnotes" to the invisible text actually take the form of diary entries for the year 1999.

Much of BARTLEBY & CO. clearly is a commentary on contemporary literature or the "impossibility of literature," posing the question, among others, what is the future of literature? At other times, however, the book seems to be a somewhat impressionistic portrayal of existential ennui. (That latter aspect probably is responsible for the former dilemma.)

The novel certainly reflects quite extensive reading on the part of Vila-Matas. Among the writers who are mentioned (in rough order of appearance in the novel): Robert Walser, Robert Moretti, Juan Rulfo, Rimbaud, Socrates, Hofmannsthal and "Letter of Lord Chandos" (the "pinnacle of the literature of the No"), Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Valery Larbaud, Pepin Bello, Bobi Bazlen, Danielle Del Grudice, Robert Derain, Arthur Cravan, Hart Crane, Joseph Joubert, Chamfort, Felisberto Hernandez, J.D. Salinger, Fernando Passoa, Elias Canetti, Paul Celan, John Keats, Herman Broch, Mallarme, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oscar Wilde, Henry Roth, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Marcel Maniere, Derek Walcott, Thomas Pynchon, Guy de Maupassant, B. Traven, and Tolstoy.

If you are not familiar with Melville's story, I strongly recommend taking an hour to read it before starting BARTLEBY & CO. Those who have read the Melville story know that Bartleby is an odd duck. It is doubly fitting that this novel be named after him, because not only does it develop the "Bartleby syndrome" but it too is an odd duck, or an odd book. At first the conceit is interesting, but I found it overdone. Three-and-a-half stars.

This is the first new novel I can ever remember owning outright for upwards of a good couple of weeks now without so much as once cracking its boards. Someone musta trun a Spaniard in the works or something. Add to this the fact that before acquiring my personal copy of Bartleby & Co. through the thoroughly efficient auspices of our wonderful host here today, Amazon dot com dot say no to online profanity dot sigh sez me, I had had in my possession for a complete calendar month an Inter-Library-Loan edition of the very same book of footnotes which sat up on the fridge to a very large extent unread for pretty much the whole loan period. Maybe because of some comically obvious reason that might have something to do with expiration dates and deadlines I'm a little leery of library books and can never seem to get comfortable with let alone finish a borrowed item. Strange but true. Perhaps my reluctance is rooted in the fact that I too am a librarian of sorts and have frequently seen through to the terrible tweed trousers at the heart of the book people's dark enterprise. In any case I say above to a very large extent unread because I did end up one memorable Saturday night taking the library edition down from the fridge and reading the first twenty-two pages or so and then on the following Saturday night I read a bunch of different entries, some of these multiple times, but I can honestly say I've yet to do the decent thing because really what I know already about this book made me want to think about this book for some considerable time before I actually get around to reading it in its entirety. I guess I wanted to stretch out the interval of anticipation or something--mostly I dive right into a new novel but I happened to read around and about this Vila-Matas beforehand and sorta thought I knew somewhat of whom the cheeky Enrique might be writing about here and so I decided to put off actually going the whole Cochinillo Asado just yet in order to think a bit more about the writers covered so as to more deeply dig the Spanish dude when I do eventually get properly stuck in to his story about a hunchback with a serious reading habit. All this then plus the abovementioned admission that I have in fact read maybe forty odd pages so far and found myself what's more happily walking around talking out loud in the sentences I'd just read very likely means that when I do finally get around to finishing the fiendish fictional fing I will be sticking with the five stars I have already awarded this lovely bit of literature from left field.

Here's one of the things I read beforehand that made me feel very favourably disposed towards Vila-Matas. It's sort of a quote from el hombre sensato himself that for my dinero at least bangs some good farking gong:

"Vila-Matas insists that there is a 'moral contract' between writer and reader, and that the reader should be active, showing a 'capacity for intelligent emotion, a wish to understand the other person, and to get closer to a language that is different from that of our daily tyrannies'. He goes further, declaring that: 'the same skills needed to write are also needed to read. Writers can fail readers, but the reverse is also true, and readers fail writers when all they look for in them is a confirmation that the world is exactly how they see it'."

Si, Señor, te oigo fuerte y claro.