Sunday

In a controversial move for Stranded Cinema, I'm going to review the novel I just finished reading (rather than the film I watched last night, It Could Happen To You). The book was by Enrique Vila-Matas, and is called Bartleby & Co. It concerns a clerk in Barcelona who decides to leave work to write a book about writers who have stopped writing. The problem, for me, was that the elements of this clerk's life that we find out about are minimal - most of the book is taken up relating the lives of those writers who have stopped writing. Admittedly, some of these writers, and some of the anecdotes, are entirely fictional: you have to pick your way through them, forever unsure of what's true or not. But I still would've liked more obvious plot concerning his life, and his successes and failures in attempting to write the book. When they came, they were refreshing, but too little. Aside from this complaint, the book is exceptionally well written (or translated from the Spanish). A very clear and lucid style. The anecdotes are entertaining, and he weaves them together to create a compulsive mythology about why and how writers decide they don't, or can't, write any more. I did sometimes feel that he was making a legend out of the mundane condition of writer's block, but he does it comprehensively enough that you don't mind by the end. Overall, impressive, subtle, and despite the overwhelming literary references, quite a simple, easy novel.