Description:
From Spain's most celebrated author, an inventive, quietly radical novel that explores how books illuminate our lives
In Camera Obscura, Enrique Vila-Matas returns with a novel-in-motion that turns the very act of looking into a literary method. Set in Barcelona, the novel follows widower Vidal Escabia as he undertakes a precise, time-bound task. Over the course of seventy-one days, he must construct an "untimely" counter-canon by entering his home library in darkness, reaching for a book at random, and, in the light of his picture window, selecting a single fragment. What begins as the fulfillment of his master's dying wish gradually gathers force, propelling the reader through a journey governed by luck yet shaped by necessity.
The fragments accumulate; so, too, do the stakes. As he moves through Barcelona among androids known as the Denver-7, Escabia is haunted by his estrangement from his only daughter, and by the absence of his beloved wife, lost to the cliffs of Tojinbo. In this unstable landscape, where human intention increasingly intersects with automation and chance, the novel builds a subtle but persistent tension: Is Escabia truly constructing the canon, or is another intelligence at work alongside him, in the dark?
Camera Obscura refracts Vila-Matas's singular vision into a book about how we see, how we read, and how meaning assembles itself in the margins of our experience.
Review Quotes: "Vila-Matas . . . charms with this speculative tale about an experiment in cultivating a literary sensibility. . . . It's a delight for bibliophiles."--Publishers Weekly
Praise for the Spanish edition: "A splendid novel . . . A tribute to writing as a constant search for the ineffable or inexpressible . . . [by] a writer of the first order."--La Voz "Camera Obscura is an invitation to embrace literature not only as a way of life, but also as a refuge in dehumanizing times."--La República "A novel of thrilling complexity--a lightness of complexity, as Italo Calvino might put it--filled with humor and leaving us much like Beckett's characters: in anticipation. For Camera Obscura demands to be re-read."--El Periódico "Revels in the space between the literal and the metaphorical; between laughter and profundity. . . A playful novel in which the magician Vila-Matas. . . masterfully shows his hand, which is no less delightful for its revelation."--Letras Libres Praise for Enrique Vila-Matas: "Arguably Spain's most significant contemporary literary figure . . . By lifting the heavy weight of the past, by setting irony against dogmatism and rigidity, Vila-Matas allows his characters, and us, to contemplate the future."--New Yorker "A writer who has no equal in the contemporary landscape of the Spanish novel."--Roberto Bolaño "Enrique Vila-Matas has pioneered one of contemporary literature's most interesting responses to the great Modernist writers."--Paris Review "Vila-Matas's wildly original novels are all investigations of whether or not originality in fiction is still possible; every nook and cranny of literary history is explored and interrogated, the margin of every great novel frantically scribbled in."--Dublin Review of Books