The Paris Review has just published my interview with Enrique Vila-Matas. It can be read here.
This comes on the occasion of the publication of his third book in English, Never Any End to Paris. The other two are Bartleby & Co and Montano’s Malady, and I recommend them all.
As I’ve said many times, here and elsewhere, Vila-Matas has pioneered what I see as a highly successful vision of what literature is in a post-“anxiety of influence” age. To put it all in a way that doesn’t reduce quite so well into a soundbyte, in The Western Canon Harold Bloom writes of Borges that he “overtly absorbs and then deliberately reflects the entire canonical tradition.” If that’s Borges, then Vila-Matas is overtly absorbed by the canon, which he then mutates from within. Although, that’s not quite it, since Vila-Matas’ canon isn’t your typical canonical canon; it’s more like a canon made from explorers of the abyss (to steal a title of an untranslated Vila-Matas book), a canon that almost entirely existed in inter-war Paris.
If that sounds like the kind of thing you want to associate yourself with, then you can find out more by reading my review of Never Any End to Paris, as well as my essay on Vila-Matas’ two prior books.
Maybe I’ve always misunderstood the concept of the “anxiety of influence” but isn’t part of the point that we never escape it? If you’re writing poetry for example, you’re always going to be influenced by those you read and are inspired by right? I’m just not sure how someone who is “overtly absorbed by the canon” is not influenced by the canon.