Montevideo - A Novel

The award-winning newest novel by Spain-s premier writer-a metafictional meditation on the limits and possibilities of literature The narrator of Montevideo is an itinerant writer and erstwhile drug pusher in the throes of a personal and literary transformation. Increasingly disillusioned with life in Paris and hoping for an artistic breakthrough, he ventures out in search of a -new style.- His quest takes him to Barcelona and then to a hotel in Montevideo, Uruguay, called The Cervantes, where seemingly both Julio Cort-r and Adolfo Bioy Casares found inspiration. Montevideo, however, is not the final stop: Bogot-Reykjav- New York, and St. Gallen in Switzerland are ahead on the narrator-s journey. But to what? In this brilliant new novel, Enrique Vila-Matas deepens and extends his inquiry into the purposes and functions of fiction: Can the products of the imagination be set on paper, coherently and faithfully? Or is literature forever destined to fall hopelessly short-consigned to be no