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Product Description
In Dublinesque, superbly translated by Rosalind Harvel and Anne McLean, Samuel Riba, a 60-year-old Catalan alcoholic publisher and bibliophile, heeding the apocalyptic voices that trumpet the imminent end of the book in our digital dark age, decides to travel to Dublin with a group of friends and hold there, on Bloomsday, a funeral for the book. Riba has never been to Dublin, but he once dreamt that he was sitting outside a Dublin pub, crying because he had started to drink again. On the strength of that dream, which for him is an omen, he sets off with his companions to the city of Joyce.
The list of “real people”, most of them writers, who pop up in the account of Riba’s ritual voyage is impressive: Julien Gracq, Claudio Magris, Georges Perec, Hugo Claus, Borges, Carlo Emilio Gadda, and many other luminaries of modern literature. Some may or may not exist (such as the aphoristic Czech author Vilém Vok), some may appear as a gift-bearing spirit (Philip Larkin, for example, gives the novel its title). Some occupy more space than they might perhaps deserve – the presence of Paul Auster among fiction’s innovators is a little puzzling – but all together conjure up a sort of literary smorgasbord surrounding the great absence, the author of Ulysses.
Vila-Matas is not above chewing up bits of the master, from the Dublin landmarks Joyce celebrated, to the various fictional techniques in Ulysses, to choice morsels of the work itself. Thus the mysterious man in the mackintosh who haunts Paddy Dignam’s funeral in the Hades section of Ulysses appears in Dublinesque as a ghostly incarnation of the many things that Riba has longed for in his successful publishing career, now coming to an end in the twilight of his gods: to have met one of the great ones such as Beckett, to have discovered a new literary genius, to have trusted literature more than the bottle, to have had faith in that literary truth which someone like Vila-Matas is attempting to demolish.
All of our books are second hand, and while you may not get the exact copy shown in the picture, all of our books are in very good condition. Removing stickers from a book may damage it, so we refrain from doing so. If you see a price sticker on a book, please ignore it.
