Enrique Vila-Matas on Joyce, Simenon, and the Art of Contradiction

In a new book, Enrique Vila-Matas explores the tension between pure art and narrative readability through a nocturnal meditation set in Turin. The narrator occupies the same room where Xavier de Maistre wrote Voyage autour de ma chambre during a 42-day house arrest after a duel. The soundtrack is Bela Lugosi's Dead by Bauhaus, a song about undead reversibility. Vila-Matas contrasts James Joyce's Finnegans Wake—described as pure art that threatens to end literature—with Georges Simenon's Les Fiançailles de M. Hire, which offers reassuring narrative order. The narrator oscillates between these poles, invoking Giordano Bruno's theory that all extremes are identical. He admits to hating conventional realist writers for their laziness, yet also finds Finnegans Wake spectacularly boring. The book is a vertiginous collage of real and invented quotations, music, and photographs, featuring Borges, Stevenson, Musil, Beckett, Gaddis, Bolaño, and others. A homeless man named Finn and another named Hire converse outside, observed by a man in a car, like Chet Baker thinking about his art.