Enrique Vila-Matas: "I've kept quiet about my meeting with Barack Obama for a long time."

Barcelona"When we think we write our readings, we are actually writing our lives," we read in Camera obscura cannon (Seix Barral), the new novel byEnrique Vila-Matas (Barcelona, ​​​​1948). The book, explained by someone who could be an android – the first to be incorporated into Vilamatian literature –, takes us into 48 hours of obsessive writing, motivated by the memory of a dead writer and the creation of a literary canon made from randomly chosen fragments of authors such as Robert Walser. Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth and Carlo Emilio Gadda.

Since Harold Bloom public The Western Canon In 1994, journalists, critics and writers have not stopped choosing and excluding authors.

— It's a book that horrified me from the moment I read it. Since then, it's become fashionable to make lists of everything: the best books of the year, the best albums, the best movies...there have always been lists. Georges Perec was so passionate about them that he even made shopping lists.

His literature has played with the idea of building canons, or rather anti-canons, since the creation of the secret society of the shandy to A Brief History of Portable Literature (Anagrama, 1985), now reissued with illustrations by Julio César Pérez by Libros del Zorro Rojo.

— There is a connection between A Brief History of Portable Literature, Bartleby and Company (Anagrama, 2000) and Camera obscura cannon. In the first I invented a secret society of writers, in the second I made a selection of authors who had left literature – Melville, Hofmannsthal, Walser... – and now the narrator and protagonist makes a random selection of book fragments that make up a canon that is undoubtedly incomplete.

He seeks a "displaced, untimely, and outdated canon." These are irreverent considerations in these times.

— It's true that I don't give much importance to the choice. The narrator mentions that it consists of about seventy books and authors, but I only cite half. I do this so that everyone who wants to can feel included in the other half.

There's no Shakespeare, for example. Harold Bloom, who staunchly defended him, must be turning in his grave...

— Shakespeare could be in the other half. And so could Witold Gombrowicz or Raymond Roussel, two authors who have been very important to me for decades. Throughout my life, I've been interested in many more than seventy books, whether classics, modern, or contemporary.

As is often the case in his literature, his protagonist sometimes reads authors much younger than himself.

— Aside from the canon he constructs, the narrator also comments on some of his readings over the past year and a half. He incorporates names like Xavier Nueno [Barcelona, ​​1990], whose essay argues that instead of expanding our libraries, we should lighten them—the very task my protagonist undertakes. Camila Cañeque [Barcelona, ​​​​1984-2024], who has a book, The final words [La Uña Rota, 2024], in which she intersperses her autobiography with more than 450 last sentences from novels and stories that were important to her.

Camera obscura cannon It tells us 48 decisive – and at the same time, inactive – hours of the protagonist's life: he reviews his memories and waits for his daughter to return from Switzerland.

— It is a catacomb novel, just as it was Montevideo (2022). Someone asked me a few years ago what books I have left to write. The truth is, I don't know. I don't worry much about these things.

In Montevideo There was a trip to Uruguay. Here it's an expedition into one's inner self.

— When they read me, readers look for the same voice, but it varies greatly from book to book. Here I've tried an extreme voice.

The voice of an android?

— It's a voice that advances through fragments. I like the energy that this fragmentation provides. It's as if the novel were starting over in each chapter. It makes me think about what it was saying. Godard about his films, which started halfway through.

The starting point is a party in the Mercader Passage organized by art curator Chus Martínez.

— Part of a real party. I've long been a nightlife expert, but I haven't had a drink in years and rarely leave the house. One night, I made an exception and lucidly examined everything happening around me during a...

While the character is looking for a taxi, he says that at the intersection of Mercader Passage and Mallorca Street, he has an amazing experience.

— This also comes from a personal anecdote. I have kept quiet about my encounter with Obama for a long time. It happened one night when Bruce Springsteen played in BarcelonaI was leaving the La Central bookstore. While I was waiting for a taxi, former President Obama's motorcade passed by, and I clearly recognized it. It was the same place where, years before, I had seen the poet Juan Eduardo Cirlot. In the novel, I propose that we call this irrelevant yet literary place Punta Obama.

Aren't you afraid that if we name Punta Obama it will become a tourist enclave?

— I don't think that will happen, because it's a place where all you can do is stand.

The protagonist would like to live hidden in a hole: but instead of "digging it in the middle of the forest," as he remembers Kafka saying to Milena Jesenská, he tries to do it in his study, where he keeps the selected books from the canon.

— He wants to dig that hole to be alone, but it is impossible, because even in this solitude several voices coexist: that of the character, that of the author of the character... and that of the other. black tenant who lives inside, an expression that comes from an essay by Alberto Savinio about Guy de Maupassant, an author who ended his days in complete delirium.

You share the passion for unfortunate authors that the protagonist of Camera obscura cannon.

— I guess.

And a taste for the avant-garde. When the character is asked when he began to call himself a writer, he quotes words from Gino Severini, avant-garde painter and writer: "Suddenly, literature appeared in my glove like a violent whirlwind from Norway."

— I don't consider myself an avant-garde author. The best of the avant-garde movements have ended up becoming part of the tradition. Many of the authors who have been considered outsiders have repeatedly exploited a flaw of their own, which, unintentionally, has advanced literature. I think of names like Proust, Joyce, Kafka, and Beckett. They have all been outsiders and at the same time have become masters.