I tried a few times to read past page ten but my mind keeps drifting. I'm not getting anything out of the character nor the style.
It's not you, it's me. This one's off to the LFL.

Mac's Problem will be a treat for readers who enjoy stories about reading, writing, novels, journals and short stories. I should undoubtedly add two more to the list: Rewriting and Repetition (caps for emphasis). To learn why this is the case, please read on.

“I'm fascinated by the current vogue for posthumous books, and I'm thinking of writing a fake one that could appear to be “posthumous” and “unfinished” when it would, in fact, be perfectly complete.” So begins the tale's narrator, Mac, a gent in his sixties, a lifelong obsessive reader who now has abundant free time following the financial collapse of his construction company. Hey, Mac, how will you spend your days? Answer: Mac plans to sit at his desk in his den and do something completely new: write, specifically, to keep a diary (not for publication in his lifetime).

You're a newbie writer, Mac? That's hard to believe since your writing skills appear to be at the level of an accomplished author, say, someone like Enrique Vila-Matas. And, besides which, halfway through your diary entries, you tell us all that stuff about a construction company is untrue; you're really a lawyer who was sacked from the law firm where you spent your entire professional career.

Whoa, Mac, are you taking on the role of the ultimate unreliable narrator? Hey, Enrique Vila-Matas, similar to Montano's Malady, are you playing a labyrinthine literary shell game with us, your readers? One thing's for certain: exactly what's true and what's not, what's fact and what's made up, will mostly be left to each reader.

Mac obsesses over the act of writing and he laces his quizzical observations and judgements throughout, as per this example: “if he's honest with himself, that this activity (writing) has nothing to do with the vulgar idea of believing himself to be a writer, because – and I want to say this now with no more beating about the bush – in order to write one must cease to be a writer.”

What to make of this remark? My sense is Mac understands a writer is best attending to the writing at hand, simply putting words on paper rather than being continually preoccupied with one's identity and status as a writer.

Yet, is Mac violating his own rule when he tells us: "I wonder why it is that today, knowing myself to be a mere novice, I worked my fingers to the bone trying in vain to begin this diary with a few impeccable opening paragraphs." Hey, Mac, don't drive yourself crazy by being too tough on yourself. Whoops! Such self-analysis could prove a foreshadowing of things to come. Poor, Mac.

Sidebar: Mac's name comes from a famous scene in John Ford's My Darling Clementine involving a bartender by the name of Mac. And Mac refuses to divulge the name appearing on his birth certificate since that name amounts to no more than an awful, tyrannical imposition set down by his paternal grandfather.

Repetition counts as another one of Mac's obsessions, with references to the likes of Søren Kierkegaard, (repetition and recollection are the same movements only in opposite directions), Alejandro Zambra (a character in one of his short stories is a repeater) and Peggy Day (writer of a daily horoscope Mac takes seriously).

Mac's obsessions reach a peak with his interactions on the Barcelona streets with famous author Ander Sánchez – and especially when Mac decides to rewrite a novel Sánchez wrote years ago when mostly drunk, a novel Sánchez considers pure garbage, a novel with the title Walter's Problem.

This brings us to the heart of Mac's Problem: Mac detailing chapters of this Sánchez novel where the author devoted sections to imitating (or parodying) short stories in the style of various authors such as John Cheever, Djuna Barnes, Ernest Hemingway, Jorge Luis Borges. And we're also given samples of Mac, in turn, rewriting Sánchez's stories.

Will such a diary project drive Mac crazy? That's exactly what Mac's wife Carmen thinks is happening. And with justification. For instance, one afternoon Mac returns home drenched in sweat. When Carmen asks Mac what happened, he tells of narrowly escaping death, a chase, karate chops and a possible corpse. And further on, at one point Mac accuses Carmen of carrying on an affair with Sánchez and at another point thinking Carmen plans an escape to Mars.

Are these bizarre exchanges and events happening not out in the world but rather within Mac's mind and diary writing? Let's not forget Mac noting how one character “believed in a fiction that admits to being a fiction, in the knowledge that nothing else exists and that the exquisite truth lies in knowing that it's a fiction, and yet believing in it all the same.”

Enrique Vila-Matas has done it again, writing a novel about the nature of literature that can be read and appreciated on multiple levels.


Spanish author Enrique Vila-Matas, born 1948

una versión menor de guerra y guerra de krasznahorkai

My god, I loved this book. Do you ever find yourself reading something and thinking, 'This was written just for me'? It hits all of my metafictional pleasure points. The book is imbued with other literature (and had me looking up a few names to follow up on (such as Marcel Schowb and Pierre Michon), but also a reflexive commentary on its own composition as well as a fictional text within the text called Walter & His Problem which the narrator, Mac, is trying to 'repeat' even as he insists that what he is writing is a diary and not a novel. It's a joyous celebration of literature even as it's also a depiction of a descent into madness by an unreliable narrator. Just brilliant.

Another one from the International Booker Prize longlist. Interestingly touches on one of my current obsessions, The Thousand And One Nights, as did the Azar novel which is also longlisted. Absolutely adored it. Give it the prize.

The book has a great opening - Mac wants to write a novel that would be left unfinished because of his untimely death or disappearance but, only he would know, that the novel was actually complete. He got this idea from the fascination that readers have with books left unfinished in this way. The first chapter had made me feel that I am in for some real good stuff but it goes down very quickly.

The novel is shaped like a diary and it has the problem which ensures that most diaries aren't art - it has no plot to it. Nothing intersting happens in the book. The only reason I get any satisfaction from reading it was all the art trivia. And it has lots and lots of that; so you would love it if you are into knowing more about authors or artists than books or art.

An extremely Vila-Matas novel, in which an out-of-work builder and covert literary type engages with his neighbor's forgotten novel, which in turn engages with a whole retinue of literary figures from the modernist past, chapter by chapter. It's a strange beast, and while I appreciated it, it also felt a little draggy by the last 40 pages or so. I'm hyped to read more Vila-Matas now, though!