Vampire in Love

Starred review from July 25, 2016
Nearly five decades into his career, Spanish author Vila-Matas’s (Bartleby & Co.) wonderful short fiction is collected for the first time in English, with 19 career-spanning tales expertly translated by Costa. These stories swerve in unexpected directions. “Torre Del Mirador” unfolds when a phone call from a desperate stranger leads the call’s recipient to secretly uncover the stranger’s past. “In Search of the Electrifying Double Act” concerns a once-famous actor, now overweight and unemployed, looking for a thin partner to join him in an Abbott-and-Costello-type undertaking, only to accidentally find himself dealing with a dangerous secret society when he approaches the wrong man. “They Say I Should Say Who I Am” begins as a man tries to introduce himself to an unknown audience, and deviates into a funny and detailed story concerning the man and the moment he caused a famous painter to go mad. “An Idle Soul” seems to be a simple morning conversation between a husband and wife until the narrator reveals itself to be the mosquito netting covering the couple’s bed. Vila-Matas fills his fiction with forlorn characters—the title story, for example, follows a depressed, hunchbacked vampire—yet never have so many stories about distressed personalities been so incredibly amusing.

July 1, 2016
Barcelona-based novelist Vila-Matas (Because She Never Asked, 2015) serves up a collection of beguiling short stories.Yes, he has unsightly fangs, and yes, things could go all unseemly at any minute owing to his interest in a young altar boy, but apart from that, it seems a little cruel to saddle poor Jose Ferrato, the subject of Vila-Matas' title story, with the nickname "Nosferatu"--or, as the narrator says, Saint Nosferatu: "I'm going to call him that because, like all those in love, he is both vampire and martyr." Not many of Vila-Matas' characters are lucky enough to be in love, but plenty are just this side of loony: in one long tale, at its dark center a shadowy figure with the unlikely name of Hong Kong, an ancillary player is even hustled off to a mental hospital under the care of "a nun who offered him some cookies" simply because he has seen into the weird way that things work in this Matrix world of ours. That's not to say that Vila-Matas works a sci-fi beat; if his fiction were to approach genre classifiability, it might better fall under horror, a kind of Lovecraft-ian somberness tempered by fistfuls of amphetamines--the diet, at any rate, of the protagonist of the opening story, who falls into the company of French novelist Marguerite Duras. But should we believe his yarns? So many of these stories turn on misdirection, after all, about which the author warns us repeatedly, as with his strange insistence that fiction "is all that exists and that the exquisite truth consists in knowing that it is a fiction and, nevertheless, believing in it." Readers not befuddled by the twists and turns Vila-Matas packs into a few pages are likely to be enchanted by narrators who are never quite trustworthy ("I treated other people's memories as mine, and that is why I can now boast of having had a life"), offbeat setups, and brilliant language. Odd stories with a bite: cynical, funny, and often puzzling.

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September 1, 2016
The recently translated novella A Brief History of Portable Literature (2015) put Vila-Matas on the Spanish-language literary map upon its original publication in 1985. In the three decades since, the Barcelona-born author has published numerous short stories, 19 of which are collected here, and each one carries the hallmarks of Vila-Matas' zany, electrifying stylefrom the hilarious and semi-autobiographical Sea Swell, in which a frenetic amphetamine addict encounters French filmmaker Marguerite Duras (real-life Vila-Matas reportedly rented an attic from the real-life Duras), to the uncomfortable chuckles elicited by Rosa Schwarzer Comes Back to Life, surely the bleakest birthday story ever written. Identifying Marks takes place during an election year and proves decidedly timely, opening with the quote: America is basically a big circus. These collected stories seem to reflect an ongoing quest for the next absurd premise or unforgettable character, like the unemployed actor who stumbles into a secret society, or the love-struck, hunchbacked vampire of the title story. As Vila-Matas continues to gain readers stateside, this collection should be cherished for its inventive ambition and oddball energy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)