Mac's Problem

February 25, 2019
In this impressive novel, Vila-Matas (Bartleby & Co.) endearingly chronicles the blundering writing exploits of Mac, a 60-something Barcelona man at the end of his career. Reeling from his failure in his family’s construction company, Mac avoids contemplating his financial status and instead embarks on a writing project. Initially, Mac endeavors to write a memoir, but after a conversation with his well-known neighbor, the writer Andrea Sanchez, Mac decides to secretly rewrite Sanchez’s story collection and address its problems (as perceived by Sanchez). As he begins writing, it becomes clear that the project highlights the displacement Mac feels within his own family, with his children grown and his wife, Carmen, occupied with her own company. As Mac reads Sanchez’s work, he finds a story that he is sure was written years ago about Carmen. That discovery draws him into a growing state of consuming suspicion that Carmen and Sanchez are involved, which undermines his daily life as he obsessively tries to learn more about Sanchez, interrogates people close to him, begins living out the stories, and starts to have trouble distinguishing reality from fiction. Vila-Matas’s bouncy prose is the highlight of this lively ride through a writer’s mind. He winningly depicts a man embroiled in regret and the places that it takes him.

February 15, 2019
A Barcelonian diarist unravels into his devotion for literature.Two months into unemployment, Mac, a 60-ish husband, father, part-time drunk, and lifelong reader, begins a diary. Tyro though he is, Mac's not without ambition. His "great dream" as a writer is to become "a falsifier"--that is, to write a book which, upon its discovery, "could appear to be 'posthumous' and 'unfinished' when it would, in fact, be perfectly complete." But, of course, "a beginner must be prepared for anything," so Mac is content to simply "put pen to paper every day and see what happens." His only demand: that his diary not turn into a novel: "I don't...have much sympathy for novels, because they are, as Barthes said, a form of death, transforming life into Fate." Alas for Mac, he has a chance encounter with his neighbor, Ander Sánchez, a "celebrated Barcelona writer" who, 30 years before, wrote an eclectic novel in stories called Walter's Problem: the purported memoir of a murderous ventriloquist and his journey to "the historic heart of that source of all stories." Walter's Problem was a "flawed work," but Mac, who's fascinated by repetition, suddenly realizes that if he were to write a novel, it would be a rewrite (with modifications) of Walter's Problem. This is where Vila-Matas (Vampire in Love, 2016, etc.) begins turning the screw: As Mac prepares his rewrite, he begins encountering troubling replicas of Sánchez's novel in his own life. Longtime Spanish heavyweight Vila-Matas' latest offering is a metafictional paean to storytelling. Mac, in his diary, pores incessantly through literature and life, struggling to demarcate the two; he references Ana María Matute, Peter Paul Rubens, Walter Benjamin, Jean Rhys, Bernard Malamud, Marcel Schwob, David Markson, Philip K. Dick, David Foster Wallace, and dozens more as he tries to map (and ends up remapping until it's incoherent) the fluid borderlands between fact and fiction. What's left of Mac in the end? That which was there in the beginning: storytelling--the webs and rhymes and replications of literature.Diary, essay, thriller, conspiracy theory, posthumous memoir, novel--Vila-Matas uses all the materials to construct his latest metafictional fun house.

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