“She, in any case, had long felt by then that literature had nothing to say to her vision of the world or make her see things in a different way.” ( )

Un libro che è come un ponte tra la galassia Gutenberg e la galassia Internet. Dublinesque è un meraviglioso ritratto di dolore, sogni d'evasione e sinistri ritorni. Il romanzo è amaramente umano, pieno di smarrimento e solitudine. Il personaggio ama la Letteratura, ma poi la butta a terra come vanità. Offre sogni e viaggi come speranza. La solitudine segue sempre. La dipendenza e l'invecchiamento infestano implacabilmente. La narrazione segue Riba, l'io narrante, o meglio lo insegue, lui è un editore in pensione sobrio per due anni dopo il rischio della pre-morte. La sua casa editrice è defunta, la sua vocazione quasi estinta in assenza di lettori intrepidi e attivi. Monologa con se stesso e con il mondo che non lo sente. I suoi pensieri lo portano a Dublino. Offre un requiem, uno in concomitanza con la scena del cimitero nell'Ulisse di Joyce. Tutto proviene da lì. Fa solo riferimento a Sterne, Joyce, O'Brien, Beckett, Gracq, Perec, Larkin e altri. Questo romanzo descrive ciò che amo della letteratura e ciò che detesto della vita. ( )

Un libro che è come un ponte tra la galassia Gutenberg e la galassia Internet. Dublinesque è un meraviglioso ritratto di dolore, sogni d'evasione e sinistri ritorni. Il romanzo è amaramente umano, pieno di smarrimento e solitudine. Il personaggio ama la Letteratura, ma poi la butta a terra come vanità. Offre sogni e viaggi come speranza. La solitudine segue sempre. La dipendenza e l'invecchiamento infestano implacabilmente. La narrazione segue Riba, l'io narrante, o meglio lo insegue, lui è un editore in pensione sobrio per due anni dopo il rischio della pre-morte. La sua casa editrice è defunta, la sua vocazione quasi estinta in assenza di lettori intrepidi e attivi. Monologa con se stesso e con il mondo che non lo sente. I suoi pensieri lo portano a Dublino. Offre un requiem, uno in concomitanza con la scena del cimitero nell'Ulisse di Joyce. Tutto proviene da lì. Fa solo riferimento a Sterne, Joyce, O'Brien, Beckett, Gracq, Perec, Larkin e altri. Questo romanzo descrive ciò che amo della letteratura e ciò che detesto della vita. ( )

Retired Barcelona publisher Samuel Riba plans a trip to Dublin for Bloomsday, 2008 with a group of writer-friends. As well as following in the footsteps of Joyce's characters, he wants to use the occasion to hold a funeral for the Gutenberg Age. He's a recovering alcoholic whose wife has threatened to leave him the next time he gets drunk: what could possibly go wrong in Dublin...?

As you might expect from Vila-Matas, this is a very intertextual book, about someone who always seems to end up seeing the world in terms of what writers have said about it in books. And who suffers from "publisher's disease", always expecting to see the next Great Writer popping up from under a bush. But there's also the feeling that the whole structure of literature that he has devoted his life to has been demolished whilst he wasn't looking, brick by brick from the inside, by Beckett, the anti-Joyce of his conceptual universe.

Riba is only too aware that since giving up his professional activities he's come close to becoming a hikikomori, reluctant to leave the house and get too far away from the screen of his computer. Even if Google means the end of the printed book, it is an amazingly powerful aid to following intertextual streams of thought in wild and unexpected directions, and Riba can't get enough of it.

It should be a depressing book, with its themes of old age, loneliness, alcoholism, the death of the printed book, wet weather, graveyards, and so on, not to mention the sinister unidentified figure who keeps popping up in the corner of the frame — is it the author Riba keeps seeing, or the young Beckett, or someone else altogether? But the mood is oddly upbeat. The narrator sticks to third-person (although this feels like a very first-person sort of a book) in order to keep an ironic distance away from Riba, and it is obvious that neither the narrator, nor the reader, nor Riba himself, can possibly take Riba and his literary obsessions quite seriously. As in the Philip Larkin poem that gives Vila-Matas his title, this is a very jolly kind of funeral. ( )

Dublinesque is a wonderful portrait of sorrow, escapist dreams and sinister returns. Vila-Matas'
novel is bitterly human, riddled with loss and solitude. It reveres Literature, but then knocks it to the floor as vanity. It offers dreams and travels as hope. Loneliness always follows. Addiction and ageing haunt relentlessly.

The narrative follows Riba, or rather it chases him, a retired publisher who is sober for two years after near-death indulgence. His publishing house is defunct, his vocation near-extinct in the absence of intrepid, active readers. He begins to project. His efforts lead to Dublin. He offers a requiem, one to coincide with the cemetery scene in Ulysses. Dublinesque proceeds from there. It only references Sterne, Joyce, O'Brien, Beckett, Gracq, Perec, Larkin and a few dozen others. This novel illustrated what I cherish about literature and what I loathe about life. ( )