Canon de cámara oscura
The best of Enrique Vila-Matas returns to the style of the celebrated A Brief History of Portable Literature with a book about books, about the impossibility of writing, and about the ultimate meaning of literature.
A novel as erudite as it is ironic, offering a unique journey through a light and portable library of essential books while exploring themes such as the foreign voices that coexist within us or the infinite absence left by those we love—”the same absence that Eurydice left Orpheus, from which many believe writing was born.”
Vidal Escabia, the protagonist of this story, has selected 71 books in a darkroom of his house with the idea of writing a displaced, untimely, and unconventional canon over the course of 71 days—a dissident alternative to official canons. Each morning, he randomly selects one of these books and brings a fragment to light for his Canon. However, what he uncovers in his readings influences both his life and his writing. Suspicions arise about whether the author of the Darkroom Canon has an android origin and is a survivor of Barcelona’s Denver-7, or whether, on the contrary, he is using the canon to give meaning to his life in the face of the boundless love he feels—beyond time and space—for his absent daughter.
PRESS
«Vila-Matas takes it one step further. He returns to the spirit of his Bartlebys who refuse to write and reaches the meta-Vilamatasian 25 years later.» Paco Cerdá, Babelia, El País
«A defining novel in Vila-Matas’s body of work. It’s not vague science fiction, but rather the precise science of fiction.» Rodrigo Fresán, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos
«A brilliant, intelligent, funny, and delightfully rogue book.» Antonio Martínez Asensio, Hoy por hoy, SER Radio
«A fascinating read in which, as always with its author, life and literature are one and the same.» Jesús Ferrer, La Razón
TRANSLATIONS
Brazil: Companhia das Letras; France: Actes Sud
