Bartleby And Co
Enrique Vila-Matas
  • Published: 15 July 2005
  • ISBN: 9780099453727
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $29.99

Bartleby And Co

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Prize-winning novel from Spain - intellectual, contemporary, very funny and highly original - by one of the most admired of present-day Spanish writers.

Marcelo, a clerk in a Barcelona office who might himself have emerged from a novel by Kafka, inhabits a world peopled by characters in literature. He once wrote a novel about the impossibility of love, but since then he has written nothing. He has, in short, become a 'Bartleby', so named after the character in Herman Melville's short story who, when asked to do something, always replied: 'I would prefer not to.'

One day Marcelo sets out to make a search through literature for all those other possible Bartlebys, and with this in mind he has the engagingly original notion of keeping a diary and writing footnotes to an invisible text. His references to authors, both real and invented, provide the reader with extravagant doses of humour that are at once hilarious, irreverent and stimulating.
  • Published: 15 July 2005
  • ISBN: 9780099453727
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $29.99
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About the author

Enrique Vila-Matas

Enrique Vila-Matas is widely considered to be one of Spain's most important contemporary novelists. His work has been translated into 30 languages and has won numerous international literary prizes, including the Herralde Prize, the Prix Médicis étranger and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. Vila-Matas' books have been longlisted (Montano) and shortlisted (Dublinesque) for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Never Any End to Paris was a finalist for the US Best Translated Book Award.

portrait photo of Enrique Vila-Matas

Also by Enrique Vila-Matas

Mac and His Problem
The Illogic of Kassel
Never Any End to Paris
Dublinesque
Montano
See all

Praise for Bartleby And Co

Vila-Matas has had the brilliant idea of tracking down literature's slackers - Bartleby and Co proposes a shadowy history of literature

Alberto Manguel

Ingenious... An Excellent book... A work of honesty and profound beauty

John Burnside, Scotland on Sunday

Bartleby and Co is set to become the book of the literary season... An enormously enjoyable and intelligent book, and if I am not mistaken, an important one

El Pais

Told with considerable elegance and an admirable lack of melodrama

Spectator