Dublinesque

von Enrique Vila-Matas

Samuel Riba is about to turn 60. A successful publisher in Barcelona, he has edited many of his generation's most important authors. But he is increasingly prone to attacks of anxiety - inspired partly by giving up alcohol, and partly by the digital revolution and its threat to books. When his elderly parents demand to know what he is going to do next, he concocts a spur-of-the moment trip to Dublin. Why Dublin? He has never been there, but he once had an intense dream about it. He was sitting on the pavement outside a pub with his wife, who was crying because he had started drinking again. What is the dream trying to tell him?

Gathering together a group of friends, Riba sets off for Dublin on the pretext that he wishes to honour James Joyce's Ulysses, and to hold, on Bloomsday, a funeral for the book. But as he and his friends give their orations, a mysterious figure in a mackintosh hovers in the cemetery, looking rather like Joyce's protégé Samuel Beckett. Is it Beckett, or is it the writer of genius that Riba has spent his whole career trying, and failing, to find? As he ponders this, and other profound questions, he marks a death but makes some illuminating discoveries about life.

Enrique Vila-Matas is widely considered to be one of the most important contemporary Spanish novelists, and Dublinesque has been declared his masterpiece. Mixing fact and fiction, irony and pathos, Dublinesque is a novel of ideas that grabs at your heart. Its first English-language publication will coincide with Bloomsday 2012, a significant year for Joyce lovers in that it marks the ninetieth anniversary of the publication of Ulysses, and the year Joyce's work comes out of copyright.