A
Literary Saloon
&
Site of Review.

Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs.

Contents:

Main

the Best

the Rest

Review Index

Links

to e-mail us:


support the site

the complete review - fiction

The Illogic of Kassel

by
Enrique Vila-Matas

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

- Return to top of the page -

Our Assessment:

B : solid meditation on art as/in real-life fiction

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "This zoolike experience would provide Vila-Matas with the source material for The Illogic of Kassel, which inverts Vos’s treatment of form and content: the book, though based in fact, adopts novelistic techniques to pose as fiction, describing actual events with ironic distance to question and trouble their "realism."" - Pasha Malla, The Globe and Mail
  
  
• "(A)n adventure novel of ideas. He writes in the first person here and, in a performative twist, through two alter egos: a cast of Enriques in different guises, narrating as if through a fuzzy mirror, so that the story is never quite clear. This is an earnest novel, but it’s also rollicking, a passionate defense of literature as an essential element of public life and, more generally, of art in a time of numbers" - Valerie Miles, The New York Times
  
  
• "Vila-Matas has found his own solution to the supposed exhaustion of possibilities in literature: a devotion to digression and lightness. (...) He chooses humour in a way that allows him to have big ideas while relentlessly making fun of them." - Lidija Haas, The Telegraph

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

- Return to top of the page -

The complete review's Review:

       In The Illogic of Kassel the narrator, a writer in his sixties from Spain of some "eccentric literary fame" -- i.e. strongly resembling author Enrique Vila-Matas -- is invited to participate in the 2012 Documenta, a contemporary art show held every five years in Kassel, Germany; he is invited to be on display as a writer-in-residence at an off-site venue, the Dschingis Khan Restaurant.
       In 2012 author Enrique Vila-Matas was, in fact, a participant in dOCUMENTA (13), a writer-in-residence at the Dschingis Khan Restaurant .....
       Vila-Matas has frequently relied on actual and literary figures in his fiction, and often figures in them in some form himself. But even in a work such as Never any End to Paris there is some distance between reality and fiction -- in that case both temporal (the autobiographical novel revisits events from decades earlier) and literary. In The Illogic of Kassel there seems barely any line between fiction and reality left to blur: it is a work of almost complete immediacy, and the setting and circumstances -- complete with the art on display and the people involved -- are almost all easily ascertainable as factual. Yet The Illogic of Kassel is not just an expanded variation on glossy magazine pieces of the 'My Experience of Documenta'-sort; it is a work of fiction.
       Two concepts that Vila-Matas employs in separating fiction from mere fact are that of the McGuffin -- a plot element that catches the reader's attention but in fact serves no real purpose in the story proper -- and the concept of 'avant-garde'. In fact, that's how Vila-Matas begins his novel -- in an avant-garde-McGuffin mash-up:

     The more avant-garde an author is, the less he can allow himself to be labeled as such. But who cares about that ? In fact, my opening sentence is just a McGuffin having little to do with what I intend to relate, though it could be that in the long run all I can tell about my invitation to Kassel and my later trip to the city will eventually have everything to do with that sentence.

We are amazed by writers who believe that the more empirical and prosaic they are, the closer they get to the truth., when in fact the more details you pile up, the further that takes you away from reality

     I thought: didn't I come to Kassel precisely to seek the aesthetic instant ? Yes, but not only that.

- M.A.Orthofer, 8 June 2015

- Return to top of the page -

Links:

• New Directions publicity page
• Harvill Secker publicity page
• Feltrinelli publicity page
• dOCUMENTA (13)
• dOCUMENTA (13): Writing’s Retreat into the Context of Contemporary Art by Nick Thurston

• La Cause Littéraire (French)
• El Cultural (Spanish)
• Le Devoir (French)
• The Globe and Mail
• El Imparcial (Spanish)
• Libération (French)
• The Modern Novel
• The Mookse and the Gripes
• Music & Literature
• The New Republic (scroll down for review)
• Publishers Weekly
• The Telegraph
• Words without Borders

• Official site
• Enrique Vila-Matas at Escritores.org

• Bartleby & Co.
• Because She Never Asked
• A Brief History of Portable Literature
• Dublinesque
• Mac's Problem (UK title: Mac and His Problem)
• Montano
• Never any End to Paris

• See Index of Spanish literature

- Return to top of the page -

About the Author:

       Spanish author Enrique Vila-Matas was born in 1948. He has won numerous literary prizes.

- Return to top of the page -

© 2015-2021 the complete review

Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links