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Informationen zum Autor Enrique Vila-Matas is widely considered to be one of Spain's most important contemporary novelists. His work has been translated into 36 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. Mac & His Problem was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020. Klappentext 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. Zusammenfassung Marcelo, a humble clerk in a Barcelona office who might have come from a novel by Kafka, inhibits a world peopled by characters in literature. He once wrote a novel about the impossibility of love, but since then he has written nothing and a mental trauma has meant that he has been unable to put pen to paper; he has become a 'Bartleby'.
