seen from China
seen from China
seen from Russia
seen from Hong Kong SAR China
seen from Taiwan
seen from Australia
seen from Malaysia
seen from Russia
seen from Türkiye
seen from Malaysia
seen from Türkiye
seen from Türkiye
seen from China
seen from Slovakia
seen from China
seen from Australia
seen from Malaysia
seen from China
seen from China
seen from China
...to be able to leave behind everything that might cross his path, to be constantly leaving everything behind, to be free and on the move, without ever slowing down.
Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque (trans. Anne Mclean and Rosalind Harvey)
Strange sea of an intense blue, dangerous like love.
Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque
“He dreams of the day when the spell of the best-seller will be broken, making way for the reappearance of the talented reader, and for the terms of the moral contract between author and audience to be reconsidered. He dreams of the day when literary publishers can breathe again, those who live for an active reader, for a reader open enough to buy a book and allow a conscience radically different from his own to appear in his mind. He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. Because we mustn’t deceive ourselves: on the journey of reading we often travel through difficult terrains that demand a capacity for intelligent emotion, a desire to understand the other, and to approach a language distinct from the one of our daily tyrannies. As Vilém Vok says, it’s not so simple to feel the world as Kafka felt it, a world in which movement is denied and it becomes impossible even to go from one village to the next. The same skills needed for writing are needed for reading. Writers fail readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it. . . .” -Enrique Vila-Matas, from Dublinesque [tr. Anne McLean & Rosalind Harvey]
“There are days when he feels like he’s lots of people at the same time and his brain is more peopled with ghosts than his parents’ house. And he can’t stand any of these people.”
Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque (trans. Anne Mclean & Rosalind Harvey)
I don’t know myself. The list of books I have published seems to have obscured for ever the person behind the books. My biography is my catalogue. But the man who was there before I decided to become a publisher is missing. I, in short, am missing.
Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque (trans. Anne Mclean and Rosalind Harvey)
“Beckett has always been an example of a writer who risks everything, has no roots and shouldn’t have any: no family, no brothers or sisters. He comes from the void.”
Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque (tr. Anne Mclean and Rosalind Harvey)
Everything will have been forgotten. Even the rain beneath which all the dead once fell in love will have faded away. And lost too, the memory of the moon beneath which they once walked along an also forgotten road like lost souls.
Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque
They smile nervously, trying to minimise the tension of this odd moment. Maybe he loves her so madly because she is someone he will never know everything about.
Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque
