Montevideo by Enrique Vila-Matas, Sophie Hughes (Translator), Annie McDermott (Translator); 2025. Hardcover.

The narrator of Montevideo is an itinerant writer and erstwhile drug pusher in the throes of a personal and literary transformation. Increasingly disillusioned with life in Paris and hoping for an artistic breakthrough, he ventures out in search of a “new style.” His quest takes him to Barcelona and then to a hotel in Montevideo, Uruguay, called the Cervantes, where seemingly both Julio Cortázar and Adolfo Bioy Casares found inspiration. Montevideo, however, is not the final stop: Bogotá, Reykjavík, New York, and St. Gallen in Switzerland are ahead on the narrator’s journey. But to what?

Enrique Vila-Matas extends his inquiry into the purposes and functions of fiction: Can the products of the imagination be set on paper, coherently and faithfully? Or is literature forever destined to fall hopelessly short—consigned to be nothing more than an impoverished, inaccurate representation?