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the Complete Review
the complete review - fiction



Montevideo

by
Enrique Vila-Matas


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

To purchase Montevideo


Title: Montevideo
Author: Enrique Vila-Matas
Genre: Novel
Written: 2022 (Eng. 2025)
Length: 230 pages
Original in: Spanish
Availability: Montevideo - US
Montevideo - US (Spanish)
Montevideo - UK
Montevideo - Canada
Montevideo - France
Montevideo - Deutschland
Montevideo - Italia
Montevideo - España
from: Bookshop.org (US)
directly from: Yale University Press
  • Spanish title: Montevideo
  • Translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott

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Our Assessment:

B : solid and typical Vila-Matas novel

See our review for fuller assessment.



Review Summaries
Source Rating Date Reviewer
il manifesto . 13/1/2024 Francesca Borrelli
Le Monde . 2/9/2023 Tiphaine Samoyault
El Mundo . 6/9/2022 Juan Marqués
Die Presse . 7/6/2024 A.Puff-Trojan


  From the Reviews:
  • "In Montevideo (...) ogni riferimento a persone e fatti realmente accaduti è del tutto intenzionale, e funziona da anti-bussola per disorientarsi in letture note e in altre mai fatte, guidati per contrasto da una prosa limpidamente seducente, nonché manifestamente sprezzante di ogni formalità post-sperimentalista." - Francesca Borrelli, il manifesto

  • "Golosamente errática, y desde su eufónico título, Montevideo (...) busca una belleza extraña en la digresión, en la acumulación, en cierta improvisación lúcida. Pequeñas secuencias narrativas, a menudo meramente anecdóticas, dan lugar a otras que se van complicando y que al cabo conforman una novela redonda, en el sentido de circular, pero sobre todo en el de impecable. El libro está lleno de observaciones, malentendidos y bromas que tal vez, en algunos casos, no van a ningún lado, pero que tienen muchísima gracia, y que, si se miran bien, contienen una enorme sabiduría que no afecta solo a la literatura, pues apuntan a un modo juguetón, creativo y distinto de afrontar la vida." - Juan Marqués, El Mundo

  • "Sagen wir es frei heraus: Im Roman Montevideo gibt es eine Menge doppelter Böden mit eingebauten Falltüren. (…) Beim Lesen hat man manchmal Mühe, die verschiedenen Erzählebenen miteinander zu verknüpfen. Doch die Lektüre lohnt sich allemal: einmal als genüssliche Denkübung, einmal als Freude an gut geschriebener Literatur." - Andreas Puff-Trojan, Die Presse

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.

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The complete review's Review:

       The six sections of Montevideo, each titled after a city, go full circle, from Paris to Paris, passing through Cascais, Montevideo, Reykjavík (barely even a stop along the way, taking up only a single paragraph), and Bogotá (a section that extends for nearly a hundred pages) along the way (though in fact these are not the narrator's only stations).
       It begins with something of a false start: as the Vila-Matas-like narrator explains early in the second part, ('Cascais'):

     The "Paris" section was going to be the first chapter of a book, now definitively abandoned, which would have covered the story of my style in its entirety and which I planned to begin with the inevitable Nabokov quote: "The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style."
       That first part offered both biography as well as story of (and introduction to) (Vila-Matas') writing and style. It opens:
     In February of '74 I traveled to Paris with the anachronistic intention of becoming a writer from the 1920s, "lost generation" style.
       He describes not writing during that first two-year stay -- while noting: "It was very unusual for someone in Paris not to write" -- though he had already: "published my first and only book, the exercise in style I completed in some barracks in the North African city of Melilla. It was titled Nepal". (The dates and place match Vila-Mata's biography, but that first novel was titled: Mujer en el espejo contemplando el paisaje. ) After completing -- and brought on by -- this Paris-section, the narrator finds himself suffering from a: "devastating and sometimes, though only sometimes, distressing writer's block", and the struggle for story and for figuring out what to write (and again being able to write) make up much of the literary odyssey recorded here.
       Central to the story is also a Julio Cortázar story, 'La puerta condenada' (translated here as: 'The Sealed Door'), in which the narrator stays at a hotel in Montevideo and finds a hidden door in his room. (As the narrator of Montevideo notes -- made aware of the fact by Adolfo Bioy Casares himself --, the Cortázar story has a double of sorts, Bioy Casares' strangely similar 'Un viaje o El mago inmortal', making it all the more intriguing.) The Cortázar story is a lifelong obsession of the Montevideo-narrator -- to the extent that:
     "One day I'll go to Montevideo and look for the room on the second floor of the Cervantes Hotel, and it will be a real-life journey to the exact place of the fantastical, perhaps the exact place of strangeness itself," I'd even written at one point, with rather more fireworks than conviction, though by now it's a well-known fact that a lack of conviction can lead us, whether we expect it or not, to conviction itself.
       (Vila-Matas' obsessions with the story and the hotel room in Montevideo dates back at least to 2007.)
       Unsurprisingly, the narrator eventually has the opportunity to visit Monetvideo, stays at the same hotel -- and has a door-experience of his own, and much of Montevideo is built around that (including then also the fall-out, as the narrator mulls the meaning of his experience and continues to try to shape something into writing.
       Literary figures and works figure prominently throughout, and the narrator mentions some interaction with real-life figures including Antonio Tabucchi and Adam Thirlwell, but the most prominent are two fictional authors: a Madeleine Moore, author of only one work, La concession française, and Enzo Cuadrelli (apparently modeled on Sergio Chejfec).
       Montevideo is a novel of place(s) and of writing, and imagination inspired by and spinning wildly off the real. At its most extreme, the narrator reports:
     I was still in that hellish Bogotá inside the Beaubourg, standing before the two possible exits, even as I was walking around St.Gallen with Cuadrelli. I felt excited about what was being set in motion, especially because from a young age I had tried to keep up with the rapid-fire brain circuits that capture and connect distant points in space. Paris, Bogotá, Cascais, St.Gallen, Barcelona, and Montevideo were, at that moment, the brain circuit around which, as if I were my camera, I moved in the darkness like the radar on a ship, finding other realities and other ports -- and other portals.
       Such layering of memory, experience, and fantasy are found throughout the novel -- and much of Vila-Matas' other work --, and the draw of (and difficulty, if not impossibility, of choosing between) the 'two possible exits', like the mysterious hotel-room doors a fine hook for Vila-Mata's ambling, far-flung ruminations. (It's almost surprising that he doesn't bring Young's double-slit experiment into it all, as it would neatly fit -- but Vila-Matas does generally avoid the specific-scientific.)
       The narrator admits at one point:
     Since none of it made any sense, I couldn't stop asking myself questions, or putting them to everyone else.
       He means a more specific thing here -- regarding the hotel and the sealed door -- but the words apply almost as well to the novel as a whole. Not that it doesn't make any sense -- certainly most of the detail is simple and realistic enough -- but there's enough throughout that the narrator (and reader) constantly question.
       It all makes for a very Vila-Matas-novel, a variation on his themes, and on writing, in particular. It's quite good fun, with some very good bits, if not quite as neat a whole as his best work.

- M.A.Orthofer, 14 November 2025

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Links:

Montevideo: Reviews: Enrique Vila-Matas: Other books by Enrique Vila-Matas under review: Other books of interest under review:

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About the Author:

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

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© 2025 the complete review

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