Enrique Vila-Matas, Jonathan Dunne (translator) · 2000 (Eng. 2004) · EPUB · Calibre ID 864
Resurfaced in Wrote Nothing Today (2026-10-08).
Role in the triad
Counter-diagnosis: not-writing as vocation and canon
Why this book
Turns Flaherty’s disease into a catalogue of ‘writers of the No’ in 86 footnotes to an invisible text; claims Kafka via the rainy Sunday (note 24) and Melville as founder. Quotes Kafka through Spanish, so it can be compared line by line with Kresh. Performs its own block on Salinger (notes 29–31).
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- ‘I never had much luck with women. … Apart from that, I am happy. Today most of all because, on this day 8 July 1999, I have begun this diary that is also going to be a book of footnotes commenting on an invisible text, which I hope will prove my reliability as a tracker of Bartlebys.’ (opening)
- ‘the illness, the disease, endemic to contemporary letters, the negative impulse or attraction towards nothingness …’ (opening)
- ‘for a while now I’ve been staring at my fingers. I think this week I’ve been totally under the influence of Goethe …’ (note 24)
- ‘There is the proof, if anyone was in doubt, that Kafka suffered from Bartleby’s syndrome.’ (note 24)
- ‘The problem with Salinger is that he had a certain tendency to repeat himself.’ (note 31)
- ‘He had renounced writing for good and, with the strange gesture of his escape, announced the modern belief that all literature is the denial of itself.’ (note 86)
Themes
Bartleby’s syndrome · footnotes · Hofmannsthal Chandos · literature of the No · Melville · Rimbaud · Salinger · Tolstoy · translation drift · Walser