This Neo-Dadaist novella posits that a group of avant-garde literati during the interwar period founded a secretive movement to advocate portable literature, a concept vaguely, if at all, defined. Of course, this plot, such as it is, is probably not meant to be taken seriously, and the product is perhaps less a novella than a series of prose poems which deploy beautiful language, stirring images, and namechecks a shedload of writers and painters of the period. Though I hadn't heard of anywhere near all of them, I decided to assume that all or most of them were actual historical figures; the publisher could have helped out the perplexed by brief identification footnotes. ( )

¿Qué pretende Vila-Matas con este libro?¿Qué sentido, finalidad, objeto persigue con ésta novela? Su inteligente prosa nos presenta un desfile interminable de personajes históricos en algunos instantes de sus vidas. Instantes imaginarios en muchos casos pero verosímiles y absurdos por igual.

La sensación de desconcierto se desgrana página tras página en un laberinto imposible cuyo único hilo de Ariadna es el reconocimiento geográfico de las ciudades donde se desenvuelven los personajes: París, Trieste, Praga, Sevilla… La novela es una oda a lo efímero, a la insolencia, al viaje más nómada y vagabundo. Su atractivo radica en la provocación, en una visión desafiante de la vida y de la muerte, en mostrar la relevancia de lo transitorio como agente transformador y en señalar a la dispersión como alternativa creativa a la opresiva realidad cotidiana.

La novela habla de principio a fin de ella misma, mostrándose como ejemplo de literatura portátil, y en este sentido el autor es al mismo tiempo creador y personaje de la sociedad conspirativa shandy que nos describe. Es la novela “de quien no puede creer en la verosimilitud de la Historia ni en el carácter metafóricamente histórico de toda novelización.”

Volvemos a las preguntas del principio y la respuesta es que aparentemente la obra carece de sentido, con una trama y un argumento dispersos, “un tipo de literatura que,…, se caracteriza por no tener un sistema que proponer, sólo un arte de vivir.” ( )

A Brief History of Portable Literature-Enrique Vila-Matas

A unique, one-of-a-kind novella, reflective of the author’s long held interest in unintended journeys undertaken by writers and other artists. This is an early Vila-Matas book written in 1985 a full decade before his better-known Bartleby and Company, and Montano’s Malady.

Here he celebrates an ever expanding group of Dadaists, Surrealists, poets, painters, photographers and other artisans who lived in post WWI Europe. They all exist within a context of portability, they are for the most part, bachelors, melancholics and manics bordering on madness. They are open to the mysteries of life and death.

They belong to a group named the Shandys, with some association to Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. Amongst the members are many artisans we are familiar with: Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Walter Benjamin, William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Georgia O’Keefe, Man Ray, Robert Walser, Salvador Dali, Aleister Crowley, Garcia Lorca, Bruno Schulz, and others we are unfamiliar with, or who may be invented: Hermann Kromberg, Walter Littbarski, Valary Larbaud and others.

The Shandys meet up in a series of cities: Vienna, Prague, Trieste and Paris. They interchange ideas and seek out Odradeks/golems/shadows and spirits possessed with unknown keys of knowledge. They discuss “the pros of short stories, fragments, prologues, appendices and footnotes, and the cons of novels”.

Dali’s Odradek “had a markedly merry and musical air” through which he became a creator of orgasmic pleasures.

Kromberg becomes possessed with Crowley’s spirit and, though often a sedentary soul, finds himself climbing mountains in the Kashmir where he falls to his death.

“Berta Bocado-moved by a sudden ambitiousness-is attempting to construct a total book: a book of books encompassing all others, an object whose virtues the years will never diminish”.


Scott Fitzgerald “has completed a novel about a person named Gatsby, a man confronting his past as he moves inexorably into nothingness”.

William Carlos Williams “who less like an American every day, entertains himself trying to solve all the arcane mysteries”.

Crowley” denounces any book that makes universal or pretentious claims”.

These lists of facts, quotes, “found” documents and critiques are reminiscent of David Markson’s novels and the short stories of Borges and Bolano, both of whom are well known influences for Vila-Matas.

Vila-Matas describes dedicated artisans who “placed a very high value on art’s secret demand: that the artist must know how to surprise, and be surprised by, what, though impossible, is”. The Shandys often appear to reside on the edge of madness, “plunging into the abyss of what sustains us, plumbing the depths of our foundations”.

As this imaginative group of searchers nears its end the “last” Shandy finds himself in a labyrinth

“where losing oneself takes practice. The art of wandering the streets of the imagination reveals the true nature of the history of the modern city…in solitude in the great metropolis spent as a wanderer, fully at leisure to daydream…gets lost in the labyrinth of Odradeks”.

This book holds special meaning to those of us who are serious readers/writers, searching ourselves for the mysteries and pleasures of life. Like the Shandys we begin

“collecting books as well as passions…the hunt for books, like sexual pursuit, enriches the geography of pleasure. This is another reason to drift in the world. As well as first editions and distinctly baroque books, he collects miniatures: postcards, pennants, toy soldiers…the love of small things underlies his liking for brevity in literature. For the last Shandy-for whim his book is another space in which to wander-his real impulse when people look at him is to lower his gaze, bow his head toward his notebook, look off into a corner, or better yet, hide his head behind the portable wall of his book.”

I highly recommend this book along with the other works by Enrique Vila-Matas mentioned at the start of this review. ( )

This is such a strange book. I enjoyed it but I also don't know if I really know what happened. I'll definitely be picking this one up for a re-read again as I have a feeling it gets better with each consecutive read. ( )

This is a brief, and very portable, comic novel featuring as characters a Who’s Who of European and American visual, musical, and literary artists of the 1920s: Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Tristan Tzara, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and may others. In this fantasy they form a secret society the Shandies, named in honor of Laurence Sterne’s comic novel The Life and Adventures of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

In a brief visit to Africa, they are inspired by their surroundings and the passing of, “a gorgeous foreign woman (‘tall, tanned, extremely sensual, a bona fide apparition”) … This woman turned out to be Georgia O’Keefe, the American painter and sculptor, who was traveling on the eastern coast of Africa in the company of William Carlos Williams, a good friend of Duchamp’s.”

From there they scamper from European city to city, pursued by shadowy figures, unsuccessfully attempting to maintain their meetings secret, until they are outed by occultist Aleister Crowley, and take refuge in a grounded submarine, the Bahnhof Zoo, where they submerge themselves into their innermost beings, a place so frightening that it scares Death away.

It’s tempting to label the writing style as surrealist (Salvador Dali makes a cameo), but it’s true style is Dadaist. The result is Laugh Out Loud sublime nonsense. So short (86 pages – including a bibliography of real, possible real, and completely made-up works) and light (4 ounces) that you can fit it in a suitcase. Why a suitcase? Well, it’s so portable you could take it aboard a stationary submarine. ( )