Enrique Vila-Matas: Insistence as a Fine Art

Hanuman Editions is a publishing project reimagining the legacy of Hanuman Books, the legendary and cult series of chapbooks that were printed in southern India and published out of the storied Chelsea Hotel in New York City between 1986 and 1993.

“In my particular case, and following what I’ve been writing here in this diary, I would say that some of the heterogeneous elements that influenced me when I chose The Fortune Teller were: the kindness and genius of the underappreciated Cordovan painter; Nietzsche’s absence; a playing card frozen in the course of time; my activism on behalf of the Multiple; the landline phone; loose threads hanging from an homemade Odradek; the world as an infinite knot; and a fleeting glimpse of eternity on Earth.”

From a mind once described as “an endless labyrinth in which all forks lead to literature,” Insistence as a Fine Art trades the ekphrastic form for passage through a hall of interlocutors, mirrors, and guides (Nietzsche, Gadda, Calvino, Orson Welles). Thus Enrique Vila-Matas’ study of an artwork, Romero de Torres’s La Buenaventura (The Fortune Teller) from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum’s permanent collection, swiftly becomes much more, spinning out with signature erudition into a whirlwind meditation on painting, history, and the opacity of the present tense. As one turn folds into another, voices rise and drift into a keenly elliptical flow.