Mac and His Misadventures

8 hrs. 53 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Enrique Vila-Matas

Narrator Stanislav Voronetsky

Description

“The novels I like are always like Chinese boxes—they’re full of stories,” the narrator of this surprising novel, disguised as a playful diary, an essay about the process of writing, a criminal investigation, and a classroom novel, claims.

Mac has just lost his job and now wanders every day along El Coyoto, a neighborhood of Barcelona where he lives. He is obsessed with his neighbor—a famous and acclaimed writer. And when one day he overhears how the man talks about his debut novel, “Walter and His Troubles,” full of mismatched excerpts, Mac decides to change and improve this first novel that his neighbor would rather forget.

And while the main character roams the surroundings, recounting small feats of the neighbors in a triumph of partly hallucinated trivia, Vila-Matas finally breaks the barrier between literature and life.

“Playful, spirited, ingenious. Perhaps it’s Vila-Matas’s best novel and one of the best written in Spanish.” — Colm Tóibín, author of the novels “Brooklyn” and “Nora Webster”