MONTANO
by Enrique Vila-Matas
translated by Jonathan Dunne Harvill
Secker ₤14.99, 326 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤11.99

When is a novel not a novel? When it is a smugly self-aware, philosophical examination of the nature of fiction that references a dizzying number of authors and texts. Montano, by Enrique Vila-Matas – one of Spain’s most acclaimed contemporary writers – seems deliberately designed to bamboozle even the most bookish.

In the first part, called “Montano’s Malady”, the narrator is a literary critic from Barcelona. He goes to visit his bookshop-owning, writer son, the Montano of the title, in Nantes, north-west France. After writing a novel about authors who suffered from writers’ block, Montano is now incapable of penning another word. This is the first of many auto-fictional elements: Vila-Matas’s previous novel, Bartleby & Co., concerned a writer who wrote about writers who had stopped writing.

Montano’s father is also suffering from his own kind of “literary disease”. He is so steeped in literature that he can only see the world in terms of it - he walks around a particular park in Nantes because the surrealist Andre Breton wrote about it; and he sees his son’s erratic behaviour in terms of Hamlet’s mood swings. As he explains: “If I carry on like this, literature could end up swallowing me, like a doll in a whirlpool, causing me to lose my bearings in its limitless regions.”

Vila-Matas seems determined to make his readers go intertextually insane. Some of the other writers and literary thinkers referred to in just the first 25 pages include Spanish poet Justo Navarro, Argentine novelist Ricardo Piglia, Mexican writer Sergio Pitol, French surrealist Jacques Vache, Italian humorist Achille Campanile, Marxist literary critic Walter Benjamin, New York literary critic Harold Bloom, Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas, French poet Arthur Rimbaud, Czech writer Franz Kafka, American poet Ezra Pound and, most tellingly, Jorge Luis Borges, the giant of 20th-century Latin American literature, famous for his self-reflexive, labyrinthine fiction.

Yet the knowing humour of this opening section is infectious. After all the pyrotechnics, it is hard not to smile when the narrator’s friend Tongoy tells him that he likes it “...when you’re simple”. It is similarly amusing when the narrator alludes to classrooms of American universities where academics deconstruct literary texts - surely the ultimate destination of this very book.

But by the second section, “Dictionary of Timid Love for Life”, the jokes start wearing thin. The reader now learns that the narrator is not really a critic, but actually a writer himself. He does not have a son. Montano does not exist. As it happens, the narrator-writer suffered writers’ block after writing a book about writers who gave up writing. He overcame his literary paralysis by writing a diary. In this part of the book he attempts to define himself through the diaries of selected writers, including Andre Gide and - once again - Kafka.

Unreliable narrators are a standard literary device, but this one is so amorphous he is simply baffling. Addressing himself in the second person and assuming the identities of other writers are just a couple of his tricks. But by the time he has started claiming he is going to write a book that embodies “literature’s complete memory”, he seems to have lost the plot - not that there ever was one - entirely.

Unsurprisingly, the style of Montano reflects its form. Its dense sentences contain tangled webs of sub-clauses that must have given its English translator sleepless nights.

In the Spanish-speaking world, Vila-Matas is revered as a truly original and daring writer. His erudition is not in question. There is also a certain charming playfulness in parts of Montano. But a lot more of it is, frankly, tortuous. At one point its narrator angrily throws aside a biography of the philosopher Thomas Browne - something readers not in the middle of a doctorate on literary critical theory might well find themselves emulating with this book itself.