Esta bruma insensata

Based in a ramshackle house on the outskirts of Cadaqués, Simon Schneider works for a highly successful author who goes by the name Gran Bros and lives hidden away in New York. Simon is a Hokusai, that is to say a distributor of quotes for other writers, among whom, although he has no idea of it, is the great Thomas Pynchon. One afternoon Simon, who has had a mental block when trying to remember a sentence about infinity, sets out from his home on a long walk in search of the lost quotation. A novel about the inextinguishable energy that stems from absence and the tension between faith in writing and the radical rejection of this same thing. Enrique Vila-Matas, one of the best writers of the current era, shines a light on the paradox that the only possible originality has its source in the art of quotation in a lucid and dazzling battle of wits between two approaches to understanding literary creation.