Enrique Vila-Matas: "I write all the time, even when I'm not writing."

Starting from a "tremendous" question that an acquaintance asked him at a party ("At what moment did you feel like a writer ?"), the Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas began to build his new literary artifact, Canon de Cámara Obscura (Seix Barral), the first book "made by a human trying to be an artificial intelligence."

In a meeting with journalists, Vila-Matas spoke about the novel, narrated by the android Vidal Escabia , which is not, however, a typical science fiction story: it is an exploration of the ultimate meaning of writing , in which old acquaintances such as Kafka, Cortázar, Barthes, Peter Handke, Juan Eduardo Cirlot and Juan Benet could not be missing.

Nevertheless, Vila-Matas emphasized that readers will discover the "first artificial intelligence to launch a book."

For the writer, this last title connects with A Brief History of Portable Literature (1985), which is forty years old, and even with Montevideo (2022).

" They're all connected; there are sort of revisions . I've always done one piece of work, and this one is almost like reaching the end of the mountain, which I haven't quite reached yet. It's the result of a literary poetic of many years that has a strange coherence, despite how absurd it may seem," he noted.

Vila-Matas revealed that even though the book is finished , "things continue to happen to me that seem relatable , coincidences, stories that I associate with one another. In other words, without writing, I continue writing."

"I write all the time, even when I'm not writing. Everything seems like something I can write about ," he emphasized, recalling that something similar happens to him, as Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar once confessed when, while crossing a pedestrian crossing, he said to someone who stopped him while he was working on a new script: "Excuse me, I can't help you, I'm writing."