Mac's Problem

Enrique Vila-Matass new novel is perhaps his greatest: playful and funny and among the best Spanish novelists (Colm Tibn)Mac is currently unemployed and lives on his wifes earnings. An avid reader, he decides at the age of sixty to keep a diary. Macs wife, a dyslexic, thinks he is simply wasting his time and risking sliding further into depressionbut Mac persists, and is determined that this diary won't turn into a novel. However, one day, he has a chance encounter with a neighbor, a successful author of a collection of enigmatic, willfully obscure stories. Mac decides that he will read, revise, and improve his neighbors stories, which are mostly narrated by a ventriloquist who has lost the ability to speak in different voices. As Mac embarks on this task, he finds that the stories have a strange way of imitating life. Or is life imitating the stories? As the novel progresses, Mac becomes more adrift from reality, and both he and we become ever more immersed in literature: a literature haunted by death, but alive with the sheer pleasure of writing.