Dublinesque

Samuel Riba, until recently a successful Barcelona publisher and drinker of alcohol - now very much an ex-publisher, a teetotaler and an imperfect husband spooked by turning sixty - wants to make the English Leap. He wants to be at the Centre. He's bored and antsy and frustrated that he has never, in his long publishing career, discovered the one writer of genius who would have made it all worthwhile. He wants to go to Dublin on Bloomsday and hold a funeral for the printed word. He doesn't know what he wants.

Riba is the enraging, pitiable, unfashionably likeable protagonist of Enrique Vila-Matas' new novel Dublinesque. It's a rich stuffata of a book, crammed full of literary allusions and gossip, brimming with reverence for books and a salted with an often hilarious scepticism about the faulty human beings who make them. There's plenty of them here, both real and fictional: writers, editors, poets and journalists, all rubbing up against each other, swapping stories of the last time they hung out with Paul Auster, being rude about the French, pining for New York. Riba's trip to Dublin becomes a reality: he and his literary friends from Barcelona actually make it there for Bloomsday, and hold a mock funeral for the age of print in Glasnevin cemetery, re-enacting the saddest chapter of Ulysses. But as they give their speeches, a young man of aquiline features and hawklike eyes flits around behind the tombstones, wearing a mackintosh. Is he the mysterious mackintoshed figure who haunts the funeral in Ulysses? Is he the ghost of Samuel Beckett, Joyce's inheritor? Is he, in fact, the young genius writer that Riba still dreams of publishing? As the Dublin expedition unravels, and his dreams of an English Leap or an enchanted Centre run up against an increasingly complex reality, Riba's narration becomes funnier, wilder and sadder. Dublinesque, like the sentimental Irishness which it frequently mocks (but which its hero aspires to), is warm, playful, full of yearning, and more serious than it might at first appea