Exploradores del abismo

Synopsis of Exploradores del abismo

"What are you writing?" Enrique Vila-Matas was asked one afternoon. After Doctor Pasavento, the writer lived in a permanent sense of closure, feeling that he had reached the end of a certain journey and an abyss opened before him. "I am writing the title of a book," he replied. The title was Explorers of the Abyss. In the days that followed, a series of stories began to emerge related to what that title suggested. The whole book is the exploration of that abyss. And, as the title itself indicates, it deals with stories starring beings on the edge of the precipice, beings who linger on that edge and study, investigate, analyze. Explorers are, obviously, a metaphor for the human condition. They are optimistic and their stories, in general, are those of ordinary people who, when they see themselves bordering the precipice, adopt the position of the expeditionary and probe the plausible horizon, inquiring what may be out there, or beyond our limits. They are not especially modern people, since they generally disdain the existential weariness so in vogue, and rather they are old-fashioned and very active people who maintain an uninhibited and direct relationship with emptiness. Sometimes, that emptiness is the center of the story that stars while in others, quite different, the abyss becomes just a good pretext for writing a story. In reality, the stories in this book seek bridges in an admirable abyss, which is patiently explored in all possible directions by subtly connected stories: stories crossed by the enigmatic and sinuous silhouette of a tightrope walker, whose journey traces the unstable and at the same time consistent thread that links, with beautiful and strange internal coherence, the set of stories that make up this return of Enrique Vila-Matas to short narrative, but also to the unclassifiable book, so far from the conventional novel as from the typical set -always so suspicious - of closed and correct stories. In the end we are undoubtedly less lost than at the beginning, but also closer to a new abyss. And it is sensed that, as Canetti would say, the explorers no longer know how to return from the map. And it is also sensed that Vila-Matas' readers will eagerly welcome this dazzling book.