checked out telegraph avenue...we'll see if i can commit

Finally reading 10:04 after avoiding it for half a decade.

I really liked that book. Virtually everyone else I know that it was fine but more miss than hit. Interested to see where you land.

Interesting, my memory is that everyone LOVED it for about six months but in a begrudging way, like "ah shit, I guess this is the perfect novel, huh?" but that the tide has since turned on this kind of autofiction and especially on Ben Lerner. I really liked Atocha Station but I could never previously get past the second chapter of this one.

The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse—by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals—propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village. Like Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 or Faulkner’s greatest novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world filled with mythology and violence—real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it’s a world that becomes more terrifying and more terrifyingly real the deeper you explore it.

The narrator of Montano’s Malady is a writer named Jose who is so obsessed with literature that he finds it impossible to distinguish between real life and fictional reality. Part picaresque novel, part intimate diary, part memoir and philosophical musings, Enrique Vila-Matas has created a labyrinth in which writers as various as Cervantes, Sterne, Kafka, Musil, Bolaño, Coetzee, and Sebald cross endlessly surprising paths. Trying to piece together his life of loss and pain, Jose leads the reader on an unsettling journey from European cities such as Nantes, Barcelona, Lisbon, Prague and Budapest to the Azores and the Chilean port of Valparaiso. Exquisitely witty and erudite, it confirms the opinion of Bernardo Axtaga that Vila-Matas is “the most important living Spanish writer.”

Did you read Never Any End to Paris? That's the one I think about the most. Lovely book.

Is there more than one translation and if so do you recommend one over another?