(#gifted @thebookerprizes) This International longlist is going to turn me grey, the ups and downs are real! From a rich and vibrant magical realist novel and a queer retelling of an Argentinian epic to this DRUDGERY. I swear. I’ll never get those four hours back I spent reading this.

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It sounds bad (and it was, for me) but I do think there is a readership out there for this book. Vila-Matas references authors such as Hemingway, Carver and Bolaño a lot and I feel like if you enjoy those authors you’ll enjoy this too. At one point I did get excited because Mac started praising the work of Samanta Schweblin, but then he spoiled the plot of Fever Dream so I went back to being annoyed.

I really don’t think Mac is supposed to be a particularly likeable protagonist, although maybe he’s meant to be an ‘everyman’, in which case I don’t care for every man. After his construction company goes under he has to rely solely on his wife’s income from her furniture restoration business. He simultaneously complains about her working longer hours to make ends meet and then contemplates leaving her but decides against it because then he’d be in financial trouble. Just a top notch guy.

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This is one of those novels that’s fully aware of how clever it’s being and as a result comes off as pretentious. With a few exceptions including If On a Winter’s Night, A Traveller, meta-fiction is just not my bag at all.

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I didn’t hate it all though. I liked the parts where Mac obsessively read his horoscope at the end of every day and tried to convince himself it applied to his life that day in his effort to discern whether our lives really are controlled by external forces. And the translation & writing itself was fine, I just did not enjoy the content - which is a shame as I’m sure Margaret Jull Costa and Sophie Hughes (one of my fave translators) worked so hard on this. But that’s about it really!

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One of the main points of the novel is Mac insisting it’s NOT a novel, just a diary never to be read by anyone. I wish he’d actually followed through with that.