Mac And His Problem

'Playful & funny & among the best Spanish novelists' [Colm Tóibín], a masterpiece of metafiction, Mac & His Problem is Enrique Vila-Matas’s testament to the power & playfulness of great literature. 

Translated by Margaret Jull Costa & Sophie Hughes.

Mac, over sixty & recently unemployed, lives on his wife's earnings from her furniture restoration business. An avid reader, he decides at the age of sixty to keep a diary. Mac is not writing a novel. He is writing a diary no one will read. Mac is a beginner, a novice, an apprentice delighted by the themes of repetition & falsification, humbly armed with an encyclopaedic knowledge of literature. Soon, Mac begins to notice that life is exhibiting strange literary overtones & imitating fragments of plot. As he sizzles in the Barcelona heatwave, he becomes ever more immersed in literature, haunted by death but alive with the pleasure of writing.

"The tremendously touching characters in Enrique Vila-Matas’s novels who stumble from one place to the next, not really sure where they are going, but always on a quest are so deeply comical on the one hand, & so deeply poignant on the other, that you just have to give yourself up to it because you’re in the hands of a master."  - Paul Auster

Enrique Vila-Matasis widely considered to be one of Spain's most important contemporary novelists.  His work has won numerous international literary prizes, including the Herralde Prize, the Prix Médicis étranger & the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. Vila-Matas’ books have been longlisted (Montano) & shortlisted (Dublinesque) for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, & Never Any End to Paris was a finalist for the US Best Translated Book Award.   

Sophie Hughes has also translated José Revueltas & Enrique Vila-Matas for New Directions. She was shortlisted for the 2019 & 2020 International Booker Prize.