Javier Cercas, the contemporary Spanish novelist is invited to give a series of lectures in 2015 on the art of the novel. Cercas is a personal favorite, his Soldiers of Salamis, The Speed of Light and the Anatomy of a Moment, all excellent examples of his creativity.

In the lectures he follows the history of the novel from Cervantes to Melville to some of his more modern favorites: Kafka, Borges, Llaso, Kundera, Sebald and others. The following excerpts speak for themselves:

"A good writer is someone who confronts a complex problem and, instead of solving it, makes it even more complex (and a brilliant writer is one who creates a problem where none existed)...bad writers simplify life and good ones complicate it (and by complicating our lives enrich them)."

"the reader needs the author to allow him some space: that space is ambiguity; and, in order for the reader to be able to penetrate that space and deploy there the rigour, the subtlety...the author should open a gap, a subtle entry point to the hermeticism of his fictitious world: this gap is the blind spot."

"its what great literature does: complicate our lives by posing complex questions in the most complex way possible, raising irreducible paradoxes, forging enigmas with no solutions or at least with no apparent solution, devising epistemological aporia; ultimately, as Faulkner said, lighting a match in the middle of the absolute darkness that surrounds us; we might say that the match doesn't let us see anything; but that's not true; it lets us see the darkness...the blind spot pitches the reader through the darkness, into the depths of the unknown to find something new; the blind spot seeks meaning where there doesn't seem to be any, in places at first glance invulnerable to meaning, or at least to a clear meaning - contradictions, ironies and irreducible paradoxes - chasing some hitherto unheard-of knowledge or even revelation or the imminence of a revelation, knowing it'll perhaps never occur, even that it cannot occur."

"the more ambiguous a work, the better it is, because it's more polysemic: because it leads to or admits more interpretations, and the more meaning it is able to embrace."

A master novelist and deep thinker who imparts his writing with meaning and blind spots. ( )

Resumen del libro

Un extraordinario ensayo sobre literatura.En 2015 Javier Cercas ocupo en la Universidad de Oxford la catedra Weidenfeld de Literatura Europea Comparada, honor en el que le habian precedido figuras como George Steiner, Mario Vargas Llosa o Umberto Eco; basandose en las conferencias alli impartidas, Cercas ha escrito un libro que posee la coherencia estructural y la voluntad estilistica de una novela.En el realiza una triple y complementaria operacion:*En primer lugar formulauna originalisima teoria de la novela surgida de su propia experiencia de escritor y de la relectura de algunas obras fundamentales, del Quijote para aca.*En segundo lugardefine y vindica algunos rasgos de la novela del siglo XXI, que son algunos rasgos de la mejor novela de siempre: su ironia y ambiguedad esenciales, su innegociable deber de innovacion, su naturaleza gozosamente omnivora, sus intrincadas relaciones con lo ficticio y lo real.*En tercer lugarreflexiona sobre el sentido actual de la novela, del novelista y de la incierta y desprestigiada figura del intelectual.El resultado es un libro clave para entender la narrativa de nuestro tiempo; tambien un libro en el que se aboga por una superacion de la posmodernidad..