The No World Concerto (Spanish Literature Series)

Hailed by Spain’s Revista Quimera as one of the top ten Spanish-language novels of the decade, alongside Bolaño’s 2666, Vila-Matas’s Bartleby & Co., and Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow.

The many layers of The No World Concerto center around an old screenwriter, holed up in a shabby hotel in order to write a screenplay about his lover, a young piano prodigy who wants in turn to give up music and become a writer. From these meager elements, A. G. Porta launches an investigation of the limits of language, fiction, and the known world. Here, hazy foosball bars and empty concert halls resound with debates about Wittgenstein or the principles of Schoenberg’s compositions; characters appear who may or may not have any existence outside the screenwriter’s work; and the young pianist begins to believe she may be in contact with creatures from another dimension.

Shifting effortlessly between realities, The No World Concerto is a delightful and prismatic narrative puzzle, and the first of A. G. Porta’s masterful novels to appear in the English language—finally joining those of his early writing partner Roberto Bolaño.