Literary parasitism

In these seemingly anti-literary times, authors tend to do all they can to support literature; Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas is the first I've seen to treat it like a disease.

Scott Esposito in the superb Quarterly Conversation on my favourite novel of the year. It's a deceptively simple book to follow but fiendishly difficult to summarise. Scott does a brilliant job at that, and is quite right to recognise that it falls away in the second half. But what a fall ...