MONTANO'S MALADY: Literary Sickness And The Characters' Birth... A Paternity Metaphor

Montano is one of the most famous, baffling and hilarious characters ever born from the hands of the catalan writer Enrique Vila-Matas: simultaneously bewildered, absent-minded, enraged and strangely perplexed, Montano is a lively literary puzzle. One can approach a comprehension of Montano's complexity by stressing the existence of different levels of fluency or "contamination": on a first level, Montano's disease is nothing more than the extreme permeability and sensitiveness to most literary works produced; on a second level, Montano is also a Shakespeare's Othello character (the young Cyprus governor) suffering, in Vila-Matas' novel, from a Hamlet-type of disease; on a third level, Montano is the narrator's son and this narrator is Vila-Matas' literary incarnation presented as "literature sick" though "not thinking about himself, but about his son", whose literary blockage ("It seemed to me like a useful idea, the one of transferring to an invented son some of my problems") he will intend to solve. 

When the son surpasses his blockage by writing a short story in which several writers are inhabited by the personal memories of other authors, Montano infects his father, who will then, "more ill than ever", feel the temptation of converting himself into literature's memory.