World Fiction

Samuel Riba, a recently retired small-press publisher and recovering alcoholic, tries to keep his mind off wanting a drink, only to discover that his life has been the catalog of the books he published. Though he has a loving wife and good friends, he feels closest to the writers he worked with—Sebald, Auster, Vok, Magris—(and didn’t, the elusive genius he never discovered). As his thoughts flit from book to book and quote to quote, it seems natural that he plan a Bloomsday trip to Dublin where, in lieu of Joyce’s interment of Paddy Dignam, he’ll conduct a funeral for the Gutenberg era, done in by the digital age. Dublinesque (New Directions, $16.95), by the Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas, is a delightful book of books. Riba’s literary name-dropping and impromptu critical commentary are by turns whimsical and profound; his own narrative is humorous, moving, and thoroughly endearing. Laurie Greer

If you’ve read José Saramago’s later novels (such as the masterpieces Blindness and Seeing), reading his first is like looking at a slightly blurred photo of someone you know well. But H., the narrator of the Manual of Painting and Calligraphy (Mariner, $13.95), is a blur to himself. A portrait painter, he produces icons of CEOs for boardrooms. Emphatically not an artist, he nonetheless struggles with aspirations to create great works and to reveal the truth about his subjects—or, as he slowly learns, of his real subject: himself. Frustrated with images, he turns to words, and the novel is a series of “experiments in autobiography” that encompass H.’s travels through Italy, his love of the Renaissance masters, the end of a passionate relationship, and Portugal’s political troubles of the 1970s when the country was “plagued with disquiet and fear.” Laurie Greer