INTERVIEWER

So what, for you, is this connection between poetry and the novel? A quality of vision?

VILA-MATAS

Probably. That quality comes from some writers’ facility for what we might call perception, the art of perceiving what’s going to happen. It’s a skill, an art, that we see very acutely in Kafka, for example . . . Literature is a mirror with the capacity, like some clocks, to run ahead of time. But we mustn’t mistake perception for prophecy itself. Kafka loved that work by Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet, with its assessment of how stupidity will spread, unstoppable, in the Western world. But Kafka went one step further than the rest. He went beyond his own sources of inspiration in that, unlike Flaubert, he described the very heart of the problem, the situation of total impossibility, of impotence, that the individual faces before the devastating machine of power, bureaucracy, political systems.