“Bartleby and Company is not really a work of fiction, but rather something between a full-fledged novel, a diary, an article, and an academic paper. It is a peculiar study of the so-called “No Trend,” writers who have willingly given up their work. From literature. The reasons are different, the talents are different, but Enrique Vila-Matas’ study is one.

Here it is obligatory to note that before reading Bartleby and Company, it makes sense to read the original work, whose main character’s name is borrowed by Vila-Matas, which is the story “The Scribe Bartleby” by Herman Melville, quite curious in its own right. It tells of a certain clerical clerk whose motive in life was the word No. Remember, like in the Jim Carrey movie Always Say Yes. It’s something similar here, only in reverse.

Reading Melville’s “The Scribe of Bartleby” (there’s a link to the text just below, it’s a novella though, but a small one) will help you better adapt to Vila-Mathas’ narrative and make it more comfortable. When a work has virtually no pivotal plot, that’s pretty important.

After closing the book someone will immediately begin to reproach himself for ignorance, saying, there are so many good writers that I have never heard of at all! But that’s not true, Enrique Vila-Matas is a real hoaxer and Bartleby is no exception, because not all the writers and works mentioned in the book existed or existed in reality. This, however, did not prevent the Spanish author to receive for his work several real literary awards. In addition, “Bartleby” together with the company since the publication in 2000, has had itself published in three dozen languages, one of the last in 2015 added Chinese. And that’s not the limit.