I was unfamiliar with Vila-Matas, and I find myself wondering if this book was the best place to start. The Illogic of Kassel is a work of autofiction – the writer was invited to participate in the Documenta art show in Kassel and this book records the experience and his impressions of the works in the show. The book is intensely intertextual – referencing not only the works of art but dozens of works of literature, and a few films to boot. Some of the references – art and literature – were works I was familiar with, but many were not. More than once I wondered to what extent one even can write about the experience of seeing (or interacting with) art, and contemporary art in particular. An observation I'll make about intertextuality is that it rewards the reader who is familiar with the referenced works; but if you as a reader are unfamiliar (and perhaps even if it's just overdone), it can be both opaque and obnoxious. I wouldn't go so far as to say this book was that, but it did remind me a little of a particular moment in my life in the early 2000s when I spent a lot of time with art school students with a proclivity for postmodern theory.
But I don't want to give a wrong impression. This book felt also like a celebration of art – and of contemporary art, in particular, which I don't think gets much in the way of literary treatment. And to my point about the rewards of intertextuality, well: I certainly felt gratified by the inclusion of some of my personal favorite writers – Joseph Roth and W.G. Sebald figure among the referenced authors. (And William Kentridge and Sophie Calle among the artists.) Overall I enjoyed the book. The reason this felt, as I put it earlier, maybe not the best place to start with Vila-Matas, is that the very context of the book assumes that Vila-Matas is a known entity. There was a reason he was invited to participate in Documenta. For the unfamiliar reader, we must try to piece that together without knowing the work that led him there.
