Manuel Vilas

“Manuel Vilas’s poems have a plot, just like boleros, in whose fortunes and misfortunes we see ourselves reflected. Robert Musil once said that plot is the shadow of the novel (one might as well say of poetry), just as pain is the shadow of illness. To this we might add that one cannot live without pain—but even less without shadow.

Roma should be read as the succession of shadows cast by the movements of a man trying to rediscover his soul in the hair salons, shops, markets, hotels, churches, fryers, restaurants, streets, and alleyways of the Eternal City and its surroundings. Here we find a Vilas ‘frightened, always frightened,’ who takes account of the price of everything—from battered cod to tiramisù, from roasted chestnuts to happiness itself.

Read Roma as an existential report, as a documentary poem. It is a shattering experience.” Juan José Millás