“The novels I like are always like Chinese boxes, full of stories,” says the narrator of this amazing novel, disguised as a funny diary, an essay on the writing process, a criminal investigation and an educational novel. Mac has just lost his job and now walks daily in El Coyote, the Barcelona neighborhood where he lives. He is obsessed with his neighbor, a famous and established writer, and one day hearing him talk about his debut work, Walter and His Ordeals, full of incongruous passages, Mac decides to change and improve this first novel, which his neighbor would prefer to forget. And for now. As the protagonist wanders around the neighborhood, recounting the little exploits of his neighbors in a triumph of partly hallucinated triviality, Vila-Matas finally breaks down the barrier between literature and life. “Joking, perky, intricate. This is perhaps Vila-Matas’s best novel and one of the best written in Spanish.” - Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn and Nora Webster.