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Enrique Vila-Matas. Extrana forma de vida. Barcelona. Anagrama. 1997. 156 pages. ISBN 84-339-1048-5. Enrique Vila-Matas, born in Barcelona in 1948, has authored many novels and earned a reputation as one of Spain's most original contemporary writers. In Extra.na forma de vida he extends his originality to the detective genre by elaborating an engrossing parallel between the act of spying and the act of writing. The narrator-protagonist Cyrano, nicknamed for his large nose, recounts in the first person the events of the most important day of his life, a day he spends preparing a lecture he must deliver that same evening. Although his announced topic is the mythic structure of the hero, that morning he rejects it for an altogether different topic, one he hopes will hold the interest of his wife Carmina's sister Rosita, with whom he has been having an affair for some years. She has threatened to leave Barcelona immediately after the talk to start a new life in another place with her pharmacist husband. Hoping if not to seduce Rosita, at least to...