Enrique Vila-Mata takes as his subject the dark art of the No, and has written in this quirky novel a history of authorial refusal. In other words, those authors who have joined Melville's Bartleby in saying, "I would prefer not to." Vila-Matas writes, "For some time now I have been investigating the frequent examples of Bartleby's syndrome in literature, for some time I have studied the illness, the disease, endemic to contemporary letters,the negative impulse or attraction towards nothingness that means that certain creators, while possessing a very demanding literary conscience (or perhaps precisely because of this), never manage to write: either they write one or two books and then stop altogether or, working on a project, seemingly without problems, one day they become literally paralysed for good." Although Bartleby and Hawthorne's Wakefield are seen as precursors, Vila-Matas locates the 20th century art of the No first in Hugo von Hoffmansthal's Letter from Lord Chandos:  " 'My case, in short, is this: I have completely lost the ability to think or speak coherently about anything,' which means that the author of the letter abandons the vocation or profession of a writer because no word seems to him to express objective reality." This syndrome is traced across the entire century, and Vila-Matas explores in humorous but searching vignettes the "land of unhappy sorcerers who renounce the deceptive magic of a few, well-chosen words in one or two books" in favor of silence. The book is brisk, entertaining, but also vaguely disturbing, for the author lays open the core of negation that haunts authors to this day.