One of the things that never ceases to surprise and delight me about my job is the way that being an author’s editor catapults you into intimate relationships with people – be they famous or just very different to you – whom you would never have got so close to otherwise. By virtue of having acquired their work for publication, you can skip all preamble in the creation of a friendship and cut to the chase: you are immediately a part of their life; you discuss in detail their work, their intentions for it and the concerns – intellectual and emotional – that have gone into making it. Of course, it is rare that an author and editor will become true friends in the way schoolmates become friends: it is not a relationship of equals; it is always slightly guarded, guided by a certain professionalism or at least the notion that professionalism should be there. But nevertheless, it is a huge privilege (and rather terrifying) to be able to meet a great writer for the first time and immediately start a serious conversation – as happened to me last Friday when I had lunch with Enrique Vila-Matas, recently voted one of Spain’s three most influential writers along with Antonio Muñoz Molina and Javier Marías.

 I had just come back from my summer holiday, during which I had read the English translation of Vila-Matas’s novel Never Any End to Paris, to be published next year. Talking to him was like picking up the discussion I had been having with him in my head while I read his wonderful book. Especially since Never Any End to Paris has a very distinctive narrator who bears a strong resemblance to Vila-Matas himself. In fact one of the first things he said when we met was that it was the only book of his that was all true. He really did spend a couple of years living in Paris as a young man in the seventies, and Marguerite Duras really was his landlady. ‘All of it?’ I said. ‘You mean your mother thought you were “a dull, grey creature”!?’ ‘Ah well, no,’ he replied with a wry smile. ‘The dreadful mother is made up.’ When you first meet him, Vila-Matas seems scarily serious, but you soon realise that, like his books, there is an exuberant and generous sense of humour lying just below the surface.

 At this point I should say there was a frightening mix of languages at the table. Enrique spoke no English. He and I discovered that we could speak French to each other but neither his translator Rosalind Harvey nor his agent Txell spoke French despite both being fluent in English and Spanish. Since Enrique spoke his French in a heavy Spanish accent, I was never sure whether he was addressing his words in French to me, or Spanish to them. Nor was my French up to par anyway: I’d just got back from a holiday in Italy. I kept thinking of the scenes in Never Any End to Paris in which Enrique has impossible conversations with Marguerite Duras whose ‘superior French’ he finds incomprehensible.

 In fact I couldn’t help thinking that our encounter might well have taken place in one of his novels. Here was I, ironically watching myself floundering in the company of a great writer who had written a brilliant novel about the art of irony and his own sense of inadequacy when encountering the likes of Marguerite Duras in Paris. What’s more we were discussing the blurring of the real and virtual worlds in the film Inception (which Enrique hadn’t yet seen, though he had listened several times to the sound track and was very curious about why there were fragments of Edith Piaf in there – an interesting preparation for going to see a film).

 When Never Any End to Paris is finally published in English you’ll see that the novel is just as much about being a reader as a writer, which is one of the reasons why I loved it. I annoyed my husband on holiday by chuckling over it and then saying it was impossible to explain why I was laughing as it was the ‘cumulative effect’. To my shame, the novel had been sitting on my desk for many months but I had read the first few paragraphs and realised it was something that couldn’t be read in an office situation. It’s important, as a publisher, occasionally to read books in a ‘normal’ way rather than stuffing them into your head at high speed whilst trying to write the editorial notes and blurb at the same time. But perhaps, even when I’m only holiday, the way in which I read couldn’t exactly be called ‘normal’. Whatever I read, I’m always thinking about how many people might like it (want to buy it!) and why. It was for that reason that my other holiday reading was Stieg Larsson.

 I think I can safely say that more people will want to read Stieg Larsson than Enrique Vila-Matas . In fact, there were times when reading Never Any End to Paris when I wondered whether it might have been written for me alone. I too spent a youthful year in Paris (though in the eighties rather than the seventies) wondering how to become a writer and thinking that reading Heminway’s A Moveable Feast might be the place to start. In several hilarious scenes, Vila-Matas describes how he tried to work his way through a 13-point list of things that Marguerite Duras thought crucial for the writing of a novel (including such mysteries as ‘linguistic register’). I too tackled the lists of my elders with a diligent earnestness. I hung around Shakespeare and Company (even worked there for a bit) and sat in cafes trying to read difficult books. Of course, I’m not seriously suggesting that no other literature-obsessed young person has hung out in Paris cafes (I’m sure we can sell a shed-load)! And the difference between Vila-Matas and me is that Vila-Matas emerged from his stay a writer, whereas I came to the firm conclusion that I should remain a reader. I think it was my obsession with Samuel Beckett that helped me reach this decision. What was there left to write after Beckett had so beautifully reduced the enterprise to one of necessity but vacuity? ‘I can't go on, I'll go on.' I lacked Vila-Matas’s talent and courage.

I told Vila-Matas that publishers weren’t very impressed by my interest in Samuel Beckett when I tried to get a job as an editor. I soon realised I needed to go about it another way. There’s been an amusing debate bubbling away in the papers this summer between those who think the British novel is dull because it fails to take account of Modernism, and those who think novels that take account of Modernism are intellectual twaddle. It started with Gabriel Josipovici dissing the likes of Ian McEwan in his book Whatever Happened to Modernism? and continued with the longlisting of Tom McCarthy’s C for the Booker (McCarthy is unashamedly influenced by European fiction and has little desire to read contemporary British fiction) and comments made by another longlisted author Christos Tsiolkas at the Edinburgh Festival and quoted by the Guardian: ‘A friend of mine gave me a book of the best European short stories of 2009. I was instantly struck by how dry and academic they were, and not in the best way, in a cheap, shitey way … They didn't talk about the real. I want something more rigorous, more challenging than I am finding at the moment.’

 I love the fact that my job of publishing translated literature in a big corporation allows me to straddle both sides of this divide and to refuse to be partisan. Twenty years after my first fumbling attempts to say why I wanted to be a publisher, I’m now clearer about the reasons: taking as read that literature is not truth, and stories are always partial, I’m fascinated by the many different stories people are telling about the world and I want to help those authors tell them. Admittedly I prefer a book to contain a nod to the relativity of truth. Which is why I’m so enjoying working with author Alice Albinia, whose first novel Leela’s Book is coming out from Harvill Secker next June. Her characters are wonderfully, exuberantly real, her plot revolves around two families in contemporary Delhi and yet she playfully undermines her reader’s suspension of disbelief at every turn. Thinking of Alice, I had better stop writing this and get back to reading her latest draft. And I also need to get the contract drawn-up for the translation of Vila-Matas’s next book Dublinesque (all about an ageing publisher concerned about the end of the printed book and in search of ‘the novel of the future’ who goes to Dublin on the trail of Joyce and Beckett). I wonder if Enrique Vila-Matas has seen Inception yet and what he thought of it. I’ll leave you with the concise words of Nick Caistor, writing about Vila-Matas in the TLS last month: ‘English readers may view Vila-Matas as too self-absorbed, too self-referential in his choice of the pursuit of literature as the exclusive subject of his fiction … Yet Vila-Matas’s obsession shows that the quest to create literature is a metonym for the ability to live a life that has some meaning, rather than being entirely absurd.’