What a fantastic, extraordinary writer and book. I found it in a bargain bin. Marías is the author of ten novels including All Soul’s, which the present book deals with extensively. This is in some sense not a work of fiction, concerned as it is primarily with the lives of ‘real’ people (the author’s friends and colleagues), especially forgotten real people (the writers John Gawsworth, Wilfrid Ewart, M.P. Shiels; the author’s dead brother Julianín). It is a meditation on time, on the nature of reality as manifested in time, on fiction and reality and their interpenetration, on death, on meaning or the lack of it in human existence, on our habit of writing our lives as stories with sequential significance, to combat randomness. Marías writes in these long, elegant, looping sentences, which I presume are as beautiful in the original Spanish as they are in Esther Allen’s very readable translation. I am sure that there is a great deal of fiction in the book, though; I don’t think a writer like Marías could create a documentary book, and I suspect much of the ‘fiction’ lies in his portrayal of the narrator, who is ostensibly himself, but who he reminds us more than once is a second person, not him. And this narrator is at pains to assert things over and over again: how the stories in the book came to him, how he didn’t seek them out, how he is lazy; the repetitions started to make me aware that maybe Marías was doing this on purpose, to call attention to the fact that he protests too much. One of the impetuses for the book was what happened to him after the publication of his novel All Soul’s, which is set at Oxford University. Marías had taught there and everyone assumed the characters in the book were based on real people in the community, which Marías is at pains to dispute (protesting too much again?). This leads to extended meditations on the relationship between truth and fiction, how the fictions that others ascribed to his book (the inferred relationships between real people and characters in his book, relationships which Marías had not intended at all, and which fascinated him) became reality in more than one instance, how he started to feel a sense of slippage between the ‘real’ and the ‘fictional’. It’s a very hard book to describe; there is no plot as such, at least not one that moves from beginning to end in an orderly, conventional fashion. But the stories he tells are so fascinating (only the section dealing with the professors at Oxford was less than absorbing for me), and the interrelation between them as the book proceeds unfolds like a good mystery story. One of the stories is about how Marías became the king of a small rocky uninhabited island close to Montserrat called Redonda – an example of how the true stories he tells are utterly fantastical. An absolutely wonderful writer. The kind of book that you will either love or hate. I loved it.

About Javier Marías: ‘Javier Marías was born in Madrid in 1951. He is the author of many books of which ten have now been translated into English including: All Souls, A Heart So White (which has sold more than a million copies in its German edition), Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me, When I Was Mortal (short stories), The Dark Back Of Time, Written Lives and Your Face Tomorrow: Fever And Spear and Your Face Tomorrow: Dance And Dream. His prizes include the prestigious IMPAC Dublin International Literary award. He is also a prolific translator into Spanish of English authors, including Conrad, Stevenson, Hardy, Sir Thomas Browne, Yeats, Auden and Sterne. He lives in Madrid.’ (www.johnsandoe.com/profile_Marias,_Javi.htm)