Javier Marìas

im reasonably sure that all souls deals with his time at oxford, before he came to london and began working at the building with no name.

i didnt have the same reaction to "farewell" although i did appreciate it, especially the way the stuff with dick dearlove came full circle. but theres a point a little after the page you cite where he says the experience of working with tupra was "less transformative, because I was an age when it was harder to change" that "all you can do is ascertain and confirm what is you carry in your veins" & this strange, stubborn discounting bothered me. a lot. especially in the face of "poison"!

there was a sense to me that deza was continually constructing every present moment as a box & that his insights and meanderings and predictions were the walls he made to keep the past and the future out. i got tired of how discrete and static he made everything, how if you can never see tomorrow's face and if the past is a cipher or a dream how disconnected we really are, from everyone and everything. the final chapter was so lonely & so tiring that him admitting the entire thing didnt really change all that much - it deflated me. right from that seemingly digressive chapter on the miranda warning theres been a tendency for most of the characters to associate empathy with weakness, to make their understanding exploitative or indifferent but always cold. and so deza has pursued freedom from everything but an eternal now & its hard to see how valid or valuable that is.

- still like a week after ive finished these books havent really been able to read anything else because im still thinking about them

- the more i think about wheelers story about his wife's propaganda work i start to find it amazing, the chalk outline or the rim of blood around the main characters capacity for forgetting, for turning a blind eye, for self-avowal

- its really easy to start wanting to imitate his cadence & sentence/thought structure

- got a copy of all souls

i have wanted to read, but i have not read, one of these new javier marías books, now that they're no longer new and when i just finish reading this book of bolano's short stories, i will enter my bedroom, sit on my armchair, get myself comfortable, and find the first page of this book that was given to me by my own cousin, who is from Madrid.

i posted so much itt!

they are wonderful & inscrutable all at once though. & those sentences are like an elegant trenchcoat hung from a peg - perfectly draped.

i have read the first passage of heart so white so many times, it is definitely up there with my favourite openings for a novel. up there with Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento...,Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know..., Stately, plump Buck Mulligan... etc. yet i've still never gotten round to reading any more of it. i have "tomorrow in the battle think on me" somewhere as well.

I'm loving fever and spear at the moment. Deza's ransacking of Wheeler's study, all the Spanish civil war stuff and the conversation w/ Wheeler the next morning. Tupra's interrogation of the Venezuelan chap. The accounts of the staff watching the vids, cctv footage etc. I love how its all going so slow and how Marias offers us little tastes of what's going on. This is one the best books I've read for ages! Marias is so enjoyable to read.

i have wanted to read, but i have not read, one of these new javier marías books, now that they're no longer new and when i just finish reading this book of bolano's short stories, i will enter my bedroom, sit on my armchair, get myself comfortable, and find the first page of this book that was given to me by my own cousin, who is from Madrid.

― Efraqueen Juárez (jim in glasgow), Thursday, September 23, 2010 5:19 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark

lol, it seems you've been influenced by marias's sentence structures!

The books section of the London Metro freesheet continues to throw up pleasant surprises - today a centrefold piece on Javier Marias (admittedly billed as a piece on a famous spy thriller writer, but the meat of it is fairly otm as far as it goes).

Found the first one of these again while moving house (third time in a year, oy) at the weekend, got annoyed at the number of books I've been carrying around and not reading

There's also a story of his in the new issue of Harper's (I think it's the new issue) but it's from the story collection that comes out around this week or so.
I think my favorite part in any of his books is in the third volume of Your Face Tomorrow where the narrator is watching one of the Babe the Pig movies, and the narrator wonders if the pig who played Babe, or any of the animals in the film, won Oscars for their roles, and I think he calls the pig who played Babe "the porcine emulator of De Niro" or something. He's just totally joking with his audience but you can tell he's having fun with it.

His new one,los enamoramientos, comes out in spanish next month. Here is the first chapter for ye hispanohablantes http://www.elpais.com/elpaismedia/ultimahora/media/201103/29/cultura/20110329elpepucul_1_Pes_PDF.pdf

So far,so marias.

I finally finished All Souls this weekend. Nowhere near as good as Your Face Tomorrow to be honest, but it was interesting to see themes popping up again. It was kinda like YFT but without all the intrigue and spying etc. also I enjoyed recognising bits in Oxford it talked about. and the climactic ending was quite good actually.

just picked up the elvis interpreter novella, am pumped/posting

this isn't new or anything btw, just posting

i wanted to! but i couldnt find a physical copy of the second book in this entire city. i did manage to find a mint copy of tusk on vinyl for $8 but i had to order the book from amazon.

― terrible poster (Lamp), Friday, 4 June 2010 06:16 (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

omg tupra!!!!!!

― Lamp, Friday, 11 June 2010 01:25 (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^i enjoy the progression between these two posts

I read through the thread before seeing your post thomp & I was going to copy and paste that exact combo with a v. similar response to it!!

ha i've stopped there until i finish pt 3 in case here be dragons or something

these are basically just amazing tho

Been thinking about rereading Your Face Tomorrow. Such a great trilogy.

::blushes::

one of the things that i really loved about these books is that they were invigorating to think and write about whereas so much stuff i read, i just bogged down or tired trying to think about my reaction to it, to find something interesting or worthwhile in the impression it left. idk these books were p amazing i guess

ha i have kind of the opposite reaction -- nine tenths of what i read i'm conscious totally of my reaction to it & where i'm situating myself in relation to it. whereas this i was totally caught up in & i feel like what i might say in a 'critical' line is sort of beside the point

i think partly bcz how totally fascinating it is as craft -- i mean, i'm less taken with this as a 'novel of ideas' or whatever than i am amazed at how compelling it makes twelve hundred fairly uneventful pages, and makes tremendous weight land on a half dozen moments that couldn't be experienced as a big deal without what's behind them -- i've been going on at people about it and i find myself going 'no the guy realises someone is following him home and it takes like five hundred pages to resolve what's up with that, and that's amazing' and they go 'so what's it actually about' and i go 'oh, you know, spies and stuff'

(and now i have finished it i have gone back and read the thread --)

re: the continuities with other books: all souls (which i just ordered) is apparently about all the oxford types that deza mentions in the first section -- nb. i am kind of glad i waited until i had met some oxford types to start reading this, ha -- and dark back of time is a gloss on all souls that sort of leads into this

what i hadn't seen mentioned was that custardoy is all over a heart so white: the character that luisa's sister-in-law calls to get the scoop on him is that book's narrator, and what he explains about custardoy is all stuff he mentions directly there. it was kind of weird to see him showing up, actually. -- but i wonder if that accounted at all for my not thinking the third book sagged at all. -- also possibly that i went directly into reading it from the second, so i wasn't reading it as anything but one big, long novel (and it really seems like the natural break between books, if there were to be one, would fall at the end of 'poison'). -- but shadow seemed to be kind of implacable in terms of, this is how this would have to happen - a logic of structure that couldn't not go any other way, given how everything's been framed. (whereas farewell seemed to go back to being way more human and having some room for chance operation, rather than, er, self-perpetuating narrative permutation (which n.b. i'm not saying is a bad structural principle in any way))

'permutation' -- i kept waiting to see if the recurring line about 'my fever, my spear, my dance and dream' (etc) would ever show up with all seven ducks lined up in a row, which i guess i'm glad it didn't -- also i was curious about his choice of 'spear', which seems to be lacking the metaphorical freight of the other six (unless it has some other weight in spanish, though i feel like jull costa would have glossed that somewhere): and then it shows up in an incredibly literal fashion

likewise i was amazed (given how he seems to be, normally, with his titles, and his running lit. quotes - 'a heart so white' must directly reference the scene in macbeth it gets its title from a dozen times) at how casually 'your face tomorrow' was glossed eight hundred pages -- & curious whether anything is to be made of the switch from 'thy' to 'your', given how much weight there is here on 'usted' and 'tu' (and 'mr tupra' and 'bertram' and 'bertie', amongst all the others)

also i am very curious who people pictured dick dearlove as whilst reading

i did not know that, about his other novels being connected. well i knew about 'all souls' but not the others

thread making me think I shd read this + Machen & Gawsworth links, right?

Just read 'While the Women are Sleeping', his short story collection, because of this thread, as not feeling strong enough atm for a huge trilogy

Really enjoyed it, even if a couple of the stories left me a bit bewildered as to what actually happened.

He has this lovely urbane, witty, charming Spanish thing going on, rather like Alberto Manguel, and sometimes Borges. And a bit like Robert Louis Stevenson (ans the Spanish bit), who I'm pretty sure Borges, Manuel and Marias are big fans of.

Gawsworth MAY show up in a story in While the Women are Sleeping, btw

Gawsworth MAY show up in a story in While the Women are Sleeping, btw

Oh yeah, I just remembered that - through the window of the retail store, I think.

gawsworth is mentioned in all souls, which is proving to be easily the most genuine oxford novel i have yet encountered

All right, all right, I may have to give this guy another chance. Still have a copy of Dark Back of Time, maybe I will reread All Souls first.

Perfectly alright to read Dark Back first, I'd say. That was my first Marias, the one that hooked me.

Doesn't get mentioned much, but The Man Of Feeling is a splendid book. Less bound to digression, more Nabokovian.

All Souls has a scene in which (like A Heart So White, and Your Face Tomorrow too kind of) an interpreter makes up his own questions during an interrogation of some kind; also, like the latter, a disquisition on how the word 'eavesdrop' doesn't exist in Spanish

oh to have time to reread these

Vaster than empires and more slow

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-worldly-digressions-of-javier-marias