Stylish, cerebral… Marías is a startling talent.

New York Times

All Souls

Fiction by Javier Marías

Translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

With high black humor, a visiting Spanish lecturer bends his gaze over that most British of institutions, Oxford University. In All Souls, our narrator views Oxford through a prismatic detachment, alternately amused, puzzled, delighted, and disgusted by its vagaries of human vanity. A bit lonely, not always able to see his charming but very married mistress, he casts about for activity; he barely has to teach. His stay of two years, he recalls, involved duties which “were practically nil” – “Oxford is a city in syrup, where simply being is far more important than doing or even acting.” Yet so much goes into that simply being: friendship, opinion-mongering, one-upmanship, finicky exchanges of favors, gossip, adultery, book-collecting, back-patting, back-stabbing. Marías has a sweet tooth for eccentricity, and his novel “crackles with deliciously sly observations of Oxford mores,” as James Woodall noted in the Independent. And yet further, All Souls is a love story within a “mysterious narrative,” as The New Statesman noted, “within a turmoil of choreographed stories.”

Paperback(published Nov, 01 2000)

ISBN
9780811214537
Price US
14.95
Price CN
20
Trim Size
5x8
Page Count
224
Portrait of Javier Marías

Javier Marías

Contemporary Spanish novelist

Stylish, cerebral… Marías is a startling talent.

New York Times