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AUTHORS | ||
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Javier Marías Javier Marías was born in Madrid, Spain, in 1951, into a very literary family. He earned his first paycheck at age twenty translating Dracula scripts into Spanish for his uncle, the movie director Jesús Franco. Today his own work is translated into thirty-four languages, and four and a half million copies of his books have sold worldwide. His many prizes include the prestigious IMPAC Dublin International Literary award for A Heart So White. He currently lives in Madrid.
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Your Face Tomorrow, Volume Two: Dance and Dream by Javier Marías; translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa A book unlike any other, a daring experiential unfolding Spanish masterpiece, Your Face Tomorrow now leaps into uncharted new territory in Volume Two: Dance and Dream. "A maelstrom of literary pleasure. . . . Start reading it now." - Benjamin Lytal, The New York Sun |
Your
Face Tomorrow, Javier Marías's dazzling unfolding magnum
opus, is a novel in three parts, which began with Volume One:
Fever and Spear (New Directions, 2005). Described as a "brilliant
dark novel" (Scotland on Sunday), the book now takes a wild
swerve in its new volume. Skillfully constructed around a central
perplexing and mesmerizing scene in a nightclub, Volume Two:
Dance and Dream again features Jacques Deza. In Volume One
he was hired by MI6 as a person of extraordinarily sophisticated
powers of perception. In Volume Two Deza discovers the dark side
of his new employer when Tupra, his spy-master boss, brings out
a sword and uses it in a way that appalls Deza: You can't just
go around hurting and killing people like that. Why not? asks Tupra. |
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Written Lives by Javier Marías; translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa An affectionate and very funny gallery of twenty great world authors from the pen of "the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature" (The Boston Globe). "It's difficult to be moderate about the charm of these brief portraits of Rimbaud, Turgenev, Rilke, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Robert Louis Stevenson, Isak Dinesen, Djuna Barnes and a dozen other literary eminences." - Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World |
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In
addition to his own busy career as "one of Europe's most intriguing
contemporary writers" (TLS), Javier Marías is also the
translator into Spanish of works by Hardy, Stevenson, Conrad, Faulkner,
Nabokov, and Laurence Sterne. His love for these authors is the touchstone
of Written Lives. Collected here are twenty pieces recounting
great writers' lives, "or, more precisely, snippets of writers' lives." Thomas
Mann, Rilke, Arthur Conan Doyle, Turgenev, Djuna Barnes, Emily Brontë,
Malcolm Lowry, and Kipling appear ("all fairly disastrous individuals"),
and "almost nothing" in his stories is invented. "Another example of the
prolific literary genius of Marías." "My premonition is that
Written Lives will be regarded as a landmark text in the history
of biography." "Reading these portraits
is addictive; one keeps turning pages in anticipation of Marías's
keen and amusing analyses." |
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Your Face Tomorrow, Volume One: Fever and Spear by Javier Marías; translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa Part spy novel, part romance, part Henry James, Your Face Tomorrow is a wholly remarkable display of the immense gifts of Javier Marías. "The major event on the
Anglo-Spanish literary scene….Jull Costa's English translation
is impeccable." |
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With
Fever and Spear, Volume One of his unfolding novel Your Face Tomorrow,
he returns us to the rarified world of Oxford (the delightful setting
of All Souls and Dark Back of Time), while introducing us to territory
entirely new—espionage. "Further evidence that Javier
Marìas is well on the road to Stockholm." |
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The Man of Feeling by Javier Marías; translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa Glinting like a moonstone with layers of emotion, The Man of Feeling is a sleek and strange tale of cosmopolitan love. An affair between a married woman and a young man just becoming an opera star (curiously helped along by the husband's factotum) meets with adamant resistance from the implacable husband. "Marias is a superb prose
stylist....New Directions is to be applauded for making his fiction
available in the US." |
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Narrated by the young opera singer, the novel opens as he recalls traveling on a train from Milan to Venice, silently absorbed for hours by the woman asleep opposite his seat. In the measured tones of memory, The Man of Feeling revolves on the poles of anticipation and recollection. The peculiar rarified life lived in the world's luxury hotels, a life of rehearsal and performance, the constant travel and ghost-like detachment of our protagonist adds a deeper tone to the novel's weave of desire and detachment, of consideration and reconsideration: its epigraph cites William Hazlitt: "I think myself into love,/And I dream myself out of it." As Marías remarks in a brief afterword, this is a love story "in which love is neither seen nor experienced, but announced and remembered." Can love be recalled truly when it no longer exists? That twist will continue to revolve in the reader's mind, conjuring up in its disembodied way Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. Beautifully translated into English for the first time by Margaret Jull Costa, this fascinating and eerie early novel by Javier Marías bears out his reputation for the "dazzling" (TLS) and "startling" (The New York Times).
"A resonant enigma...an elusive
text...a revealing introduction to and gloss on Marías's richer,
even more puzzling subsequent fiction." "A living master...a visceral
exploration of the deep center of the human heart and mind." "A good introduction to
the wonderfully inventive Javier Marias." "A digressive narrative that
moves back and forth in time....There is nothing quite like it in fiction
today." "Perverse
and powerful fiction." "A true genius of literary
subterfuge....a writer whose sprawling intelligence and circular, tricksterish
prose resist reduction." |
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Dark Back of Time by Javier Marías; translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen A book by Spain's greatest living writer weaves fiction and fact into a completely original and unforgettable hybrid. "Javier Marías is in
my opinion one of the best contemporary European authors." |
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Called by its author a "false novel,"
Dark Back of Time begins with the tale of the odd effects of publishing
All Souls, his witty and sardonic 1989 Oxford novel. All Souls
is a book Marías swears to be fiction, but which its "characters"—the
real-life dons and professors and bookshop owners who have "recognized
themselves"—fiercely maintain to be a roman à clef. With the
sleepy world of Oxford set into fretful motion by a world that never "existed,"
Dark Back of Time begins an odyssey into the nature of identity
("we do not know anyone entirely, not even ourselves") and of time. Marías
weaves together autobiography (the brother who died as a child; the loss
of his mother), a legendary kingdom, strange ghostly literary figures,
halls of mirrors, a one-eyed pilot, a curse in Havana, and a bullet lost
in Mexico. Dark Back of Time has been acclaimed here as "superb"
(Review of Contemporary Fiction), "fantastically original" (Talk),
"brilliant" (Virginia Quarterly Review), and "a rare gift" (The
New York Times Book Review). "In the best manner of Borges," The
Hudson Review commented that this hybrid is "lush and mysterious."
"[A] writer who lives in our own time but speaks with the intensity
of past." "Fascinating...fresh
(in both senses of the word) and sexy (in every sense
of the word)." |
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A Heart So White by Javier Marías; translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa A Heart So White is a breathtaking novel about family secrets, winner of the 1997 Dublin IMPAC Prize for the best novel published worldwide in English, and arguably Javier Marías's masterpiece. "Marías...remains almost
unknown in America. What are we waiting for?" |
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Javier Marías's A Heart So White chronicles with unnerving insistence the relentless power of the past. Juan knows little of the interior life of his father Ranz; but when Juan marries, he begins to consider the past anew, and begins to ponder what he doesn't really want to know. Secrecy—its possible convenience, its price, and even its civility—hovers throughout the novel. A Heart So White becomes a sort of anti-detective story of human nature. Intrigue; the sins of the father; the fraudulent and the genuine; marriage and strange repetitions of violence: Marías elegantly sends shafts of inquisitory light into shadows— and on to the costs of ambivalence. ("My hands are of your colour; but I shame/To wear a heart so white"—Shakespeare's Macbeth.) "As quirky as it is brilliant....
An entertaining and intelligent novel." "The work of a supreme stylist....
It is brilliantly done." "The most subtle and gifted
writer in contemporary Spanish literature." "Immense talent...a landmark
[by] a genuine artist." |
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When I Was Mortal by Javier Marías; translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa "A first English translation
of a 1995 collection comprising 12 elliptical, often insidiously compelling
stories from the prizewinning Spanish author, whose highly regarded
fiction artfully blends Henry James's subtle indirection with flagrantly
Gothic and Grand Guignol narrative materials." |
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Victims
of mistaken identity, sponging relatives, amateur sleuths, eavesdroppers,
professional liars, assassins, and failed bodyguards populate the short
stories in When I Was Mortal. Plots turn on curious exigencies—a
woman about to star in her first porn film; a night doctor who adds
new meaning to "specialist"; a ghost whose neglect is greatly resented.
"In the space of ten or twenty pages," as the Nouvel Observateur
remarked, "Marías contrives to write a novel." "The short story
fits Marías like a glove," as Le Point noted, and these stories
have been acclaimed as "dazzling" (The London Times Literary Supplement);
"formidably intelligent" (The London Review of Books); and
"startling" (The New York Times Book Review). "This is fiction clever
enough to seem simple, devilish enough to seem innocuous." "[S]tylish, cerebral short
stories....a startling talent... his prose is ambitious, ironic, philosophical
and ultimately compassionate." "When writers talk about
craft, this is what they mean." "These 12 stories show [Marias]
at his most witty and sardonic..." "Javier Marias writes with
elegance, with wit and with masterful suspense."
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Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me by Javier Marías; translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa From "the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature" (Boston Globe), a riveting novel of infidelity and a man trapped by a terrible secret. "My personal favorite among
Marías books is Tomorrow.... A complex centripetal whodunit
about the reverberations of a sudden death...." |
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"No one ever suspects," begins Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me, "that they might one day find themselves with a dead woman in their arms...." Marta has just met Víctor when she invites him to dinner at her Madrid apartment while her husband is away on business. When her two-year-old son finally falls asleep, Marta and Víctor retreat to the bedroom. Undressing, she feels suddenly ill; and in his arms, inexplicably, she dies.What should Víctor do? Remove the compromising tape from the phone machine? Leave food for the child, for breakfast? These are just his first steps, but he soon takes matters further; unable to bear the shadows and the unknowing, Víctor plunges into dark waters. And Javier Marías, Europe's master of secrets, of what lies reveal and truth may conceal, is on sure ground in this profound, quirky, and marvelous novel. "Brilliantly imagined and hugely intricate," as La Vanguardia noted, "it is a novel one reads with enormous pleasure." "Marías's is a world-class
talent, one always worth reading."
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All Souls by Javier Marías; translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa With high black humor, a visiting Spanish lecturer bends his gaze over that most British of institutions, Oxford University. "A dazzling example of the
Oxford novel." |
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In All Souls, our narrator, a visiting Spanish lecturer, viewing Oxford through a prismatic detachment, is 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, without a doubt, one of the cities in the world where least work gets done, 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. Marias 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 story of love within "a mysterious narrative," as The New Statesman noted, within "a turmoil of choreographical stories." "[C]rackles with deliciously
sly observations of Oxford mores." "Probably the wittiest novel
set in British academia since David Lodge wrote Changing Places."
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©2009
by New Directions Publishing Corp. |
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