Издания и произведения

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."

Dark Back of Time is a compelling story of the way in which reality blurs into fiction by Javier Mar?as, whose highly-anticipated new novel The Infatuations is published in 2013. It is translated by Esther Allen in Penguin Modern Classics. "We lose everything because everything remains except us", says the mysterious narrator of this extraordinary novel, which meditates on the transience, chance and fragility of life. As a man called Javier Mar?as recalls the strange events and people that shaped his past, including ghostly literary figures, a pilot, an adventurer, a brother who died as a child and the king of an island in the Caribbean,…

Called by its author a "false novel," Dark Back of Time, the latest work of "the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature" (Boston Globe) is a splendid new hybrid. Javier Marias's singular new production Dark Back of Time begins with the tale of the odd effects of publishing All Souls, his 1989 Oxford novel. All Souls, narrated by a visiting Spanish lecturer, is a book he 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 a clef. They claim certain roles for their own, and for others: the narrator's…

Pero quizá ninguno haya visto su realidad invadida por la ficción como Javier Marías, ni a tantas personas comportarse como personajes suyos, ni se habrá diluido tanto entre sus propias páginas, ni se habrá convertido en el heredero de un reino legendario que sin embargo figura en los mapas. Poco podía imaginar el autor de esta «falsa novela» que con su obra Todas las almas iba a poner en marcha un mundo que yacía dormido o que transitaba sólo por la Negra espalda del tiempo que suele estar oculta y no verse. Un mundo en el que todo cabe, lo impensable y lo que trae el destino, la inverosimilitud y la gracia, la aventura y el infortunio,…