Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
I really can’t be reading anything but Best Translated Fiction books at the moment, but this is the sort of thing to make me want to devise a Your Face Tomorrow
That digression is a hallmark of Marías’s writing and is sure to whittle away some of his readers, but rewarding for most. It was also a topic of Marías’s talk with Paul Holdengräber at the New York Public Library, where, among other things, Marías acknowledged that the sword (readers will know the sword) is a nod to Cervantes. On digression, Marías remarked that “Time doesn’t give time to exist” and that novels give you time back. In real time, for example, after a long night of discussion, you may remember only a single moment, but the novel gives you the duration of the evening you never have in real life.
I believe this is along the lines of what Jordan Anderson is getting at in his Marias essay at The Quarterly Conversation that begins with the paragraph:
The writings of Marcel Proust and Javier Marías are concerned with the contrast of finite human memory against nearly infinite time. They lay bare a tragic fact of a human existence: we compare the limitations of our own memories to the ceaseless expanse of time and space surrounding them. Proust’s and Marías’s works also constantly involve deliberation over the extent to which we can understand the past, and they represent that past via language and the degree to which can we know either ourselves or others. Both authors might suggest that what we can know of any of these things is an extremely limited amount, if it is any amount at all.
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Yes, please do! (“Infinite Tomorrow?” “Your Face Summer?”) I’ve had the trilogy sitting on my shelf for months now. I new-year’s-resolved to read it in January, but with the days slipping away (and my pile of other books to read piling higher), I doubt I’ll get to it without some external motivation.
I’m in. Your Face This Summer!
Count me in as well. Infinite Face!
I am re-reading A Heart So White at the moment, and have Vol 3 of YFT at home, with the other two on the way. Such a wonderful talent Marias is!
I read Vol 1 Fever and Spear a few months ago, and came away greatly impressed. It was my first experience with Marias, and he is an amazing talent. I would totally participate in Your Face This Summer!
I am reading Vol 3 now. I recently re-read the first two (I admit I skimmed here and there) and when I met Marias at his 92nd Y reading here in NY, I told him this and he seemed, shocked and told me not to bother, that things in the new book would remind me of what had happened. Nevertheless one odd experience I had (re)reading was that due to his complex and non-linear Time, I kept thinking I’d skipped or forgotten something important: I would mention for example, sex with a woman, as having happened in the “past” yet the actual event was still to be narrated. Hence, as a reader I felt as if I was remembering, or more precisely, “forgetting” something that I had yet to read.
I am rereading the last three or four chapters of Fever and Spear before I acquire the second volume, and I just wanted to add that I can think of very few other reading experiences that compare to being swept away by Marias. The power and quality of his writing is so rarely encountered. Perhaps, I have experienced similar effects while reading Le Clezio’s The Prospector, Carpentier’s The Lost Steps, and Austerlitz by Sebald, but otherwise. . .