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Since I found Your Face Tomorrow so enjoyable I’ve since moved on to All Souls, something of a precursor to Your Face Tomorrow, and the The Dark Back of Time, something of a follow-up to All Souls.
While reading YFT, I didn’t quite see the Henry James comparisons that Marias routinely gets, but they make a lot more sense vis a vis All Souls. Marias’ observation of manners is definitely sharper here (though far from lackluster in YFT), and his sentences are leaner, the sub-sub-sub clauses feeling more necessary and more carefully situated. (And due credit to Margaret Jull Costa–these are amazing translations, true paragons of the art.)
Also, All Souls has much more of an introvert feeling. In Your Face Tomorrow, Deza was something along the lines of a man of action (befitting the noirish plot), but here his narrative voice is far less so, befitting what is essentially a campus novel. One example:
During my two years of scouting out and hunting down such books with my gloved hands, I obtained many apparently unobtainable marvels at quite ridiculous prices, such as the seventeen volumes of The Thousand Nights and a Night by Sir Richard Francis Burton (better known to booksellers as Captain Burton), which began to appear more than a century ago in a limited edition of a thousand numbered copies of each volume, available only to subscribers of the Burton Club on the understanding (which they honoured) that it would never be enlarged or reprinted: in fact that exuberant Victorian text has never again been reprinted in its entirety, but only in selections or in bowdlerised editions, which, whilst apparently complete, were in fact expurgated of everything considered at the time (or by Lady Burton to be obscene.
That’s from an entire chapter on the used bookstores of Oxford.
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All Souls is one I’ve not read, but I agree with the James comparisons. What always strikes me when reading Marias, however, is less who he sounds like than the way he always sounds just like himself. His sentences, both in terms of structure and in terms of tone, are so distinct, so familiar from book to book that they’re instantly recognizable–though that stamp also makes it harder for him to shift his narrative voice (and thus his basic first-person protagonist) much.
Completely agreed about the character in All Souls – far more interesting, especially to literary types who I imagine can identify with this Deza more than the blank creature that shows up in YFT. Looking forward to the Dark Back of Time to see if anything can explain the transformation (though I guess it may just be the divorce).
Scott,
I’m so glad you’re reading All Souls and Dark Back of Time. I hope you’ll consider posting your thoughts about both after you’ve finished them, and how they link up with YFT. I was really impressed with the many echoes from both of the earlier novels Marias rings throughout YFT. In some ways, they’re three very different novels, but in others, they are so intimately intertwined. I was also quite intrigued to see the similarities–and the aging differences– between the younger pre-Luisa Deza and the post-separation Deza. Reading them while working my happy way through YFT made me also hold out a little hope that Marias may not yet be done with our friend Jacques Deza–perhaps eight or ten years from now he’ll write another novel about JD’s sojourns “in another country”…one can always hope! Happy reading!
I agree that the prose does seem so much different, in a sense, in All Souls, than in any of the other books of Marias’s that have been translated into English, even if I remember correctly the earlier novel, The Man of Feeling.
I’ve always wondered if Marias was influenced very much by “Jude the Obscure” while writing All Souls, since he had translated Hardy before — particularly in the puns used in the novel (renaming a couple named the Stones, who own a bookstore in Oxford, as the Alabasters, is in particular something reminiscent of Hardy’s use of stonemason imagery as metaphor for corruption in Oxford, in “Jude”).
I was also reading Christopher Hitchens’s new autobiography and was struck by how similar his view of Oxford was to Marias’s, and how Marias caught some of the hypocrisy of the university during his time there.
I think also Dark Back of Time is such a wonderful use of Marias’s “literary thinking,” that sort of borderline philosophical discourse… it would be interesting to know who Marias’s favorite philosophers are, especially since his father was so distinguished in the field.
Also, an interesting piece of information at http://www.javiermarias.es, if you look under the scroll-down section “Libros de Javier Marias,” then under “Todos las Almas” – at the bottom of the page is a link to a set of pictures detailing the Oxford of “All Souls.” It’s a pretty interesting way to get a sense of some of the places Marias talks about in the book, although they’re pretty famous landmarks.
[...] in the book and probably would have remained nameless had Marias not written YFT, and the book is quite unlike YFT in structure and [...]