Javier Marias: All Souls

I am on a literary tour of Spain these days. After Juan Goytisolo now it is the turn of Javier Marias. Unlike Goytisolo I have been hearing his name and reading the reviews of his books for quite some time but I got around to reading him only now. Apparently in continental Europe he is a major literary star and many of his books have scaled the bestseller charts. His books have been regularly reviewed in major english language magazines and newspapers too.

In the eighties Marias spent a couple of years in Oxford as a visiting lecturer in the Spanish department there. He wrote this book based on his experience there. Now that I have said this, he actually wrote another book called Dark Back of Time, which I have been reading too, exactly for readers like me who look for some biographical grounding in fiction. Anyway let's just say that the narrator, who may or may not be Marias himself, lives in Oxford and like his fellow academics is basically a good-for-nothing. In Oxford he says "being is much more important than doing or even acting."

"In Oxford just being requires such concentration and patience, such energy to battle against the natural lethargy of the spirit, that it would be too much to expect its inhabitants actually to stir themselves, especially in public, although in the breaks between classes some of my colleagues did make a point of rushing from once place to another just to create the impression of being in a state of the most constant and extreme haste and bustle."

Well be that as it may, as the novel shows being itself can be very interesting and very funny too if the people are colourful enough. There is actually no central thread in the book. It is just a fragmented and loosely connected collection of brief portraits of colourful figures and some really hilarious (and a few sombre) set-pieces. And by colourful I really mean colourful. We get to meet a bunch of aging homosexuals, ex-spies, (seems in retrospect be a self-conscious commentary on the famous Cambridge spies and homosexuals), experts on interrogation of defectors from Soviet Union, an economist whose expertise is the cider tax in sixteenth century England, an eccentric couple who run a second hand book store, plump rustic girls in the neighbourhood pub, a representative of the international Arthur Machen society, a dog with three legs, an obscure writer John Gawsworth who was awarded the kingship of an island but who died in utter destitution, and a host of others. The narrator also gets involved in a romantic affair with a married woman which actually forms the bulk of the novel.

The tone and the style of the book, as befits the subject, is that of a high-brow and inventive satire. The narrator is himself an outsider, a continental, and one of his jobs in Oxford seems to be recording and commenting on the mores of Oxford academics, as if he were a trained anthropologist. Most of the time it is self-satire too though it is always full of affection and sympathy towards everybody. There is not even a hint of bitterness and anger. Some people may feel the book to be slight and without a serious point but I think that would be a mistake. Its seriousness lies not in its content but the way language is used to negotiate fiction and reality. The book has a few photographs too which like in W.G. Sebald's books tease the readers by confusing them about the nature of fiction and reality. (Marias and Sebald admired each other's works.) The tone, the style and the wordplays also reminded me of Nabokov, many of whose narrators are academics and are similarly unreliable and inventive too. He was similarly a master of high-brow satire too, though he preferred the label "parody" because he considered satire to be a didactic and hence a sub-literary art. (Nabokov's Pnin, which this book reminded me of, is actually one of my favourite academic novel i.e. a novel about academics.) In fact Nabokov himself makes a few appearances in the book as Vladimir Vladimirovich.

Marias actually wrote "a sequel" (rather a fictional-commentary) to All Souls which was published in English as Dark Back of Time (a phrase taken from All Souls). I am currently half way through it and it is an absolute masterpiece. It has a seriousness which seems to be missing from All Souls, at least on surface. If All Souls reminded me of Pnin, then Dark Back of Time is Pale Fire. I will write about it when I am done with it. For now a nice profile of Marias from The Guardian.