All Souls

Javier Marías

Editions

Review

The setting of this gorgeous novel is Oxford, “a city in syrup” according to the narrator, a visiting Spanish lecturer, bibliophile and lover. It is a beautifully observed, often very funny portrait of academia.  This is probably the book to start reading this important author: it is  immediately accessible, and both characters and themes crop up in later books.

Among the cast is a secondhand bookseller called Alabaster, and a character who slopes around looking for obscure books by John Gawsworth ("King of Redonda") and other mysterious Fitzrovia figures.  There were people in Oxford who believed that All Souls was a roman a clef.  Marías dismissed this with the characteristically subtle response that if there were people wandering around Oxford who had adopted attributes from characters in his novel then that was not his responsibility…

Subsequently, some of All Souls's Redonda background came to life for Marías in a most surprising way, which he used in his novel The Dark Back Of Time hbk £15.99pbk £7.99. - review by John de Falbe