A Companion to Javier Marías

A Companion to Javier Marías PDF Author: David K. Herzberger
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1855662302
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
A detailed and lively discussion and analysis of the novels, short stories, newspaper columns, and other works of one of the most important and popular writers in Spain today. This book provides the most comprehensive study to date of the full range of Marías' writing, including discussion and analysis of his literary and intellectual formation, his development as a novelist and short story writer, andhis unique perspective offered in nearly twenty-five years of newspaper columns on topics ranging from religion to football. Above all, Marías is examined as a writer of fictions. As a translator of several canonical works from English to Spanish, Marías came to appreciate the preciseness of words as well as their ambiguity, their capacity to represent as well as their propensity to distort. The author examines Marías's constant awareness of how languagecan be used to construct stories as the foundation for engaging the world as well as for imagining it. The nature of Marías's storytelling, and the way in which he imagines, form the principal focus of this Companion. David K. Herzberger is Professor and Chair of the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside.

A Companion to Javier Marías

A Companion to Javier Marías PDF Author: David K. Herzberger
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1855662302
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Get Book

Book Description
A detailed and lively discussion and analysis of the novels, short stories, newspaper columns, and other works of one of the most important and popular writers in Spain today. This book provides the most comprehensive study to date of the full range of Marías' writing, including discussion and analysis of his literary and intellectual formation, his development as a novelist and short story writer, andhis unique perspective offered in nearly twenty-five years of newspaper columns on topics ranging from religion to football. Above all, Marías is examined as a writer of fictions. As a translator of several canonical works from English to Spanish, Marías came to appreciate the preciseness of words as well as their ambiguity, their capacity to represent as well as their propensity to distort. The author examines Marías's constant awareness of how languagecan be used to construct stories as the foundation for engaging the world as well as for imagining it. The nature of Marías's storytelling, and the way in which he imagines, form the principal focus of this Companion. David K. Herzberger is Professor and Chair of the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside.

The Infatuations

The Infatuations PDF Author: Javier Marías
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307960730
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book, NPR Great Reads, and Onion A.V. Club Best Book of 2013 Each day before work María Dolz stops at the same café. There she finds herself drawn to a couple who is also there every morning. Observing their seemingly perfect life helps her escape the listlessness of her own. But when the man is brutally murdered and María approaches the widow to offer her condolences, what began as mere observation turns into an increasingly complicated entanglement. Invited into the widow's home, she meets--and falls in love with--a man who sheds disturbing new light on the crime. As María recounts this story, we are given a murder mystery brilliantly encased in a metaphysical enquiry, a novel that grapples with questions of love and death, chance and coincidence, and above all, with the slippery essence of the truth and how it is told. This ebook edition includes a reading group guide.

Coming into one's Own

Coming into one's Own PDF Author: Alexis Grohmann
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900448826X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Javier Marías is a major contemporary Spanish novelist who has enjoyed remarkable international success and recognition. He is a writer who has undergone a singular and clearly discernible novelistic evolution and has forged a very distinctive style of his own. It is this formal development that this book traces through a study of his works from Los dominios del lobo (1971) to Negra espalda del tiempo (1998). With the help of a wide range of 20th-century literary theories and criticism, it strives to show that in order to escape realism and Spanishness and to make his way into literature, Marías forges an intricate style which progressively develops and matures, and which creates highly suggestive and elaborate imaginative worlds, a literature with a particular ontology, ultimately capable of inventing reality. This book is the first full-length study of Javier Marías's work to be published so far and serves both as an introduction to, and a close examination of, the work of a major European writer.

Berta Isla

Berta Isla PDF Author: Javier Marías
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525521372
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
From the award-winning, internationally best-selling Spanish writer, author of The Infatuations, comes a gripping new novel of intrigue and missed chances--at once a spy story and a profound examination of a marriage founded on secrets and lies. When Berta Isla was a schoolgirl, she decided she would marry Tomás Nevinson--the dashing half-Spanish, half-English boy in her class with an extraordinary gift for languages. But when Tomás returns to Madrid from his studies at Oxford, he is a changed man. Unbeknownst to her, he has been approached by an agent from the British intelligence services, and he has unwittingly set in motion events that will derail forever the life they had planned. With peerless insight into the most shadowed corners of the human soul, Marías plunges the reader into the growing chasm between Berta and Tomás and the decisions that irreversibly change the course of the couple's fate. Berta Isla is a novel of love and truth, fear and secrecy, buried identities, and the destinies we bring upon ourselves.

Dark Back of Time

Dark Back of Time PDF Author: Javier Marías
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307951057
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
From one of Spain's greatest writers—and the international bestselling, award-winning author of The Infatuations—comes an odyssey into the nature of identity and of time that weaves together fact and fiction into a completely original and unforgettable hybrid. "Stylish, cerebral...Marías is a startling talent...His prose is ambitious, ironic, philosophical, and ultimately compassionate." —The New York Times 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 and of time. Marías weaves together autobiography, a legendary kingdom, strange ghostly literary figures, halls of mirrors, a one-eyed pilot, a curse in Havana, and a bullet lost in Mexico.

Between Eternities

Between Eternities PDF Author: Javier Marías
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101972106
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
A new, exhilarating collection of critical and personal writings--spanning more than twenty years of work--from the internationally renowned author of The Infatuations and A Heart So White. A Vintage Books Original. Javier Marías is a tireless examiner of the world around us: essayist, novelist, translator, voracious reader, enthusiastic debunker of pretension, and vigorous polymath. He is able to discover what many of us fail to notice or have never put into words, and he keeps looking long after most of us have turned away. This new collection of essays--by turns literary, philosophical, and autobiographical--journeys from the crumbling canals of Venice to the wide horizons of the Wild West, and Marías captures each new vista with razor-sharp acuity and wit. He explores, with characteristic relish, subjects ranging from soccer to classic cinema, from comic books and toy soldiers to mortality and memory, from "The Most Conceited of Cities" to "Why Almost No One Can Be Trusted," making each brilliantly and inimitably his own. Trenchant and wry, subversive and penetrating, Between Eternities is a collection of dazzling intellectual curiosity, offering a window into the expansive mind of the man so often said to be Spain's greatest living writer.

In the Night of Time

In the Night of Time PDF Author: Antonio Muñoz Molina
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547548052
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 657

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Book Description
A Washington Post Best Book of the Year: A “hypnotic” novel of the Spanish Civil War and one man’s quest to escape it (Colm Tóibín, The New York Review of Books). October 1936. Spanish architect Ignacio Abel arrives at Penn Station, the final stop on his journey from war-torn Madrid, where he has left behind his wife and children, abandoning them to uncertainty. Crossing the fragile borders of Europe, Ignacio reflects on months of fratricidal conflict in his embattled country, his transformation from a bricklayer’s son to a respected bourgeois husband and professional, and the all-consuming love affair with an American woman that forever altered his life. Winner of the 2012 Prix Méditerranée Étranger and hailed as a masterpiece, In the Night of Time is a sweeping, grand novel and an indelible portrait of a shattered society, written by one of Spain’s most important contemporary novelists. “Labyrinthine and spellbinding . . . One of the most eloquent monuments to the Spanish Civil War ever to be raised in fiction.” —The Washington Post, “The Top 50 Fiction Books for 2014” “An astonishingly vivid narrative that unfolds with hypnotic intensity by means of the constant interweaving of time and memory . . . Tolstoyan in its scale, emotional intensity and intellectual honesty.” —The Economist “Epic . . . Intoxicating prose.” —Entertainment Weekly “A War and Peace for the Spanish Civil War.” —Publishers Weekly

The Man of Feeling

The Man of Feeling PDF Author: Javier Marías
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0804172609
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
A story of love and memory from "the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature" (The Boston Globe) and the award-winning, international bestselling author of The Infatuations. On a train journey from Paris to Madrid a young opera singer becomes fascinated by those in his compartment: a middle-aged businessman, his alluring wife, and their male traveling companion. Soon his life of constant travel, luxury hotels, rehearsal and performance will become entangled with these three people, and the singer will find himself fatefully consumed by Natalia's beauty. The Man of Feeling is the haunting story of the birth and death of a passion, told in retrospect. Intricately interweaving desire and memory, it explores the nature of love, and asks whether we can ever truly recall something that no longer exists.

Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me PDF Author: Javier Marías
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Detective and mystery stories, Spanish
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
While in bed with a lover, a married woman has a heart attack and dies. What should the lover do, besides feed the baby and discreetly leave the house? The problem is aggravated by his inability to keep a secret.

The Fictional World of Javier Marías

The Fictional World of Javier Marías PDF Author: Marta Pérez-Carbonell
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004310975
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
The Fictional World of Javier Marías examines the origin and meaning of uncertainty in the key works of Spain’s leading contemporary novelist by engaging with the many language-related issues common to his narrative.