Dark Back of Time - Hardcover

Mar�as, Javier; Allen, Esther

3.8

903 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811214664 ISBN 13: 9780811214667

Publisher: New Directions, 2001

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Javier Marias' s singular new production Dark Back of Time begins with the tale of the odd effects of publishing All Souls, his 1989 Oxford novel. All Souls, narrated by a visiting Spanish lecturer, is a book he 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 a clef. They claim certain roles for their own, and for others: the narrator's invented mistress has been firmly identified as one of the professors' wives. Marias views with astonishment a world that seemed nearly asleep set into fretful motion by a world that never "existed". Yet this backwash of All Souls only begins an odyssey into the nature of identity ("We do not know anyone entirely, not even ourselves"), and of time ("which is not yet past nor lost and maybe isn't even time at all"). With the flair of Sterne, his "false" novel manipulates time, weaving in autobiography, a legendary kingdom, strange ghostly literary figures, halls of mirrors, a one-eyed WWI veteran, a curse in Havana and a bullet lost in Mexico. Dark Back of Time becomes a brilliant ironic puzzle about the powers of art and of memories, which become only more mysterious the more Marias remembers.

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Product Description:

Physical description; 336 p. : ill. (some col.), maps (some col.) ; 21 cm. Other titles; Negra espalda del tiempo. English. Notes; Originally published in Spain by Ediciones Alfaguara Barcelona, 1998. Genre; Fiction.

Review:

[Dark Back of Time] shows sensitivity in exploring an entire shadowland of human experience just beyond the reach of words, and could be said to represent a culminating point in its author's long career (Times Literary Supplement)

It is a rare gift, to be offered a writer who lives in our own time but speaks with the intensity of the past, who comes with the extra richness lent by foreign history and nonetheless knows our own culture inside out (New York Times)

Witty, readable, moving and insistently thought-provoking-in the manner of Sebald (Irish Independent)

Dark Back of Time brings us a writer who is prepared to set up his apparatus and conduct the narrative experiment in broad daylight, without the benefit of smoke and mirrors (Scotland on Sunday)

He uses language like an anatomist uses the scalpel to cut away the layers of the flesh in order to lay bare the innermost secrets of that strangest of species, the human being (W. G. Sebald)

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