3.0
All Souls
ByPublisher Description
From one of the most important voices in world literature—and the award-winning author of The Infatuations—a darkly comic campus novel and love story about that most British of institutions, Oxford University. • "Javier Marías is in my opinion one of the best contemporary writers." —J.M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize-winning author of Disgrace
In All Souls, a visiting Spanish lecturer, viewing Oxford through a prismatic detachment, is alternately amused, puzzled, delighted, and disgusted by its vagaries of human vanity. A bit lonely, not always able to see his charming but very married mistress, he casts about for activity; he barely has to teach. Yet so much goes into simply "being" at Oxford: friendship, opinion-mongering, one-upmanship, finicky exchanges of favors, gossip, adultery, book-collecting, back-patting, backstabbing. Marías demonstrates a sweet tooth for eccentricity in this novel from “one of the best contemporary writers” (J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature).
In All Souls, a visiting Spanish lecturer, viewing Oxford through a prismatic detachment, is alternately amused, puzzled, delighted, and disgusted by its vagaries of human vanity. A bit lonely, not always able to see his charming but very married mistress, he casts about for activity; he barely has to teach. Yet so much goes into simply "being" at Oxford: friendship, opinion-mongering, one-upmanship, finicky exchanges of favors, gossip, adultery, book-collecting, back-patting, backstabbing. Marías demonstrates a sweet tooth for eccentricity in this novel from “one of the best contemporary writers” (J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature).
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesAll Souls Reviews
3.0
BelievableFeel distantLikeableMemorableMinor characters stand outMultilayeredRelatableClever plottingDisjointedLoose endsNonlinear narrativeSatisfying conclusionSlow-pacedWell-structuredAtmosphericEvocative imageryHistoricalMagicalMajesticMysticalNostalgicOpulentPicturesqueRealisticSetting fits the storySurrealUnique locationVivid descriptionsBeautifully-writtenFunnyOriginalWitty
“more like 3.5 but i’m gracious so i round up
i loved how smart and cool i felt reading this book. and it was funny and pretentiously relatable (which is my way of saying the narrator was a snob who thought he was special for feeling things literally everyone has felt)
some really great quotes that i loved, but also a weirddddd random spurt of fatphobia i can’t quite get past
and i’ll say it— i love an affair narrative sorry (as long as it stays in my fiction and not irl)”
About Javier Marías
JAVIER MARÍAS was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published fifteen novels, including The Infatuations and A Heart So White, as well as three collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into forty-four languages, has sold more than eight and a half million copies worldwide, and has won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Prix Femina Étranger. He died in 2022.
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa
Other books by Javier Marías
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