4.0
Dark Back of Time
ByPublisher 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.
"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.
Download the free Fable app
Stay organized
Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.
Build a better TBR
Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building tool
Rate and review
Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tags
Curate your feed
Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesStay organized
Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.Build a better TBR
Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building toolRate and review
Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tagsCurate your feed
Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesDark Back of Time Reviews
4.0
“First, I recommending that you read http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/151695266 , since he provides such a thoughtful and comprehensive picture of this novel. Mike's accomplishment is all the more impressive because of the unique style and approach Marías takes in this novel. Is he writing a memoir or a novel? Is he providing historical analysis based on primary documents, or presenting a fictional depiction of historical characters? What is real? What relationship do storytelling and narrative play in our constructing our past as well as our present? Marías purposively and brilliantly explodes genre boundaries as he plays with themes having to do with reality and fiction, and the difficulty in distinguishing between them.
In Dark Back of Time, Marías begins with a humorous, affectionate, and (sometimes) exasperated depiction of the reception of his novel https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1655608.All_Souls , which many friends and former colleagues take to be a roman á clef based on Marías's time spent in Oxford University. As Marías repeatedly insists that the novel sprung mainly from his imagination, he moves from a discussion of his novel to examinations of minor historical figures who appeared in the novel, through the lens of myriad historical documents - newspaper articles, oral histories, written documentation, and photographs, among others.
As a historian, I especially appreciated Marías's treatment of historical sources, which he understands to be fictions in their own way, based on the very different perspectives and motivations of their creators. I've always loved it when authors present a scrapbook of sources, not tidied up neatly in a clear story (although that also has its place), but with all the loose ends, ambiguities, and contradictions in place. This love of complexity and nuance is part of what interested me in studying history in the first place. There is something so human and involving to me about all those ragged edges of the past. As Marías says, "facts in themselves are nothing, language cannot reproduce them just as any number of repetitions, with their sharp edges, cannot reproduce the time that is past or gone, or revive the dead who have already gone past us and been lost in that time. And at this point who knows what has become real and what has become fictitious." (330) The blurred lines between fiction and reality are complex, messy, part of being human.
Marías' approach to understanding the past has all the elements of complexity and nuance that I describe above. He notes the accretions of the past on the written word, as well as what we lose through death and the dimming of memory: "With the passage or loss of time, old books are no longer text and binding alone but also what their former readers have left in them over the years, marks, comments, exclamations, profanities, photographs, dedications or ex libris, a letter, sheet of paper or signature, a waterspot, burn or stain or simply their names, as the books' owners." (286) Marías also makes a place for what he refers to as the dark back of time - a place where events and nonevents converge, where paths not taken, brothers lost at a young age, and parallel lives still carry on, and can be recovered if we are open to them.
This book is very highly recommended for readers who are open to Marîas' creative, philosophical, lyrical, and personal approach.”
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
Start a Book Club
Start a public or private book club with this book on the Fable app today!FAQ
Do I have to buy the ebook to participate in a book club?
Why can’t I buy the ebook on the app?
How is Fable’s reader different from Kindle?
Do you sell physical books too?
Are book clubs free to join on Fable?
How do I start a book club with this book on Fable?
