Marias, Javier. All Souls. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992.
Reason read: Oxford Jazz festival is in April.
I don’t exactly know how to explain All Souls except to say it is the first person narrative of a professor at Oxford with a two year contract. He remembers not having a heavy teaching load, but instead had heavy opinions of his colleagues. Most of his narrative is remembering his struggle to carry on a more then superficial affair with a married woman and the hurt he felt when she snubbed him for a month when her child was ill. He was a hard character to feel sorry for.
Confessional: I don’t think I much like the narrator of All Souls. He is an opinionated, standoffish, snarly man. On the other hand, I was fascinated with Will the porter. At ninety years old he lives in his head and those around him never know what era he thinks he is in but they accommodate him nicely.
Quote to quote, “Mrs. Alabaster was a smiling, authoritarian woman, with one of those very English smiles that you see adorning the faces of those famous strangers in films as they’re about to chose their next victim” (p 75).
Here’s another odd one, “We always condemn ourselves by what we say, not by what we do, but what we say or what we say we do, not by that others say or by what we actually have done” (p 31).
Author fact: Marias also wrote the Your Face Tomorrow series which is also on my Challenge list.
Book trivia: All Souls was the first fiction of Marias to be translated by Margaret Jull Costa in 1992.
Nancy said: Pearl said nothing special about All Souls except to quote a line from it.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Oxford” in the section “Literary Fiction” (p 171).
~*LunaSea*~ 