Customer Reviews

All Souls

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A novel which appears to be about nothing but suggests everything. It is set in one of the two most famous English Universities, and very little of moment occurs in its pages - there is no murder, no scandals, no international spies but en passant the novel alludes to all of these things. It concerns itself with the minutia of daily living as seen through the eyes of the single Spanish lecturer. The eccentricities, gentleness, and foibles of this section of English life are a central concern with the realisation that far from being an ivory tower where inhabitants concern themselves with matters of a higher order, of philosophy, of God, and existence, they spend their time as best friend Dr Cromer-Blake expostulates, thinking about men and women - everything one does, everything one thinks, everything else that one thinks and plots about is a medium through which to think about them. Even wars are fought in order to be able to start thinking again, to renew our unending thinking about our men and women, about those who were or could be ours, about those we know already and those we will never know, about those who were young and those who will be young , about those who shared our beds and those who never will (p64). In the end, there is a sadness when the novel closes, a sweet sorrow and an acknowledgement of connection between his pushing his newborn son along in a pram and Marriott dragging his one legged dog along, or the Gypsy flowerseller dragging her wares along. It is a love story, but expresses itself in a love of humanity which happens to be that situated in Oxford, England. A love story that echoes Donne's lines that no man is island entire unto himself even though he may often feel he is!

Only read this book if you love literature.
Marias is the type of gifted writer who makes telling compelling stories 'look easy,' and thus inspires us to wish that we had written down our own adventures, perceptions, and loves. Although it is fiction, it caused quite an uproar at Oxford/Cambridge, because the professors there read themselves into the book's characters.
All Souls, from the opening pages to the end, is an evocative, inventive, textured, and fabulous novel.
Five stars, all the way.

I came to ALL SOULS having read Marias' "Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me" a month ago and being very impressed with it. My lukewarm assessment of ALL SOULS is no doubt in part a product of frustrated high expectations; ALL SOULS (published in 1989) is a comparatively pale and shallow fore-runner of "Tomorrow" (which was published in 1994).

In ALL SOULS, the un-named first-person narrator recounts what he wants to share with the reader about his two years as a visiting don at Oxford in Spanish literature. (The story is told more than two years after his tenure at Oxford, when he is back in Madrid and recently married, to Luisa, and more recently a father.) The back cover blurbs portray ALL SOULS as an "Oxford novel", marked by "wit and humour." While the novel may well realistically portray a young don's life at Oxford, it is not so much a send-up of Oxford or a particularly funny novel (although the first few pages of a chapter on dinner at "high tables" are quite funny) as it is a novel about purported relationships that end up being shallow and virtually inconsequential, and as such could be set in virtually any contemporary cosmopolitan spot. The narrator goes through the motions and conventions of friendship but through it all he remains emotionally and psychologically withdrawn and very self-absorbed. Here, the narrator's principal friends are two other Oxford dons and Clare Bayes, with whom the narrator has an adulterous affair of convenience for most of his two years in Oxford. The other principal character in the novel is a long-dead, actual historical figure from English letters, John Gawsworth. In the novel, Gawsworth may or may not have played a prominent role in Clare Bayes' life; in real life (and query how "real" this is) he also was the King of Redonda, a post that is today occupied by the "real"-life Javier Marias. (Christopher Marlowe also makes an intriguing cameo appearance, albeit unnamed.)

All in all, the novel is slow going. Very little happens, and unlike "Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me", there is very little psychological suspense to carry the reader forward. The narrator in ALL SOULS is even more self-centered and the other characters, as a group, more bland and one-dimensional. As in "Tomorrow", the writing is baroque, marked by lengthy parentheses-laden sentences and pages-long paragraphs. Much more often than in "Tomorrow", I found that I had lost my way in a meandering sentence or paragraph and I had to go back and find and pick up the thread. Likely that was due not so much to the elaborate writing, but more because large stretches of ALL SOULS (unlike "Tomorrow") are, frankly, boring; too little happens and we care too little about the self-absorbed characters.

Many other similarities or parallels between ALL SOULS and "Tomorrow" could be enumerated, but here I will mention only two: In both, the narrator embarks upon an affair with a married woman with seemingly no qualms for her husband, which indifference ends up appearing to be in a sense justified in the closing pages of the novel when the narrator learns that the husband also is carrying on outside his marriage. Second, some of the serious themes discussed so gracefully and engagingly in the later novel, "Tomorrow", also appear in ALL SOULS -- for example, personal identity, death, and the weaknesses and vicissitudes of memory -- but the treatment here is so light and casual that I can't characterize ALL SOULS as an intellectual novel, as I tend to regard "Tomorrow."

I read ALL SOULS because of the serendipitous good fortune of having first read "Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me." If, instead, my introduction to Marias had been ALL SOULS, I doubt that I ever would have gone on to read "Tomorrow".

The book is excelent and the AMazon's service is perfect

A devastating picture of the Oxbridge university system, with its fossilized ways, its unreal academics disconnected from the real world, the dowdy town and frowsty gown, crumbling spires and unbreakable atmosphere of privilege that the university exudes. Javier Marias knows what he is talking about for he taught there. But being Spanish, he is not in mental thrall to the very idea of Oxford (or Cambridge) the way most Anglo-Saxons are.

Unfortunately, it is more of a series of vignettes than a highly developed novel but Marias approach enables him to pour barrelfuls of acid on the place. Its highpoint is the account of a supper at an Oxford college high table, that starts off well but rapidly breaks down into intellectual, moral and physical chaos. Some of the writer's aphorisms (such as the reference to Oxford being preserved in aspic, and statements like the one arguing that the city is "one of the world's cities where least work gets done, where simply being is far more important than doing") should be engraved in marble and set up in the middle of the High.

The novel won a prize back home in Spain and M/s Costa's translation is brill.

My Heart so White was an excellent book that kept up the suspension, though there were some unnecessarily lengthy philosophical passages in it. All Souls starts off with a lot of promise, it has some witty observations about life and the meaning of life in Oxford, about English academics and their obsessions, about a foreigner trying to find his feet in that rather idiosyncratic world, and about his becoming a hunter rare books ... and one or two quite original portraits of the people that inhabit that world. But these little scattered gems of excellent writing, admirably translated by Margaret Jull Costa, cannot hide the fact that there simply isn't a story worth telling here. I found the hero utterly self-absorbed and not worthy of sympathy, or interest. It remains a mystery what he finds so attractive in his lover Clare, since she is very much a cardboard character. The same can be said of his academic protector, who is a jealous homosexual ... it's all too stereotyped to be believable, or worthy of our attention.
All in all a book that has some beautifully written passages but left me completely indifferent.

One of the books my father would stop reading and put on the top shelf because it's so sad. Vacuum. No "fear god in life" but fear of cold and emtpiness. The enormous amount of awe Oxford demands.sun on the walls, but also constant vivisection practised behind them. It all seems to be a riddle like the ones Borges indulged in (but can't be explained in 10 minutes)...so worth being read..

Sin la templenza vista tu alguna cosa perfeta? Oh death come quiet as in the arrow You are wont to come.....