Dark Back of Time [Paperback]

Javier Marias (Author), Esther Allen (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2004

A book by Spain's greatest living writer weaves fiction and fact into a completely original and unforgettable hybrid.

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 ("we do not know anyone entirely, not even ourselves") and of time. Marías weaves together autobiography (the brother who died as a child; the loss of his mother), a legendary kingdom, strange ghostly literary figures, halls of mirrors, a one-eyed pilot, a curse in Havana, and a bullet lost in Mexico. Dark Back of Time has been acclaimed here as "superb" (Review of Contemporary Fiction), "fantastically original" (Talk), "brilliant" (Virginia Quarterly Review), and "a rare gift" (The New York Times Book Review). "In the best manner of Borges," The Hudson Review commented that this hybrid is "lush and mysterious."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The Spanish novelist Javier Mar¡as has the ability, which he shares with Italo Calvino, to turn a metaphysical insight into a novelistic adventure. In his latest book, Mar¡as employs the old gambit of a novel within a novel, but the radical twist is that the novel on the inside is one of Mar¡as's real, previous novels All Souls. All Souls revolved around various fictitious and nonfictitious Oxford personalities, and was inspired by Mar¡as's temporary teaching position at the university in the early '80s. In the present novel, Mar¡as learns, to his dismay, that various factual Oxford personages upon whom various fictional personages were based are taking over his novel, in effect, by extrapolating fictitious facts from partial facts that were embedded in the original fiction. For instance, the fictitious narrator of All Souls has an affair with a married woman, Clare Bayes. This is translated, in the Oxford community, as proof that the real Mar¡as had a real affair with a woman at Oxford, who is variously identified. Other misidentifications and misreadings follow. In one of the funniest scenes, Mar¡as returns to an antiquarian bookstore in Oxford and finds that the couple who own it, the Stones, not only identify with the bookstore-owning Alabasters in his novel, but want to play them in the film version of the book. Meanwhile, the film, in a final turn of the screw, turns out to be a complete distortion of the novel. The second half of this novel is a virtuoso digression on the seedily adventurous circle around a minor British poet and Oxford figure, Gawsworth. Mar¡as has an antiquarian's taste for history's minor characters, in whose lives fact flows easily into fiction and back again.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

A seamless blend of biography, autobiography, and fiction....a novel with a brooding, speculative, and investigative nature. -- Bondo Wyszpolski, Easy Reader, 29 July 2004

An invaluable gloss on one of contemporary fiction's most provocative and accomplished bodies of work. -- Kirkus Reviews

Fascinating...fresh (in both senses of the word) and sexy (in every sense of the word). -- Bookforum

Javier Marías is in my opinion one of the best contemporary European authors. -- J. M. Coetzee

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation (June 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811215709
• ISBN-13: 978-0811215701
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,215,924 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Javier Marías is an award-winning Spanish novelist. He is also a translator and columnist, as well as the current king of Redonda. He was born in Madrid in 1951 and published his first novel at the age of nineteen. He has held academic posts in Spain, the US (he was a visiting professor at Wellesley College) and Britain, as a lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University. He has been translated into 34 languages, and more than six million copies of his books have been sold worldwide. In 1997 he won the Nelly Sachs Award; the Comunidad de Madrid award in 1998; in 2000 the Grinzane Cavour Award, the Alberto Moravia Prize, and the Dublin IMPAC Award. He also won the Spanish National Translation Award in 1979 for his translation of Tristram Shandy in 1979. He was a professor at Oxford University and the Complutense of Madrid. He currently lives in Madrid.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fiction? Or non-fiction? Whichever, this is extraordinary literature., January 10, 2009

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R. M. Peterson (Santa Fe, NM) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dark Back of Time (Paperback)

DARK BACK OF TIME is an extraordinary work of literature, unlike anything else I have read. But like many good things, it is not readily accessible. Reading it, like reading anything by Marias, requires careful attention, even work. Moreover, for maximum effect, one probably should read at least two other works by Marias before tackling DARK BACK OF TIME (see the last paragraph of this review).

DARK BACK OF TIME is an extended essay on fiction and reality, and how they interpenetrate and influence one another in story-telling and, ultimately, in memory and in history. The springboard for the book is the minor cause celebre occasioned by the publication in England of Marias's earlier novel, ALL SOULS, the setting of which was Oxford University. In large part because Marias himself had taught for two academic years at Oxford, he was immediately identified with the nameless narrator of ALL SOULS. Furthermore, despite Marias's adamant denials, many readers, especially in England, insisted that ALL SOULS was a roman a clef, whose characters were based on real individuals with whom Marias had interacted during his two years at Oxford.

In DARK BACK OF TIME, Marias recounts and expounds on this confusion, this confounding of fiction and reality. Along the way, other subjects are also explored, including identity, death, time, the frailty of memory, the evanescence of life, and how "[e]verything is so random and absurd" (which is closely related to the question of whether there is, or can be, any meaning associated with our lives, and deaths).

Reportedly, Marias has described DARK BACK OF TIME as a "false novel." I don't quite know what he means by that. To me, it is essentially a work of non-fiction, at least insofar as literary essays, imaginative and contemplative in nature, are non-fiction. Some I guess would call it "meta-fiction." Within the pages of the book there are, however, a few flights of pure fancy. There also are extended digressions involving actual minor historical figures not associated with Oxford, people like Wilfrid Herbert Gore Ewart (a WWI veteran and writer, touted by Conan Doyle and T.E. Lawrence, who was mysteriously shot and killed in Mexico City around the moment 1922 became 1923) and Hugh Oloff de Wet (a mercenary soldier who survived imprisonment as a spy in Nazi Germany).

Members of Marias's family also make their appearance, including Javier's older brother who died suddenly, at the age of three, before Javier even was born. This happenstance occasions one of Marias's reflections on the "dark back of time" -- the "what-ifs" and "might have beens" in this world of randomness and absurdity: "If the child had lived longer, I might not have been born or might might not have been the same person, the two things are identical. And so what, if I hadn't been born, and so what, if my brother faded away and said goodbye so soon, as if [time] rushed to rid itself of his incipient will and forced it to cross over to its opposite side, its dark back, transformed into a ghost."

Elsewhere Marias expands on the "dark back of time," such that it becomes a universal or omnipresent concept to him. (The phrase, and perhaps the concept itself, is borrowed from Shakespeare: "What seest thou else / In the dark backward and abyss of time?", The Tempest, act I, sc. ii, line 49.)

There are distinct similarities in style and tone to the fiction of W.G. Sebald (principally "Rings of Saturn" and "Vertigo"), which are highlighted by Marias's use of photographs, although for the most part the photographs in DARK BACK OF TIME are more closely, or obviously, related to the text than in Sebald. Thus, it was intriguing to learn that Sebald was an admirer of Marias's work, and that he provided an endorsement for the cover of the English edition of DARK BACK OF TIME. (For what it's worth, the original German publication of "Schwindel, Gefuhle", or "Vertigo", was in 1990, while DARK BACK OF TIME was not published until 1998.)

Translating DARK BACK OF TIME must have been more daunting and demanding than most books, but Esther Allen seems to have done a superb job. (Still, the book is one of those rare works of literature that I would very much like to be able to read in their original language.)

Finally, to return to the point of preparatory reading: DARK BACK OF TIME undoubtedly will be vastly more rewarding, and easier to get into and understand, if the reader has already read ALL SOULS. Unfortunately, ALL SOULS, by itself, is not a superior work of fiction, at least to my mind. What is a superior work of fiction, and what I think provides an excellent introduction to Marias' style and his existential ambiance is TOMORROW IN THE BATTLE THINK ON ME. Thus, my recommendation would be to read TOMORROW first, then ALL SOULS, and only then DARK BACK OF TIME. That's quite a bit of reading, to be sure, but Marias is one of the truly great contemporary writers and, in my experience, well worth the effort. I look forward, keenly, to reading more of his work.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A dyslexic's view of time... and history, literature, and the human condition..., June 7, 2010

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John P. Jones III (Albuquerque, NM, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dark Back of Time (Paperback)

"I sometimes think that time must be different for someone who began writing and reading in reverse...than it is for most people who have never tried to go from back to front but have always progressed from front to back...I often move through what I've called in several books `the other side of time, its dark back' taking the mysterious expression from Shakespeare to give a name to the kind of time that has not existed, the time that awaits us and also the time that does not await us and therefore does not happen..." So says Javier Marias, very late in this masterpiece, which helps explain the title. He is not (particularly) talking about the space-time continuum, time warps and modern physics, but rather what is possible at the juncture of fact and fiction in the work of a creative writer, as well as the `what ifs' of history. Marias is simply marvelous, and reading him is like playing a game of three or even four-dimensional (to add the time continuum) chess. You turn the final page, and place it on your "must re-read list" and hopefully I'll "get" the other half, the second time around.

The author commences, first by identifying some real-life historical characters that he elaborates on later in his work, and then focuses on his "novel within a novel." In real life, Marias wrote "All Souls," based on his two years teaching at Oxford University. Is his previous novel a formal, "roman a clef," a novel based on real individuals? But aren't most novels? And for anyone who has ever written a book, there is the "squeamishness" of reading about the real life reactions of the people who are, or who think they are in Marias's earlier work. Why didn't he include me? Why was this fact omitted, that incident included, particular circumstances changed? Marias has a droll, self-deprecating style. Concerning the woman who was identified as the person who had an affair with the author, which the author at least formally denies (which side of time are we on with that one?), he says: "...and thus not only would her reputation be placed in question but her good taste as well."

"I must make a digression--this is a book of digressions..." Indeed, it is, as Marias writes about three real life characters, and sometimes writers. Wilfred Ewart, who managed to survive World War I in the trenches, participated in the spontaneous Christmas truce of 1915, but latter was felled by a bullet in his "dead" eye on the last moment of 1922, in Mexico City. Was it an accidental shot from New Year's revelers, or something more sinister? Marias plays at a bit of "C.S.I." 80 years later. There is also John Gawsworth, the "King of Redonda," an uninhabited island in the Caribbean. (Marias is now "credited" as being the Spanish king of Redonda.) Gawsworth wrote well, and was to die `in the gutter.' The third writer, as well as one of life's adventurers, was Hugh Oloff de Wet, whose own history was widely woven fact and fiction. There is a marvelous scene when de Wet meets Franco, the then dictator of Spain, and tries to solicit funds for his effort to overthrow the Soviet Union. Since Marias' real-life father had been on Franco's death list, you can assume the "Admiral" did not come off very well in this passage. (The books written by these three authors, which Marias mentions, obscure though they might be, are generally available at Amazon.)

Marias interlaces this wonderful rich soufflé, with literary illusions, high and low, obscure historical reference and definitive opinions on the poverty of the human condition. Since Marias has toiled in academia, rest assured they do not come off well. Consider: "Accustomed to the robbery, looting, plagiarism and endless espionage of the contemporary university..." Or, in taking on humanity as a whole: "...I've seen from certain social-climbing businessmen when they were crossed: contemptible, insecure people who inspire no respect and need to convince themselves of their eminence, crushing anyone they can, anyone who is weak, to ceaselessly renew their always scanty confidence..."

In the midst of this wild literary pastiche of erudition, there is a poignant half chapter, on his "older" brother, Julianin, who died at the age of 3 ½. The author explores the "what ifs" of history, how the author himself might not even be alive, or would be a different person - the same thing he says - if Julianin had lived. There is a heart-breaking portrait, and an even more moving picture of Julianin. RM Peterson, in his own review of this book, notes the parallels between Marias, and W.G. Sebald. Indeed there are, including the obscure photos placed with the narrative. It was reassuring to hear that they were friends (Sebald died in 2001).

I'd only fault Marias on one issue: he has apparently fallen for one of history's fakes and scoundrels, TE Lawrence, as in, "Lawrence of Arabia," who makes repeated appearance in this work, including: "...and Lawrence of Arabia, the unattainable ideal of all adventurers..."(p 302).

Overall, a Pychonesque novel in scope, breadth, and quirky erudition, and I would give it to Marias "on points" in terms of insight into the human condition. A re-read within the next five years...if, of course... In the meantime, without hyperventilating, or even breathing deep, it certainly deserves 6-stars for the first time around.

5.0 out of 5 stars Death, Fate and a Few British Authors, November 23, 2011

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James W. Fonseca (Zanesville, OH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dark Back of Time (Paperback)

This is a many-faceted book. First of all, it's a metanovel; a novel in reaction to another novel - the author's All Souls a fictional account of academic intrigue at Oxford. He fictionalizes an account of reaction to his novel, particularly how, despite his best efforts to NOT make it a roman a clef, everyone saw themselves and their colleagues in it. The author fictionalized reality and discovered that fiction became reality. It's also a metanovel because the author frequently draws a distinction between the narrator and the author and, in effect, challenges the reader: "guess who's speaking now?"

Against this dual fictional backdrop, about a third of the work consists of mini biographies of early and mid-Twentieth Century British authors. I'm tempted to say "obscure British authors," but some of these folks, such as Stephen Graham, had fifty published works in their day. "Where are they now?" it seems the author is asking us.

There are many recurring philosophical themes in this work. Death, of course, is the main one. World War I and the Spanish Civil War offer plenty of material. Fate is big. Another theme is authors seeking immortality through their books and actors through their films. Another is coincidence. Didn't Jung say there are no coincidences?

Marias expends the most biographical effort on the British author Wilfred Ewart, who spent his short life as if he were destined to be killed by a stray bullet entering his brain through his already-blind eye on a hotel balcony in Mexico City. The author constructs what-might-have-been scenarios, as he does with his three-year old brother who died before the author was born. He writes about special objects owned by us, such as a comb or cigarette lighter: "...it may be that objects are the only things that reconcile and balance past and present, and even the future, ... They go on living without missing us and for that very reason they don't change, and in that they are loyal to us."

There are many lyrical passages. Some samples: "...his irises yellow under the stationary July sun;" "...launching of quick anecdotes sharp as fencers' thrusts;" and "...laughing in slow percussive bursts like pistons backfiring..."

If there is another author's work I am tempted to compare this book with, it is Proust. That's quite a comparison and I debated a while about giving this book a 4 (there are some tedious sections) or a 5. I decided on the latter because, how often do you encounter a work of this scope and depth? I think it's a work of genius. Not light reading, but worthwhile reading. As the author unabashedly notes near the end of the work, "...if the reader should wonder what on earth is being recounted here or where this text is heading, the only proper answer, I fear, would be that it is simply running its course and heading toward its ending, just like anything else that passes through or happens in the world."