The Man of Feeling [Hardcover]

Javier Marias (Author), Margaret Jull Costa (Author)

Book Description

Series: New Direction Book | Publication Date: May 2003

Marías's riveting novel about an opera singer and an extramarital affair.

Glinting like a moonstone with layers of emotion, The Man of Feeling is a sleek and strange tale of cosmopolitan love. An affair between a married woman and a young man just becoming an opera star (curiously helped along by the husband's factotum) meets with adamant resistance from the implacable husband.

Narrated by the young opera singer, the novel opens as he recalls traveling on a train from Milan to Venice, silently absorbed for hours by the woman asleep opposite his seat. In the measured tones of memory, The Man of Feeling revolves on the poles of anticipation and recollection. The peculiar rarified life lived in the world's luxury hotels, a life of rehearsal and performance, the constant travel and ghost-like detachment of our protagonist adds a deeper tone to the novel's weave of desire and detachment, of consideration and reconsideration: its epigraph cites William Hazlitt: "I think myself into love,/And I dream myself out of it." As Marías remarks in a brief afterword, this is a love story "in which love is neither seen nor experienced, but announced and remembered." Can love be recalled truly when it no longer exists? That twist will continue to revolve in the reader's mind, conjuring up in its disembodied way Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. Beautifully translated into English for the first time by Margaret Jull Costa, this fascinating and eerie early novel by Javier Marías bears out his reputation for the "dazzling" (TLS) and "startling" (The New York Times).

Editorial Reviews

Review

A book that reflects the torture of love the way arias reflect heartbreak. -- Washington Times, 11 May 2003

A digressive narrative that moves back and forth in time....There is nothing quite like it in fiction today. -- New York Times Book Review, Lawrence Venuti, 29 June 2003

A good introduction to the wonderfully inventive Javier Marias. -- Bookslut, Matthew Kirkpatrick, October 2003

A living master...a visceral exploration of the deep center of the human heart and mind. -- American Book Review, Amy Sayre-Roberts, September/October 2003

A resonant enigma...an elusive text...a revealing introduction to and gloss on Marías's richer, even more puzzling subsequent fiction. -- Kirkus Reviews, 15 April 2003

A true genius of literary subterfuge....a writer whose sprawling intelligence and circular, tricksterish prose resist reduction. -- Village Voice, Joy Press, 4-10 June 2003

An intriguing novel that...explores the meaning and impetus of love not head-on but through love's handmaidens—anticipation and recollection. -- Easy Reader, Bondo Wyszpolski, 11 September 2003

Marias is a superb prose stylist....New Directions is to be applauded for making his fiction available in the US. -- Rain Taxi, Alan Tinkler, Summer 2003

Perverse and powerful fiction. -- Review of Contemporary Fiction, Steven G. Kellman, Spring 2003

[Marias] has a flair and outrageous humor and a form of erotomania that is all his own. -- Mark Rudman, New England Review, Summer 2004

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Spanish

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (May 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811215318
• ISBN-13: 978-0811215312
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,298,102 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

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A lukewarm recommendation to steadfast fans of Javier Marias, September 2, 2009

By 

R. M. Peterson (Santa Fe, NM) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Man of Feeling (Paperback)

Javier Marias is one of my favorite contemporary writers of fiction. THE MAN OF FEELING is one of Marias's earliest novels (1986). It is evident that he had not yet hit his full stride as an author. If you are not familiar with Marias, I strongly recommend against making THE MAN OF FEELING your introduction to his work. And even if you have been captivated by Marias's more mature, and much better, novels, you can give THE MAN OF FEELING a pass without missing out on something truly significant.

THE MAN OF FEELING shares a distinct family resemblance with Marias's later novels, especially the prose style, which is marked by dense, meandering sentences, somewhat akin to the prose of W.G. Sebald or that of Henry James. Several themes or preoccupations are the same -- particularly, the blurring of fact and fiction (or imagination) in memory, and the finality of death -- although they are not explored as extensively or as deftly as in the later novels. Also the same is the oddly detached and somewhat melancholy tone of the narrative by the first-person narrator.

Here, that first-person narrator never reveals his name. He is a professional opera singer, and the story concerns the beginning and end of his relationship with Natalia. He first saw her on a train on the way to Madrid four years ago, as he was traveling there to begin an engagement to sing Cassio in Verdi's "Otello." She was traveling with her protective, wealthy husband and the male companion hired by her husband to entertain her (chastely) while he attended his business affairs. The three of them end up staying at the same hotel in Madrid as the narrator, and an odd competition over Natalia develops between the narrator and her businessman husband (who, curiously, turns out to be "the man of feeling"). In a brief epilogue, Marias states that THE MAN OF FEELING is a "love story," but I did not so regard it while reading the novel -- and I still don't.

That synopsis probably doesn't sound very exciting, and to be sure the novel is not exciting. Truth be told, none of the Marias that I have read is exciting. His hallmark is a minute examination of commonplace situations, raising and exploring seemingly all possible explanations, or implications, of an event or action. That simply does not lend itself to excitement. But the two later novels (of those I've read) most similar to this one -- "Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me" and "A Heart So White" -- begin with a death and surrounding mystery that provide for an atmosphere of suspense that propels the reader through the gradually unfolding musings of the narrator. Here, that suspense is missing, and the narrative suffers. Also missing, by and large, is the wit and humor found in the later fiction.

In sum, I can recommend THE MAN OF FEELING only to steadfast fans of Javier Marias, and then it is only a lukewarm recommendation. But I will commend this edition's cover illustration, "New York Restaurant" by Edward Hopper, which captures perfectly the ambiance of the novel.

5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A really good one, October 1, 2003

By 

Jose F. Troncoso "jftron" (NJ, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Man of Feeling (Hardcover)

This is not the best book to start reading Javier Marias, but if you like him (in novels such as A heart so white or Tomorrow in the battle think on me) you must read this one.

1 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not fully realized, March 3, 2005

By 

Luciole "Traduttore" (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Man of Feeling (Hardcover)

If the above reviewer felt this was not the Marias book to start with, I would love to know why.
This, the first novel by Marias that I've read, seemed a work that stalled at impressive effort without making it to graceful coherence. The author's afterword does more to elucidate with a confession of intention than all the book's detailed but ultimately unrevealing waffling.