When I Was Mortal [Paperback]

Javier Marías (Author), Margaret Jull Costa (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 14, 2009

A dozen stories by Javier Marías — "the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature" (Boston Sunday Globe) — commissioned from numerous literary publications around the world.

Victims of mistaken identity, sponging relatives, amateur sleuths, eavesdroppers, professional liars, assassins, and failed bodyguards populate the short stories in When I Was Mortal. Plots turn on curious exigencies—a woman about to star in her first porn film; a night doctor who adds new meaning to "specialist"; a ghost whose neglect is greatly resented. "In the space of ten or twenty pages," as the Nouvel Observateur remarked, "Marías contrives to write a novel." "The short story fits Marías like a glove," as Le Point noted, and these stories have been acclaimed as "dazzling" (The London Times Literary Supplement); "formidably intelligent" (The London Review of Books); and "startling" (The New York Times Book Review).

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Like Borges, who felt that every story benefited from a good mystery, Mar!as (A Heart So White) packs murder, intrigue, even ghosts into nearly every one of the dozen short narratives in this collection. Mar!as, one of Spain's most prominent contemporary writers, shows his macabre playfulness right from the start. In "The Night Doctor," a dinner party leads to a nighttime walk through Paris, and introduces two similar Italian women with similarly unpleasant husbands, and a mysterious doctor whose evening visits may put a permanent end to their marital problems. In "Broken Binoculars," a seemingly innocuous conversation at the racetrack develops into a frank discussion of assassination. "Flesh Sunday" features a man looking out from the balcony of his honeymoon hotel room. While his wife lies on the bed behind him, he watches a woman who may--or may not--be waiting for him. These tales, like others in the collection, are enigmatic, almost elliptical, and are related by a narrator distinguished by his urbane wit and unflappability. The one long story here, "Blood on a Spear," typifies the author's taste for misdirection. The intriguing opening scene shows the narrator's friend murdered, impaled on his bed with a naked woman by his side. As the unnamed narrator investigates, he learns that little is as it initially seems. In a foreword, Mar!as reveals that nearly all the short fictions were written on commission, and that many came with external requirements (such as a summer setting, or a crime element), which heightened Mar!as's literary gamesmanship. The foreword also discloses, amusingly, that "Broken Binoculars" originally appeared with the first page accidentally discarded, in what Mar!as calls "the worst printer's error ever perpetrated on one of my texts." (Apr.) FYI: Mar!as won the 1997 International IMPAC Literary Award for A Heart So White.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Kirkus Reviews

A first English translation of a 1995 collection comprising 12 elliptical, often insidiously compelling stories from the prizewinning Spanish author, whose highly regarded fiction artfully blends Henry James's subtle indirection with flagrantly Gothic and Grand Guignol narrative materials. Two of Maras's novels, in fact, are here compressed and reimagined: the suave Oxford College comedy All Souls in ``No More Love,'' and the harrowing family psychodrama A Heart So White in ``The Honeymoon.'' Most of the pieces are brusque glimpses of lives derailed by quick-strike passions or moral confusionsall recorded by an aloof narrator who seems to stand comfortably outside the orbits of the individual ``worlds'' he observes so dispassionately. This limits the power of several tales to involve usthough there are a few striking exceptions: ``Fewer Scruples,'' told with weary self-mocking wit by a ``financially strapped' woman who auditions for a porno film; the bizarre detective-story thriller ``Blood on a Spear''; and the brilliant title story, a monologue spoken by a ghost who understands the shape of his life only after having departed it, and learned how and why he died. Dependably intriguing (if uneven) work from one of Europe's most interesting contemporary writers. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (April 14, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811215164
• ISBN-13: 978-0811215169
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,694,938 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

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars So just what does make us mortal?, November 24, 2000

By 

"jfallahay" (Oak Park, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: When I Was Mortal (Hardcover)

In fairness to Mr. Marias, I think an alternative view of this collection should be offered to the book-buying public so that they can decide if they wish to purchase this item.

Although this collection does have its faults and is sometimes uneven--I think a couple of entries could easily have been left out--it offers an interesting and entertaining literary voice and suggests a universe that is uniquely cohesive and disturbing. Indeed, one could posit that in Mr. Marias's universe little true empathy exists between persons, be they husbands and wives, childhood friends, or even casual or business acquaintances. A general, undefined antipathy permeates the boundaries of most human interaction in these stories, suggesting that modern society is lacking some basic interconnectedness at its core; yes, something is rotten in the state of Denmark, but just what is not so obvious as in Shakespeare's tales.

This is not to suggest that everyone is alone and riddled by angst, anger, or fear--and spouting off about them--but merely that modern relationships display some palpable sense of absence rather than a unity at the core. The sense is that fate or accident has thrown people together--or blinded them--and that this condition of unexpressed unease is allowed to exist until, one day, it emerges in sudden flares of violent action.

Indeed, violence can be found in almost all of these twelve tales, but not the overt violence of today's movies and TV news. These tales are rarely graphic or disturbing in that sense. The violence is often suggested and its reasons masked rather than explicitly shown. One story asks, Have two women worked together with a "foreign" doctor to quietly eliminate their husbands? Another depicts a bodyguard who now seems compelled to kill the person he has been hired to protect, but we are left to ponder the reason. Still another leaves us wondering about the suicide of a main character. Indeed, Marias takes us along the path of Yeats' poems, where we are often left with questions rather than defined answers, and in that sense the tales can be confounding if you are not willing to read closely, and reread, to unearth the subtleties of the elegant prose and the barely revealed clues. Little is directly stated in these stories, and I am sure that will cause consternation among those who want clean-cut, easily defined tales that have a neat beginning, a logical progression, and an inevitable or shocking end. That is not Marias's way. More often, you are left to fill in the subtext. Fortinbras does not waltz in neatly at the end to restore order.

Was I always pleased with these stories? Nope. But did I learn from them and find some small truths about people and the way we are mortal? The answer is defintely yes. And because the prose is refined and subtlely ironic, because the viewpoint is often detached and analytical, and because Marias presents an unsettling world that truly reflects our own, I was curious enough to read them as befits their merit. They peeked my interest enough to even attempt a novel by Marias, and that may well be my next Amazon purchase.

By the way, the story "When I Was Mortal," the centerpiece of the work, is among the best conjectural narratives I have read. It may not be worth the price of admission alone, but it goes a long way toward making this volume a worthwhile purchase.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars In Response to Comments by Others, January 5, 2001

By 

David Curry (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: When I Was Mortal (Hardcover)

A reader should consider the possibility that Marias' introduction to the book is also fictive, including the details about commissions.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Chamber Music, July 25, 2010

By 

Jeremy Glazier (Columbus, OH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: When I Was Mortal (Paperback)

I'm slightly surprised that this is the first five-star review of this collection, but I am happy to provide one. I picked up When I Was Mortal - it was my first exposure to the work of Marias - after seeing his named lumped together with W. G. Sebald, Michel Houellebecq, and Vladimir Sorokin, all writers I have devoured and returned to again and again. It was not a useless comparison (though, of course, those writers are all very different, and Marias isn't exactly quite like any of them; still...). I read the entire book on a return flight home - though I had only intended to read a story or two and then fall asleep - I was so entranced by the narrator's voice(s), the compelling characters, the twisted situations.

I enjoyed the experience so much that I sought out a number of his other works - A Heart So White, the recently-concluded Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, all of which I have enjoyed; however, I'm someone who generally prefers chamber music to symphonies, the intricately-crafted miniature to the densely-woven panoramic. That's what I found in these Marias stories and, in a way, they helped to teach me how to read the longer works. (I've heard Marias compared to Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, etc., perhaps simply because of the sheer length of Your Face Tomorrow, but I don't see it.) When I Was Mortal is the perfect introduction to this important contemporary writer; if nothing else, it will allow the curious reader to gauge whether or not to seek out his other works. For my part, I felt compelled to read more - in the same way I felt compelled to seek out the orchestral work of Marias's compatriot Cristobal Halffter after hearing Halffter's string quartets. These stories convey the same intimacy - and intensity - of chamber music, and I'm excited to see that another collection of stories will soon be available.