All Souls - (Vintage International) by Javier Marías (Paperback)

About the Book

With high black humor, a visiting Spanish lecturer bends his gaze over that most British of institutions, Oxford University.

Book Synopsis

From one of the most important voices in world literature--and the award-winning author of The Infatuations--a darkly comic campus novel and love story about that most British of institutions, Oxford University. - "Javier Marías is in my opinion one of the best contemporary writers." --J.M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize-winning author of Disgrace

In All Souls, a visiting Spanish lecturer, viewing Oxford through a prismatic detachment, is alternately amused, puzzled, delighted, and disgusted by its vagaries of human vanity. A bit lonely, not always able to see his charming but very married mistress, he casts about for activity; he barely has to teach. Yet so much goes into simply "being" at Oxford: friendship, opinion-mongering, one-upmanship, finicky exchanges of favors, gossip, adultery, book-collecting, back-patting, backstabbing. Marías demonstrates a sweet tooth for eccentricity in this novel from "one of the best contemporary writers" (J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature).

Review Quotes

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

"Dazzling.... Javier Marías writes with elegance, with wit and with masterful suspense." --The Times Literary Supplement

"Javier Marías is such an elegant, witty and persuasive writer that it is tempting simply to quote him at length." --The Scotsman

"Stylish, cerebral.... Marías is a startling talent...His prose is ambitious, ironic, philosophical, and ultimately compassionate." --The New York Times

About the Author

JAVIER MARÍAS was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published fifteen novels, including The Infatuations and A Heart So White, as well as three collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into forty-four languages, has sold more than eight and a half million copies worldwide, and has won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Prix Femina Étranger. He died in 2022.

Translated by Margaret Jull Costa