Todas las almas

An account, from memory, of the Spanish narrator's 2 years at Oxford. _From memory_, that's the important bit here. Everything is account (story) and memory.
At first I was going to complain about the style, the looping, rambling voice of not only the narrator but also the other characters

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(everyone talks/thinks the same?, I thought to myself). In fact, at one point (the high-table scene where our narrator first meets his lover-to-be) I said to myself, this scene that's supposed to be funny (hilarious even) almost isn't because of the way he's telling it. But by the end I realized that that's the point. The whole book is in the narrator's head, I mean _coming from_ the narrator's head. That's why it's messy, anxious, agitated (as the narrator himself readily admits he was during that period in his life).
This novel is also a demonstration of what literature is: keeping going with the story; the immortality of us as persons and as a culture. All souls have a story, all souls are afraid to die because they don't want to miss out on the all the stories: those untold, those yet to unfold...
One of my favorite bits: the scene near the end where Clare recounts a scene from her past that she herself barely remembers (she was only 3 and has constructed the story from others' tellings); but we don't "hear" her finishing the story (the climax), instead the narrator does it himself in his own head, adding his own embellishments and touches...!

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There's a small group of authors whose works should be read in chronological order (e.g., Pynchon), and I'm now certain that Marias is one of them. Many of the characters in this book show up again in Your Face Tomorrow; more importantly, I think you'll appreciate this book more if you read it

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without thinking to yourself "well now, this is different, Marias doing Beckettian farce," or "ah, this is the start of his wonderful style" or "a lot more happens in this book than in his later works, but I'm not sure that's a good thing," all thoughts I had as I read it.

One slightly more productive thought: it turns out that I think of novels are a mix of essay, plot and character. And I think many authors eventually eliminate one or the other of these in their books. What's weird about 'All Souls' is that Marias, who pretty much eliminates character in his later works, here revels in his cast of eccentric Englishmen. The people don't all speak like Marias' narrator, they're of different classes and different backgrounds, and they all have little handles--the old professor, the lech, the plump girl and so on. In the other Marias I've read, all of this is gone, and those novels are *stronger* because of it. The ideas are more developed and the plot is both more gripping and more concise, even though the books themselves are much longer.

That said, this is still better than your average Oxford novel.

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Reading All Souls was like an easy stroll through Central Park, in no hurry, and mindful of all my surroundings. It was a sleepy tale for me and one that took longer than anticipated as I cared little for it to end and had no stake in if it continued. However, the relaxed pace of the writing of

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Javier Marías and the sophistication he brings to the page is quite delightful. It is similar to sitting in a professor's comfortable library listening to a respected teacher tell a story. It is difficult to grade a book such as this one. If I were on a vacation somewhere, in a lounge chair on the beach, and if my reading of late had not been so intensely violent and bloodthirsty, then perhaps I would have had a different experience with this book. But in my case, in real time, the book was too slow for me and I never got past the staleness I felt throughout most of it except for the bookshop segment and the narrator's thoughts on having a child. I also throughly enjoyed Clare's explanation near the end of the book and her story regarding her mother and why these two adulterous lovers would not be continuing on in their relationship because of it. Hard for me to punish Javier with a poor rating when it was only I who was elsewhere while reading the text. He is a very fine writer and I look forward to reading more of his work in the very near future.

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Reading this in the wrong order, a few months after Your face tomorrow, it's interesting to see how much it works as a kind of prologue for the trilogy. The narrator is the same, of course, and many of the characters reappear (some under new names), but it's also notable how many of the scenes in

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this book prefigure key scenes in the trilogy. It certainly makes sense to read them together.
Otherwise, I enjoyed the comic glimpses into eighties Oxford life - possibly a bit clichéed, but still very much as I remember it. Oxford is, after all, a city that loves to boast about the tackiness of its own image.
Marías is perhaps a bit more self-conscious about his very individual style than in the later books where he and the reader have got used to it: there are a few places where he even seems to be sending himself up (e.g. in the Brighton scene, where Clare is about to tell us what promises to be a key story, but is blocked at the word "Listen!" for about ten pages of repetitions and nested parentheses).

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This is an interesting little book set in Oxford "the static city preserved in syrup", where the writer spent two years in the 1980s. The first half has some terrific comic set pieces, notably an extended description of a comic dinner, and the second half is more reflective and philosophical. Very

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enjoyable.

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An unnamed Spanish lecturer at Oxford describes some of his life there--his lover, his mentor, other lecturers, the used bookshop staff, the places he goes and where he lives.

And it's all long stream-of-consciousness paragraphs. Not my thing. What happens? Not much, really. A lot of speculation

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about what happened, what will happen, and what happened a lifetime ago for some of the characters.

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I don't exactly know how to explain All Souls except to say it is the first person narrative of a professor at Oxford with a two year contract. He remembers not having a heavy teaching load, but instead had heavy opinions of his colleagues. Most of his narrative is remembering his struggle to carry

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on a more then superficial affair with a married woman and the hurt he felt when she snubbed him for a month when her child was ill. He was a hard character to feel sorry for.
Confessional: I don't think I much like the narrator of All Souls. He is an opinionated, standoffish, snarly man. On the other hand, I was fascinated with Will the porter. At ninety years old he lives in his head and those around him never know what era he thinks he is in but they accommodate him nicely.

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