On Javier Marías, TMoF

Opera singers always stay in luxury hotels and our excesses are neither unusual nor excessive, but rather the norm and what is required, yet our life in the city where we have come to work is not so very different from that of a traveling salesman. In every hotel in which I have stayed—in every hotel, therefore, in which there was a singer—there was at least one traveling salesman who, during my sojourn, slashed his wrists in a bubble bath or ruthlessly knifed a bellboy, performed a striptease in the foyer, set fire to a carpet, used the fire extinguisher to smash the mirrors in his luxury suite or, in the elevator, fondled the wife of a member of some government. And before or after such an outburst, I have always identified with some detail, some characteristic, some gesture of utter weariness which I had noticed in the salesman when we coincided in the elevator late at night, tie disheveled and eyes docile; in a shared sideways glance of patience and defeat; in the discreet way we smoother our hair or mopped our brow with a handkerchief; in the unoriginal manner of their suicide.

I am enjoying the hell out of Javier Marías’ The Man of Feeling. I wrote to Kugler, in a drowsy email, that reading Marías is like getting drunk, each sentence like a sip from a too-strong liquor. And I think I was referring specifically to the passage above.

An early Believer article with a stupid premise (“But who from Spain?”) introduced me to Marías and I found a copy of his short story collection, When I Was Mortal, on someone else’s bookshelf. That’s where I realized I’d read him before, the long story, “Blood on A Spear,” was published in Zoetrope a few years earlier.

This past November, the New Yorker profiled Marías on the release of a collection of essays. The article features a few of those long strange passages – like the one above – that saturate his stories. I want to compare Marias to David Lynch but that's probably laziness on my part. They both drift towards domestic strangenesses (I'll add a big 'occasionally' there) and then they go in very much their own directions.