Between Eternities

March 15, 2018

IMPAC Dublin Literary Award winner Spanish author Marías (e.g., The Infatuations) has published 19 volumes collecting the weekly columns he's been writing for two decades for the newspaper El País. This volume offers a best-of-the-best survey of incisive pieces ranging from classic cinema and comic books to mortality and Marías's black-sheep uncle.

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May 21, 2018
Spanish novelist Marías (While the Women Are Sleeping) draws from 20 years of weekly newspaper columns to assemble a collection that is often funny, sometimes wise, and always thought provoking. The essays tackle approachable themes with élan and even bombast, as when he declares that all cities are either “boastful” like Madrid, or “conceited” like New York, which “attracts by cultivating an ever closer resemblance to the preconceived image one has of it.” In “The Invading Library,” he describes how his childhood struggles to find space to play amid stacks of his parents’ books resulted in his fondness for literature, as well as a “lack of respect for anyone who writes, myself included... individuals who partially soured my childhood and invaded the territory occupied by my thrilling games.” But he also writes more emotionally, such as when reflecting on “the pain caused when something ends” while observing his friends mourn their children growing up and leaving home. Marías says that he writes like he reads, and the same way life is lived—without knowing what is going to happen in the end. This open-minded, playful approach permeates his delightful essays.

June 1, 2018
Portrait of the artist as a well-traveled sophisticate, unsentimental littérateur, and cranky film critic.Very little gets past the narrators of Marías' recent novels, The Infatuations (2013) and Thus Bad Begins (2016).They're onlookers, life's minor characters, bearing detailed witness to a much bigger story than their own. The author proves to be a similarly absorbed and intelligent noticer in this collection of essays and newspaper columns from the past few decades, albeit one sometimes boxed in by a tight space. Although there are longer essays where he flourishes, the pieces often feel a little claustrophobic, and many end when he's just getting going. Early in the book, Marías keeps himself (and readers) amused writing about family history or Venice, a city whose residents live in a world unto themselves. "Their indifference and lack of curiosity about anything other than themselves and their ancestors," he writes, "has no equivalent in even the most inward-turning of villages in the northern hemisphere." The author is at his best writing about books and movies, despite a certain reactionary streak. He takes joy in deriding a profession divided between the self-destructive and self-absorbed. His own idea of an artist-hero is The Leopard author Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, who spent his last days reading rejection slips for his only novel. Marías also lets us in on his own writing process: "I force myself to be ruled by what I have already written, and allow that to determine what happens next." As a cineaste, he's decidedly old-school; he worships the Western, adores Ann-Margret, venerates It's a Wonderful Life and (his favorite) The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. He may be the only critic alive who believes the 1970s were "the worst decade in the history of cinema." A lively collection, on the whole, from a man of the world who is most comfortable on his own turf.

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