All Souls - Softcover

Mar�as, Javier; Marias, Javier

3.65

3,987 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811214532 ISBN 13: 9780811214537

Publisher: New Directions, 2000

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

In All Souls, our narrator, 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. His stay of two years, he recalls, involved duties which "were practically nil"―"Oxford is, without a doubt, one of the cities in the world where least work gets done, where simply being is far more important than doing or even acting." Yet so much goes into that simply being: friendship, opinion-mongering, one-upmanship, finicky exchanges of favors, gossip, adultery, book-collecting, back-patting, back-stabbing. Mar�as has a sweet tooth for eccentricity, and his novel "crackles with deliciously sly observations of Oxford mores," as James Woodall noted in the Independent. And yet further, All Souls is a story of love within "a mysterious narrative," as The New Statesman noted, within "a turmoil of choreographical stories."

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About the Author:

Javier Mar�as 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.

MARGARET JULL COSTA is a three-time winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. For New Directions, she has translated works by Rafael Chirbes, Javier Mar�as, Fernando Pessoa, E�a de Queir�s, and Enrique Vila-Matas.

Review:

A dazzling example of the Oxford novel. -- Michael Kerrigan, Times Literary Supplement

Probably the wittiest novel set in British academia since David Lodge wrote Changing Places. -- Corinna Honan, Daily Mail

The most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature. -- Boston Sunday Globe

The most talented Spanish author alive. -- Il Messagero

[A]lmost as intricate as The Sacred Fount or Pale Fire... read it. -- Irving Malin, The Hollins Critic, April 2001

[C]rackles with deliciously sly observations of Oxford mores. -- James Woodall, The Independent

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