Coming into one's Own: The Novelistic Development of Javier Marias (Portada Hispánica, 13)

Javier Marías is a major contemporary Spanish novelist who has enjoyed remarkable international success and recognition. He is a writer who has undergone a singular and clearly discernible novelistic evolution and has forged a very distinctive style of his own. It is this formal development that this book traces through a study of his works from Los dominios del lobo (1971) to Negra espalda del tiempo (1998). With the help of a wide range of 20th-century literary theories and criticism, it strives to show that in order to escape realism and Spanishness and to make his way into literature, Marías forges an intricate style which progressively develops and matures, and which creates highly suggestive and elaborate imaginative worlds, a literature with a particular ontology, ultimately capable of inventing reality. This book is the first full-length study of Javier Marías's work to be published so far and serves both as an introduction to, and a close examination of, the work of a major European writer.

a welcome contribution to scholarship on Spanish fiction towards the end of the twentieth century. [a] valuable contribution to the understanding of contemporary Spanish narrative. in: "Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies," Vol. 10, No. 2, 2004, pp. 245-247
Este primer libro sobre la obra de Javier Marias es una excelente contribucion dedicada a rastrear la evolucion estilistica de su narrativa a traves de una serie de lecturas particulares de cada novela. in: "Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispanicos," No. 3, 2004, pp. 614-16
No puede haber mejor introduccion al laboratorio creativo de Javier Marias y a la evolucion de su narrativa que el presente estudio de Grohmann. Ken Benson, in: "Revista de Filologia Hispanica," 2003, nr. 2
respektabele wissenschaftliche Leistung in: "Romanische Forschungen," Band 117, Heft 1, 2005, pp. 97-100"