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 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. ( )

Periodically I am asked if I've been to Oxford. I glibly reply, yes, I've been to both. Perhaps my first sentence is an overstatement, but i have offered my response a few times in my life and mean it. I don't consider Square Books and Rowan Oak to be tantamount to the learned city on the Isis, but the southern locale is a cultural hub. My wife and i last went to Oxford, on the Thames, a few winters ago. It was a delightful cold and wet day. Our minds were occupied with Inspector Lewis and second-hand books rather than discerning the vapor trails of Senor Marias.

I loved All Souls for its discretion. It struggles to find a pragmatic middle path in life. That said it didn't lose itself in serpentine digressions. Perhaps here, I am looking at you [b:Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear / Dance and Dream / Poison, Shadow, and Farewell|9653380|Your Face Tomorrow Fever and Spear / Dance and Dream / Poison, Shadow, and Farewell|Javier Marías|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1348998393s/9653380.jpg|14540925]

It was intriguing to note the number of observations in All Souls which resurface in YFT: the thesis on cider tax and the booksellers' distinction of Richard Francis Burton (Captain Burton for those inclined) were but a few. Alas, contrary to the novel, we didn't discover any intrigue, only wonderful Lebanese food and a knapsack stuffed w/ books from the tented stalls.
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All Souls by Javier Marias is about a Spanish academic who spends two years as a visiting academic in Oxford, and has an affair with another tutor, Clare, who is married with a son. I am always drawn to books set in universities, but this one was a little different from the typical campus novel. It was certainly quite funny and contained its fair share of the scandalous relationships and eccentric tutors that are usually found in the university novel, but there are several things that set it apart.

One was a tendency towards philosophical digressions on subjects such as identity, memory and the ritual significance of emptying a rubbish bin. Some of these I found funny (the rubbish bin episode, for example), others rather off-putting and tedious. I found some of the abstract and reflective sections quite heavy-going, until the plot acquired some more momentum and I became interested again. I wasn’t particularly drawn to the character of Clare, as she seemed rather vague and distant, and didn’t come alive to me somehow. Perhaps this reflected the slightly apathetic nature of their affair, which seemed partly a way for the main character to fill his time and amuse himself while in Oxford, where he admits, he has ‘minimal duties, a fact that often made me feel I was playing a purely decorative role there’. I was more interested in his friendships with other academics, and his experiences living in Oxford, which is described as ‘a city preserved in syrup’.

Another way the book was quite unusual was the surrealist aspect to it. For example, one subplot of the book was the narrator’s ‘morbid’ interest in collecting rare books, which is a distraction from the emptiness of his life and his inability to see Clare as much as he wants to. This leads to him becoming obsessed with two neglected writers with bizarre life histories and being stalked around second-hand bookshops by a strange antiquarian bookseller. I quite liked this part of the book. It was definitely more entertaining than the narrator’s half-hearted relationship with Clare.

Another way the book differs from the usual Oxford novel or film is its absence of nostalgia or romanticism. As well as the university, it describes the other lives of Oxford, including the homeless people with whom the narrator becomes obsessed in his wanderings around the city. The book doesn’t just talk about the centre of Oxford, but also mentions the towns and villages surrounding it, and reveals an entertaining obsession with Didcot Station (a very dreary, deserted place), where the narrator briefly meets a young girl, an encounter that seems to haunt him for a while. I also liked the description of the narrator’s trip to a sleazy nightclub and the groups of people who go there. Of course, All Souls does concentrate mainly on the university, since all the main characters are academics, but it doesn’t romanticise this either; in fact the narrator’s main feeling towards the place is one of unease. It is seen as a place where nothing changes, where people don’t have enough to occupy them and their academic work is merely a distraction from their real preoccupation with relationships. It is also described, disturbingly, as a place where people exist outside time and reality... This book definitely didn’t have much of the Brideshead spirit about it, or if it did, only the negative flipside.

This wasn’t one of my favourite university novels, since it lacked a certain passion and excitement, but it was pretty entertaining and unusual. I’m still not really sure what to make of it, but I liked how it made me see Oxford in a different way. [2011] ( )

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 enjoyable. ( )

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 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). ( )