Early Marías, but already with most of the characteristic features of his style clearly visible. The classic narrative rhythm, the subversive parentheses, the loops and digressions, the literary sidetracks: all there as we would expect, but on a slightly less monumental scale than in his more recent books.

The narrator is an opera singer, a tenor, who is telling us about a dream he's just had relating to an incident some four years ago when he was in Madrid, appearing as Cassio in Verdi's Otello, and got involved with a woman called Natalia Manur, wife of an important Flemish banker. We soon lose track of how much of what he's telling us is dream and how much really happened, and he doesn't seem to be very clear about it himself, but obviously that shouldn't make any difference to us as readers of a piece of fiction anyway...

As we might expect, there's a female character who has to die prematurely for no good reason other than to advance the plot. But despite the obvious Othello parallels in the plot, it isn't the Desdemona character who gets the chop this time. Moreover, Marías being nothing if not self-aware, it turns out that the narrator has an interesting obsession with the character Liù in Turandot, who has to kill herself so that it's possible for the story to resolve itself.

There are passing mentions of Flaubert, Nabokov, Shakespeare and other usual suspects, as well as "an Austrian writer" (Thomas Bernhard? Robert Musil?). But mostly Marías sticks to the idea that the narrator is not a particularly bookish person, more interested in the oddities of the opera world than in odd corners of world literature. And there are some good opera anecdotes, including the one about the singer who becomes so obsessive about not singing to a house that is less than 100% full that he ends up sitting in an overlooked empty seat himself and having to be removed forcibly by the men in white coats.

Good claustrophobic fun! ( )

The Man of Feeling is a reinvention of Othello, one both wicked and wicked-smart. An opera singer reflects on a visit to Madrid to perform in Verdi's Otello. He encounters three people: a married couple and their (paid) companion. The Shakespearean roles are all twisted and dislocated. The matters are more mercenary here than the Bard's tale. Madrid is both home to the itinerant singer as well as some blurred noir, teeming with after-hour temptations and the ubiquity of garbage trucks. Marias offers a duality in the afterward: there are those who accept a fictive purpose and those who aspire to a reality, even if that tangibility destroys. Marias finds favor with the latter, especially those who are consequently consigned to memory's lens.

I fled through this novel, inhaling each sentence and marveling. An entire afternoon slipped between the pages. I find the Marias of this and [b:Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me|60030|Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me|Javier Marías|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1348254165s/60030.jpg|1281855] to be narcotic. The long form Javier of the trilogy doesn't have quite the same effect. ( )

An intriguing and haunting meditation on the nature of love, loss and the space between dreams and memories. ( )

Premetto: parlando di M. non sono persona obiettiva.
---
Non è un libro immortale, ma è *solo* affascinante, intenso, delicato, colto, ricco. Non sarà ai livelli di "Domani nella battaglia..." ma non possono essere tutte opere indimenticabili, quelle di M. Anche se mi vien da pensare che questa ha una, una pagina sola, buttata li' in mezzo alle altre, che rimane brillante di un amore, di un dolore, di una potenza evocativa tale che basta questa a giustificare la lettura di tutto il libro. Solo per arrivare li' è rimanere impietriti. ( )

This short meditative book is narrated from the perspective of a young opera singer who travels across Europe for performances. On one of his journeys he shares a train cabin with an attractive woman, her husband, and a man who works as their handler (for lack of a better word). It seems painfully obvious that the narrator will lust after the woman, that the power-hungry husband won't like that, and the handler will play both sides against one another, because that is exactly what happens. Marias narrator is not a sympathetic character, even as he details the reprehensible behavior of the others in this quartet, he still comes off as the worst. The saving grace is that Marias - and his translator - makes good use of lyric writing with a few turns of the flowery word and a narrative built on a dreamlike quality. This is not a book to read for the plot or the characters, just the well-crafted prose. Marias describes his work accurately in the epilogue as 'a love story in which love is neither seen nor experienced, but announced and remembered.'' ( )