Javier Marías

'She was bored and fought against her boredom, which only bored her still more.'Five sparkling, irreverent brief portraits of famous literary figures (including libertines, eccentrics and rogues) from Spain's greatest living writer.Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Spanjoren Jacques Deza, även kallad Jaime, Jacobo eller Jack, som under några tidigare år varit lektor i spanska i Oxford återkommer från sin hemstad Madrid till England efter separationen från sin älskade hustru Luisa. I London blir han rekryterad till den brittiska underrättelsetjänsten på rekommendationer av en gammal vän från Oxfordtiden. Deza har en kuslig förmåga att se människors riktiga jag, det ansikte som döljer sig under masken, och anlitas snart till att observera allt från suspekta affärsmän till samhällsrevoltörer.Men snart börjar Deza själv röra sig i skumma landskap. Han inser att hans arbetsgivare ägnar sig åt verksamheter som inte tål dagens ljus, och minnen från faderns upplevelser under spanska inbördes- kriget blir åter aktuella. Men det viktigaste av allt i Dezas liv – ska han lyckas återfå Luisa?Javier Marías storslagna trilogi Ditt ansikte i morgon är lika mycket en spionroman som en uppgörelse med Spaniens mörka historia. Allt sedan första delen publicerades 2002 har verket hälsats som Marías magnum opus. Nu samlas de tre delarna – Feber och Lans, Dans och Dröm (2004) och Gift och Skugga och Farväl (2007) – på svenska i Lena E. Heymans översättning.

Award-winning author Javier Marías weaves a darkly thrilling tale of love, betrayal and lives played out in the unhappy shadow of history As a young man, Juan de Vere takes a job that will haunt him for the rest of his life. Hi employer is Eduardo Muriel: a famous film director, sophisticated and discreet. Muriel's wife Beatriz is a soft, ripe woman who slips through her husband's home like an unwanted ghost, finding solace in other beds. And on the periphery of their lives stands Dr Jorge Van Vechten, a old family friend with a shadowy past. Juan enters eagerly into Muriel's world of glamour and prestige, but as time passes he is troubled by many questions that seem to have no answer. Why does Muriel hate Beatriz? How did Beatriz meet Van Vechten? And what happened in the chaotic years after the war?As Juan learns more about his employers, his own innocence begins to fall away. Though he starts off as a mere observer, he is soon unable to stand on the side lines, compelled to interfere ever more dangerously in the dark interior of other people's lives.Marias presents a study of the infinitely permeable boundaries between private and public selves, between observer and participant, between the deceptions we suffer from others and those we enact upon ourselves.'No one else, anywhere, is writing quite like this' Daily Telegraph on The Infatuations

An essential companion for every traveller to Venice, this is the hidden city revealed in a gorgeous non-fiction account by one of Europe's greatest living writers, Javier MaríasCentury after century, the essence of Venice is unchanging. It is a place of contradictions, equal parts glamour and chaos. As a young man, Javier Marías made the city his home; since then he has left and returned many times, drawn back to its labyrinth of blind alleys, its pearly green canals, its imagined spaces.His love affair with the city has lasted over thirty years - he has traced every inch of its endless interior, has lived among the Venetians and lived apart from them. In Venice, An Interior, Marías sets out to uncover the heart of this strange and enchanting place.

A story of love and memory from "the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature" (The Boston Globe) and the award-winning, international bestselling author of The Infatuations. On a train journey from Paris to Madrid a young opera singer becomes fascinated by those in his compartment: a middle-aged businessman, his alluring wife, and their male traveling companion. Soon his life of constant travel, luxury hotels, rehearsal and performance will become entangled with these three people, and the singer will find himself fatefully consumed by Natalia's beauty. The Man of Feeling is the haunting story of the birth and death of a passion, told in retrospect. Intricately interweaving desire and memory, it explores the nature of love, and asks whether we can ever truly recall something that no longer exists.

Forelskelser er en fængslende roman om kærlighedens gåder og skæbens magt fra en af Spaniens absolut største forfattere: Javier Marias. María Dolz kan ikke slippe tanken om det lykkelige ægtepar Deverne, som hun hver dag iagttager på en cafe i Madrid. Især ikke, da hun opdager, at den forelskede Miguel Deverne er fundet død efter et brutalt knivoverfald. Hvad var den den lykkelige historie egentlig om de to? Og er forelskelse i det hele taget en god ting for os mennesker?

The Infatuations is a critically acclaimed novel by the great Spanish writer Javier Marías.Every day, Maria Dolz stops for breakfast at the same café. And every day she enjoys watching a handsome couple who follow the same routine. Then one day they aren't there, and she feels obscurely bereft.It is only later, when she comes across a newspaper photograph of the man, lying stabbed in the street, his shirt half off, that she discovers who the couple are. Some time afterwards, when the woman returns to the café with her children, who are then collected by a different man, and Maria approaches her to offer her condolences, an entanglement begins which sheds new light on this apparently random, pointless death.With The Infatuations, Javier Marías brilliantly reimagines the murder novel as a metaphysical enquiry, addressing existential questions of life, death, love and morality.Praise for The Infatuations:'Mesmerising . . . chillingly clear and hypnotically eerie . . . At this very fine and disturbing novel's core is a compelling meditation on love in all its ramifications' Herald'Keeps us guessing until almost the last page' Financial Times'Few writers have sustained such an engagement with the classic (Anglophone) canon. As a translator he has rendered into Spanish work by Hardy, Yeats, Conrad, Nabokov, Faulkner, Updike, Salinger and many others. As a novelist, he has threaded his work with traces of these writers, and is explicitly underpinned by an empathy with Shakespeare and Sterne, as well as Cervantes and Proust' GuardianJavier Marías was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published thirteen novels, two collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into forty-two languages and won a dazzling array of international literary awards.Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for over twenty-five years and has translated many novels and short stories by Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American writers, including Javier Marías, Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, Bernardo Atxaga and Ramón del Valle-Inclán.

Marías siste roman Forelskelsene kom ut i Spania i april i fjor. Siden har boka solgt nærmere 150 000 eksemplarer i Spania, og knapt vært ute av bestselgerlistene. Forelskelsene er et nytt høydepunkt i Marias forfatterskap: en særegen beretning om kjærlighetens gåter og skjebnens makt. For første gang har Marías valgt en kvinnelig hovedperson: MaríaDolz klarer ikke bli kvitt tanken på det stormlykkelige paret Desvern, som hun nettopp møtte. Særlig ikke når hun kommer over bildet av den forelskede Miguel Desvern død i avisen. Hva var meningen med den lykkelige historien om de to? Og enda vanskeligere: Er forelskelse i det hele tatt en god ting for oss mennesker? Forelskelsene ble kåret blant årets beste bøker i en rekke spanske aviser og tidsskrifter i 2011, og vant prisen som Årets bok i 2011 i storavisen El Pais.

Dödlig förälskelse är temat för Javier Marías nya samtidsroman, eller kanske snarare återuppstånden kärlek, sådan dödsmärkt kärlek som en gång Mylady i De tre musketörerna personifierade: hon som musketörerna gjorde sig av med, mördade helt enkelt, för att hon visade sig bära straffångens franska lilja inbränd på skuldran och som för evigt skulle hemsöka D´Artagnan och hans förbundna.Förälskelsen kan rättfärdiga allt; de mest nobla och osjälviska gärningar men även de största överdrifterna och övergreppen. Förälskelser är dessutom en berättelse om omöjligheten att någonsin veta vad som är sanning, inte ens den vi tror vara vår egen.

Twelve short stories by "the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature" (The Boston Globe)--and the award-winning, international bestselling author of The Infatuations. Victims of mistaken identity, sponging relatives, amateur sleuths, eavesdroppers, professional liars, assassins, and failed bodyguards populate the short stories in When I Was Mortal. Plots turn on curious exigencies--a woman about to star in her first porn film; a night doctor who adds new meaning to "specialist"; a ghost whose neglect is greatly resented.

From one of the most important voices in world literature--and the award-winning author of The Infatuations--a darkly comic campus novel and love story about that most British of institutions, Oxford University. - "Javier Mar as is in my opinion one of the best contemporary writers." --J.M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize-winning author of DisgraceIn All Souls, 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. Yet so much goes into simply "being" at Oxford: friendship, opinion-mongering, one-upmanship, finicky exchanges of favors, gossip, adultery, book-collecting, back-patting, backstabbing. Mar as demonstrates a sweet tooth for eccentricity in this novel from "one of the best contemporary writers" (J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature).

A riveting novel of infidelity and a man trapped by a terrible secret, from "the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature" (The Boston Sunday Globe)--and the award-winning, international bestselling author of The Infatuations. "One of the writers who should get the Nobel Prize is Javier Mar as." --Orhan PamukMarta has only just met Victor when she invites him to dinner at her Madrid apartment while her husband is away on business. When her two-year-old son finally falls asleep, Marta and Victor retreat to the bedroom. Undressing, she feels suddenly ill; and in his arms, inexplicably, she dies. What should Victor do? Remove the compromising tape from the answering machine? Leave food for the child for breakfast? These are just his first steps, but he soon takes matters further; unable to bear the shadows and the unknowing, Victor plunges into dark waters. And Javier Mar as, Europe's master of secrets, of what lies reveal and truth may conceal, is on sure ground in this profound, quirky, and marvelous novel.

​​WINNER OF THE IMPAC DUBLIN AWARD - Widely considered a masterpiece, a breathtaking novel about family secrets that chronicles the relentless power of the past--from the award-winning author of The Infatuations and "Spain's best writer" (Roberto Bola o, national bestselling author of The Savage Detectives). Juan knows little of the interior life of his father Ranz; but when Juan marries, he begins to consider the past anew, and begins to ponder what he doesn't really want to know. Secrecy--its possible convenience, its price, and even its civility--hovers throughout the novel. A Heart So White becomes a sort of anti-detective story of human nature. Intrigue; the sins of the father; the fraudulent and the genuine; marriage and strange repetitions of violence: Mar as elegantly sends shafts of inquisitory light into shadows and onto the costs of ambivalence.

Slippery figures in anomalous situations ghosts, spies, bodyguards, criminals haunt these stories by Javier Mar as: the characters come bearing their strange and special secrets, and never leave our minds. In one story, a man obsessed with his much younger lover endlessly videotapes her every move, and then confides his surprising plans for her; in another, a ghost can t stop resigning from his job. Masterfully, Mar as manages in a small space to perplex and delight. The short story fits Mar as like a glove, as Le point noted. His stories have been hailed as formidably intelligent (The London Review of Books), a bracing tonic (The Chicago Tribune), and startling (The New York Times Book Review).