When Javier Marías was asked in an interview in 2006, “What is your natural state?” he responded with a single word: “Indecision.” But he quickly qualified his response, suggesting that another layer needed to be peeled away. “But that doesn't mean I never make decisions,” he pointed out. “It means I take my time.”

For readers with more than a passing familiarity with his writing and, in particular, with his novels, Marías's observation that he takes his time will come as no surprise. Indeed, for the narrators who tell his stories, and for the readers who navigate the complicated path through them, time and patience are both required and rewarded. A contemplative, even bemused indeterminacy lies at the core of Marías's fiction, which is constructed most often with a meandering style that grows slowly and persistently to configure his textual worlds. Marías admires the precision of language (he is an accomplished translator from English to Spanish), yet he celebrates its elusiveness. He constructs his fiction with lengthy, complex sentences replete with subordinate clauses and distant antecedents; his voluble meditations and stylistic digressions sometimes try the forbearance as well as the confidence of even the most assiduous of readers.

Yet Marías has also shown an extraordinary ability to write directly, to say what he wishes to say with efficiency and candor. Using a style practiced and polished for more than fifteen years in his weekly columns for the national press (with specific deadlines and word quotas), Marías has published hundreds of short pieces that are narrowly focused and remarkably concise.