During the course of preparing this book, in addition to the customary reading of professional criticism on the work of Javier Marías, I sought also to stay abreast of the extensive flow of information about him on various blogs and internet sites. In this way I was able to compile an array of information from many sources offered from diverse points of view. As might be expected, some of what I found was quite useful, providing a detail here or an insight there into Marías's life and works. Marías is a popular figure among casual readers as well as academic scholars, and the content of the various websites generally reflected the diversity of readers and opinions on what is important or not, what is good or bad, about Marías's work.

Before sitting down to write this brief foreword, I entered the name “Javier Marías” one final time into the internet search engine Bing, and clicked on the submit button. As it turns out, my search produced a list of 242,000 entries (an increase of about one hundred over the week before)—not a surprising number given the volume of Marías's writing and the fact that his works have been translated into thirty-six languages. However, I feel compelled here to offer a qualification concerning my internet exploration: I have not read all of the entries listed under Marías's name, and further, it is highly unlikely that I will ever manage to do so.

In Corazó n tan blanco (1992) (A Heart So White, 1995) and Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí (1994) (Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, 1996), Marías continues to emphasize two important aspects of his fiction: intertextual connections with other works of literature and film (most explicitly with Shakespeare in these two novels), and the way in which storytelling lies at the heart of how we construct our understanding of the world. Each of the novels begins with a sudden and unexpected death, and thus contains elements of a mystery novel which invite the reader to expect intrigue and perhaps danger as the narrative progresses. In each case, however, and in typical fashion for Maróas, the intrigue is generally deferred and the mystery turns out to be less tautly drawn than readers might have anticipated. In Corazón tan blanco, the narrator tells the story of the death unwillingly—he does not directly set out to discover more about it (for example, why it occurred or what were its consequences), and in fact, he resists finding out what actually happened several decades before. In contrast, the narrator of Mañana en la batalla piensa en mó desires to tell the story of the night of the death and to explore as well what happened afterward. In each novel the death serves as a perturbation in the life of the narrator, and in each case the telling of the story determines how such perturbations may persist or diminish over time.

Non-fiction Sketches: Vidas escritas and Miramientos

Vidas escritas (1992) (Written Lives, 2006) and Miramientos(Glimpses) (1999) have in common at least one authorial intention: Marías's desire to write brief sketches about writers whom he finds intriguing. While on the face of it the two books share certain elements of composition (for example, photographic images of the writers in Miramientos; both photographs and drawings of authors in Vidas), the differences between the two texts are pronounced. Most notably, in Vidas Marías comments solely on non-Spanish writers who are deceased, using biographical and other information to form the content of his narrative, while in Miramientos he focuses exclusively on Spanish-language authors and comments only on the images inserted in the text, with no external information. In this way he offers a purely impressionistic “glimpse” of several writers no longer alive, some of whom he has known. To emphasize the occasionally playful perspective of the book, he also includes a section of photos of himself, with comments in the same fashion as those made about the dead authors.

Vidas escritas

Vidas is not the first time that Marías has written brief biographical introductions to authors. As he notes in the prologue, the idea for the volume came from his edition of Cuentos únicos (Singular Stories) (1989), in which he put together an odd collection of short stories written originally in English by relatively obscure authors, with brief biographical sketches about each.

El siglo

El siglo (1983) is an unabashedly stylized novel. Its narrative technique (alternating chapters told in the first and third persons), its complicated sentence structure (largely baroque-like), and the slow pacing of its plot stand in marked contrast to Marías's earlier novels, Los dominios del lobo and Travesía del horizonte. In the latter two works, as we have seen, Marías moves deftly but swiftly through multiple stories with sometimes tenuous connections. He rarely slows to allow for the development of complex characters, and he shapes the perspective of each novel largely through third-person narrators who may not possess sufficient information to tell the entire story or bring it to a sound conclusion. While these early works by no means stand apart from what will become the core of his fiction (they reveal, for example, his central concern with storytelling, the influence of movies on his literary formation, and important connections to non-Spanish literature), they nonetheless reflect the sometimes inchoate narrative practices of a young writer who has only begun to understand the more intricate malleability of language and the deliberate construction of characters.

In El siglo, however, Marías retreats deeply into the narrative discourse itself and allows it to dilate and grow through the ever more dense accretion of words, which in turn leads to the embodiment of one of the essential principles (as he himself has pointed out) of the whole of his narrative production: “You progress as you digress.”

Although Marías published short essays in the Spanish press and wrote articles for newspapers as early as 1976, it was not until December of 1994, when he agreed to undertake what he has called his “tareas dominicales” (“Sunday tasks”) for the magazine El Semanal, that he began to write a regular weekly column. For Marías, who had drolly embraced writing as a way to avoid holding a regular job bound by a fixed work schedule, the commitment to meet a deadline, and to be paid for doing so, seemed somewhat odd as well as potentially treacherous. He noted in November of 1996, while writing his one-hundred-fourth column for El Semanal, that he was still befuddled by his initial decision to write every week and somewhat amused by his perseverance over the previous two years. As he put it to his readers in “La infancia recuperada” (“Childhood Recovered”), “En principio estaba en contra de escribir a fecha fija, y era más bien partidario de hacerlo sólo cuando verdaderamente tuviera ganas, algo que comentar y tiempo para ello. Bueno, aún estoy en contra de lo que vengo haciendo desde hace dos años ante ustedes …” (“In the beginning, I was opposed to writing to meet a deadline; I was instead inclined to do it only when I truly felt like it, when I had something to say and time for it.

Tu rostro mañana is best understood as a three-volume novel rather than three novels sutured together to form a trilogy. Published over a period of five years (2002–2007), it tells the story of Jaime Deza, who first appears as narrator and main character of Marías's 1989 novel Todas las almas and who narrates each of the three volumes of Rostro. Deza thus provides the “thread of continuity” in the narrative that Marías envisions as a critical part of lives and stories, an idea first asserted by the narrator of Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí and echoed by Deza here: “Yo soy el río, soy el río y por tanto un hilo de continuidad entre vivos y muertos al igual que los cuentos que nos hablan de noche …” (“I am the river, I am the river and, therefore, a connecting thread between the living and the dead, just like the stories that speak to us in the night …”).

To a large extent, Rostro is more culminant than innovative within Marías's body of writing. Indeed, many key aspects of the novel can be found in his previous fiction: he revisits in Rostro several characters first presented to a greater or lesser degree in earlier novels (e.g., Peter Wheeler, Esteban Custardoy, his father, Juan Deza); he inserts visual objects in the text, such as paintings, photographs, and posters, a strategy that has helped to shape other works (e.g., Negra espalda del tiempo; Miramientos; Vidas escritas); he elaborates on a range of ideas related to truth, knowledge, interpretation, violence, and ethics; he continues to follow the digressive style and technique for which he has long been known in his writing.

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.

The two novels explored in this chapter, Todas las almas (1989) (All Souls, 1992) and Negra espalda del tiempo (1998) (Dark Back of Time, 2001), are two of the most intimately linked of all of Marías's works of fiction. This intimacy obtains on many levels, even though nine years passed between the publication of the two works, and despite the fact that Marías wrote two other novels in the intervening period, Corazón tan blanco (1992) (A Heart So White, 1995) and Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí (1994) (Tommorow in the Battle Think on Me, 1996). To a large extent, Marías wrote Negra to set the record straight about statements he had seen in reviews and essays concerning the referential base of Todas in general, as well as comments from acquaintances about its overall autobiographical nature. Thus he sets out in Negra to clarify certain aspects of Todas that readers had misconstrued, to expand upon characters and ideas that were left ambiguous or incomplete, and to introduce new information that bears upon certain events and locations represented in the earlier novel. Additionally, he creates large sections in the novel that have little or nothing to do with Oxford and the cast of characters from Todas.

Marías also lays out a series of theoretical principles and queries about fiction in Negra that stand as complex and purposefully contradictory declarations of intention about the art of novel-writing and the nature of reading.

Given the international recognition and critical acclaim that Marías has received (and in particular, beginning with the publication of Todas las almas in 1989), the relatively small amount of critical study devoted to his work is somewhat unexpected. Much of the work is in Spanish, but because of the growing number of his novels translated in English, and especially because of his strong reception in Great Britain and Ireland, critical reading in English has become increasingly relevant to Marías studies over the past decade.

For readers wishing to place Marías in his Spanish context, but who are not familiar with post-Franco Spain, the subsequent transition to democracy, and the paroxysm of cultural and social change that quickly followed, several collections of essays exist that explore various aspects of contemporary Spain. Two of the best that cover much of the cultural terrain are Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction, ed. Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, and Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies, ed. Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas. In addition to placing Marías in the cultural landscape of Spain, readers may also want to locate his fiction historically within the development of the Spanish novel from the late Franco years to the twenty-first century. This is especially pertinent to the understanding of Marías's writing. With the exception of novelists such as Cervantes in the seventeenth century, Leopoldo Alas in the nineteenth century, and a handful of writers (including his principal mentor, Juan Benet) in the twentieth, he has publicly and frequently rejected nearly the entire body of canonical fiction in Spain.

When asked in 2006 about the relationship between his second novel, Travesía del horizonte (1972) (Voyage Along the Horizon, 2006), and the general tendencies in Spanish fiction at the time of its publication, Marías promptly linked it to his first novel, Los dominios del lobo (1971) (The Dominions of the Wolf), and then located both outside the narrative mainstream in Spain. Indeed, he placed his first two works in a context of difference from important works of Spanish fiction of the 1960s and early 1970s that were lauded for their combination of stylistic experimentation and political antagonism toward Francoism. As Marías put it about his two novels: “(a) they were not at all autobiographical; (b) they were not ‘experimental,’ as was the trend with novels in those days; (c) they were not ‘antinarratives,’ another trend back then; (d) they were not set in Spain; (e) they were not set in the same era in which they were written; and (f) they had no particular ‘message,’ neither ideological nor political nor any other kind.” To a large degree, Marías confirms here what most critics and literary historians have perceived about his early writing: it bears little resemblance to other Spanish fiction and is vested largely with the traditions of foreign literatures. In both Dominios and Travesía Marías imbues his narrative with a large dose of English and American discourses (fiction and cinema).

Nearly all the historical fiction published in Spain during the Franco years (1939–75) can be fully understood only in the larger context of the writing of history during that period. While it is clear that Franco used raw military power to win the Spanish Civil War and to establish his regime by force, the need to sustain his authority and legitimacy over time required other and more elaborate mechanisms. One of the most compelling was the regime's attempt to assert control over the history of the nation, to make history an instrument of the government's own progamme – in other words, to exploit history as a source of power. This entailed a number of coercive practices – regulating academic appointments in history, controlling funds for research, creating publishing venues for books and journals, censorship, and so on. Above all, it meant that the regime sanctioned a historiography that defined Spain as a unified nation whose essence grew from the Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula beginning in the late eighth century and culminating in 1492. The origin of the nation was thus located in the heroic deeds of Christian warriors who defined and defended Spain against all that might threaten it. In this way of thinking, the Francoist regime was part of a continuum, along with the imperial Catholic Spain of the past, and fully embodied Spain's historic destiny. For Francoist historians it was as if history in 1939 had come to its inevitable and perfect climax, with the new Spain of Franco representing a return to the nation's glorious past too long forsaken by those in power.

Since historians of the regime asserted their authority over narration of the past, and since they made the truth and meaning of history largely the private property of the State, any narrative that set out to represent the past of Spain necessarily stood in some relation to the historiography of the regime. Much historical fiction of the period is necessarily polemical, because it is written explicitly or implicitly against the grain of the predominant discourse of Francoist historians. As a result, the historical novel during the Franco period to a large extent addresses not only historical events per se, but is also intimately concerned with just how the past can be known, with the nature of storytelling, and with the contingencies of historical meaning.