Negra espalda del tiempo

Author: Javier Marias
- Fiction
- Vintage
- ISBN: 9780307951403
- Release Date: 10-02-2012

Synopsis

Una “falsa novela”, en palabras del propio autor, Negra espalda del tiempo comienza con la historia de la publicación de su novela Todas las almas, un libro que consiguió que sus lectores se empeñaran en confundir lo ficticio con lo real. En Negra espalda, Marías decidió convertir lo real en ficticio, creando un mundo en el que todo cabe: lo impensable y lo que trae el destino, la inverosimilitud y la gracia, la aventura y el infortunio, una bala perdida en México y una maldición en La Habana, un niño zurdo que escribe su nombre al revés, un piloto mercenario y tuerto al que la muerte siempre pasaba de largo, y los velados recuerdos de un narrador que se hace más misterioso cuanto más reflexiona y cuenta. La voz de Marías es aquí más impresionante que nunca, como si fuera “la voz del tiempo cuando aún no ha pasado ni se ha perdido y quizá por eso ni siquiera es tiempo”.

Called by its author a "false novel," Dark Back of Time begins with the tale of the odd effects of publishing All Souls, his witty and sardonic 1989 Oxford novel. All Souls is a book Marías swears to be fiction, but which its "characters"—the real-life dons and professors and bookshop owners who have "recognized themselves"—fiercely maintain to be a roman à clef. With the sleepy world of Oxford set into fretful motion by a world that never "existed," Dark Back of Time begins an odyssey into the nature of identity ("we do not know anyone entirely, not even ourselves") and of time. Marías weaves together autobiography (the brother who died as a child; the loss of his mother), a legendary kingdom, strange ghostly literary figures, halls of mirrors, a one-eyed pilot, a curse in Havana, and a bullet lost in Mexico. Dark Back of Time has been acclaimed here as "superb" (Review of Contemporary Fiction), "fantastically original" (Talk), "brilliant" (Virginia Quarterly Review), and "a rare gift" (The New York Times Book Review). "In the best manner of Borges," The Hudson Review commented that this hybrid is "lush and mysterious."

From the Author - From Wikipedia

Javier Marías is an award-winning Spanish novelist. He is also a translator and columnist, as well as the current king of Redonda. He was born in Madrid in 1951 and published his first novel at the age of nineteen. He has held academic posts in Spain, the US (he was a visiting professor at Wellesley College) and Britain, as a lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University. He has been translated into 34 languages, and more than six million copies of his books have been sold worldwide. In 1997 he won the Nelly Sachs Award; the Comunidad de Madrid award in 1998; in 2000 the Grinzane Cavour Award, the Alberto Moravia Prize, and the Dublin IMPAC Award. He also won the Spanish National Translation Award in 1979 for his translation of Tristram Shandy in 1979. He was a professor at Oxford University and the Complutense of Madrid. He currently lives in Madrid.

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