Spanish Literature'I believe I've still never mistaken fiction for reality, though I have mixed them together more than once, as everyone does." With these words, Javier Marías opens Dark Back of Time, a tour de force exploration of the boundaries between fiction and memoir. Generic undecidibility has become Marías's trademark by now, and All Souls, his so-called "Oxford novel", caused controversy precisely because of this.
Many readers took it to be a roman à clef about the sub-faculty of Spanish at the university, since the author had spent two years teaching there. Marías has consistently rejected the idea, yet the belief that All Souls was more autobiographical than fictional has persisted, and in Dark Back of Time the writer humorously reflects on the consequences for himself and those academics supposedly depicted in the novel.
Of course, writers have long known that life and literature are inextricably linked, and that each infiltrates the other in unlikely ways. Having found himself the victim of his own narrative prowess (unmarried and childless, Marías nevertheless recalls how students in Madrid inquired after his wife and child, since the narrator in All Souls becomes a husband and father), the author turns the tables on his readers in this latest book and explores the ways in which narrative inevitably shapes reality. It is a theme which preoccupies many of Marías's Spanish contemporaries too - Eduardo Mendoza's novels offer satire through a variety of popular forms ranging from science fiction to murder mystery and, in A Cock-Eyed Comedy, Juan Goytisolo, a writer of an older generation, gleefully muddies the waters in writing fiction with autobiographical echoes.
Marías has a light touch and a wry sense of humour, and as Dark Back of Time jovially meanders through space and time, weaving fact and fiction, it offers delightful vignettes of characters from the author's Oxford days. We meet Mr and Mrs Stone, second-hand book dealers in Oxford who, despite the author's embarrassed denials, persist in believing themselves to be models for the idiosyncratic couple, the Alabasters, in All Souls. The obscure author John Gawsworth is another character who reappears - except that this time he turns out to be a real person who, ironically, was taken by some readers to be a figment of Marías's imagination. Gawsworth truly comes to life in Marías's hands. A prolific writer as a young man, he spent his last years as a down-and-out pushing a pram full of beer cans round the streets of London, but he had inherited the Kingdom of Redonda, an island in the Caribbean, and been crowned its king. In a bizarre twist of fortune, thanks to his interest in Gawsworth, Marías has now apparently inherited the throne himself!
Despite the jaunty tone of Dark Back of Time, Marías also displays his skill in dealing movingly with painful subjects, such as the short life of his brother, Julianín, who died of meningitis before the author was born. Marías seems to be striving to make Julianín's life more substantial by setting it down in words, yet he is conscious of how language distorts the past, possibly out of a wish to tame misfortune's senselessness:
Three years and seven and a half months was that child's duration in the world, and he is known to have passed through here, though few among the living have seen him. My older brother Miguel, his younger brother, who did live to know him, looked for him everywhere at the foolish little age of a year and a half: 'Tintín, Tintín, Tintín?' he called out as he crawled, 'and he seemed to be asking for an explanation', that's what my father writes. But Miguel doesn't remember him.
The touching simplicity with which Marías writes about Julianín and the effect of his loss on the family conceals the skilfulness of a sensitive storyteller who is the best novelist of his generation.
Alison Ribeiro de Menezes is lecturer in Spanish at University College, Dublin
Dark Back of Time By Javier Marías, translated by Esther Allen Chatto & Windus, 336pp, £15.99