All Souls
(JAVIER MARIAS)
I haven''t read a Harvill volume yet that I didn''t enjoy
greatly, and Javier Marías'' All Souls was no exception. Drawing on the
author''s own experience, its narrator is a visiting Spanish lecturer on a two
year teaching stint at Oxford.
(Somewhat surfeited on novels set in Oxford
and written by insiders, it was a change to read one by an outsider.) The
principal thread is his affair with the wife of another academic, but the novel
is episodic and it is individual portraits and vignettes which are most
memorable: a farcical high table dinner, the college porter who changes decades
every day, the concealed presence of horror in ordinary people and everyday
objects, and the rubbish bin as a measure of human existence. Though there''s
nothing surreal about All Souls, it does contain some Borgesian
elements, especially in the narrator''s expeditions through Oxford''s second-hand bookshops in search of
the works of obscure English writers Arthur Machen and John Galsworth .
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