This book is a gift. A few days ago, showing the center of Madrid to a visiting friend, we stopped at the bookshop patronized by Javier Marías. In Librería Méndez they are usually well stocked on his books. Because of its connections with Opera, I had wanted to read this particular one, but as it is an early work it is less easy to find. But there it was, and my friend very kindly offered it to me.The opera link is with Verdi’s Otello. This is another sample of Marías’ interest in Shakespeare. In most of his works there is at some point a reference to the English bard. In this novel, though, as the link is operatic it is removed by one further step. The narrator in the novel is an opera singer who has arrived in Madrid to sing the role of Cassio at the Teatro de la Zarzuela. At the time Marías wrote this, the Madrid Opera was still under restoration. This particularity helps to date the novel. It was published in 1986.The novel, like play and opera, is also about a love triangle, but this one seems a dislocated Othello. The viewpoint, the angle and the way the components move are modified by Marías. The variations themselves give additional dynamism to the plot.My edition contains an Afterword by Marías. Authors and artists are often cryptic when they are asked to elucidate their work. Their utterances become yet another creation, another representation. That is not the case here. Marías explains his method of writing. He claims that he sets off out of a lived image or single memory that has stuck in his mind and from this starting point his literary imagination meanders and projects, and the work gradually takes shape. Writing for him is a voyage of discovery. He trails the characters as they flow out of his pen. I was somewhat bewildered by this, since his books seem to be marked by a steady pace of someone who is not in the least hurried and who enjoys delaying his march but who knows very well where he is going. In this Afterword, Marías also states, clearly, that his aim was to compose the temporal space of love, for love lives out of anticipation and of memory. Love is the feeling that requires most imagination; it only exists in the realm of the possible – past and future. For Marías, then, the sentimental man, or man of feeling (the English version is The Man of Feeling), is he who realizes that if love is no longer possible, he will feel compelled to step out of the domain of fortuity – of life. Marías is very skilful in disorienting our sense of time in our in pursuit of that sensation of love, a sensation that cannot live in the present. A linear development of the story, understood as a fast succession of the “Nows” similarly to the way a film is composed of a rapid succession of still photos, would just not work.Instead the narrator keeps jumping backwards and forwards from the moment in which he is telling his story. And to add to the disorientation, the “sueño” element is introduced as well. Indeed, the novel begins with a reference to a dream, a recent dream that repeats something that had happened a few years before, even if in a somewhat different order and in somewhat different tempi to the real version. And from there proceeds to tell us the dream, and what had happened, even if they are the same. Meanwhile the present continues, with further visits to a more distant past. But the dream returns.Marías plays with the two senses of the word sueño, for in Spanish it means both “sleep” and “dream”. And this double value is consciously spelled out in the novel. If Marías is constricted by the conflated meanings into one single word, he also plays and exploits its ambiguity. Rejecting Freudian ideas, he however acknowledges the revelatory power of dreams. But while dreaming one is also asleep, or living as if dead. Lovers are separated when they are sleeping, even if they are sleeping together. And for dreaming together, they have to be awake.This is my third Marías. As the other two were from 1992 A Heart So White and 2011 Los enamoramientos my reaction to my familiarity with Marías writing is being formed following an inverted chronology.His stamp is recognized in his circular writing. And in this novel this contributes to the synthetic understanding of the story. Marías literary techniques make me think of music structures. There are expositions, repeating themes, ritornellos, anticipations, subthemes, modulations etc. Although I admit that I felt this most clearly when I read "A Heart so White".What is very constant, though, is the narrating voice. I feel as if I were always listening to that same voice.
Marias writes as the master of realism. It is faithless to believe it is about the realistic, detailed rendering of events and objects. The Man Of Feeling instead searches out, in elegant prose, the portrayal of inner reality, its speculation as both strength and defense, or the need to discard it as cumbersome to the enjoyment of life lived within the boundaries of a life.The first person narrator, a budding opera singer on the cusp of stardom, who must travel frequently for professional reasons, lives also on the cusp of speculative reality, amidst its fascinating but thinning process. Others in his life, as himself, are outlines to be filled in. At times it wasn't clear to me if what I was reading was a dream of his or what was actually unfolding, if there was a difference, if it mattered, if I cared.Marias writes as an aesthetician never altering the purity of his style which calmness heightens the occasional shattering surprise, never breaking stride. The experience of reading such precise leveled prose while stepping across the Marias tightrope is eloquently disturbing, unsettling. It remained unclear if the characters were as described, reported or would prove to be other.The story begins with our opera singer noticing the two men and a woman sitting across from him on a train traveling to his home city of Madrid. He remembers this journey and dreams obsessively about these three for the next four years. His accounts of their arrival and the first night at the hotel where all four are staying, at the hotel bar having a drink with one of the men. He works for the other whose speculation by the narrator observes his characteristics as, ambitious, greedy, an exploiter. The man at the bar, Dato, is the personal companion of the pale, sad woman married to our wealthy businessman. The opera singer, Dato and the woman will spend the majority of the remainder of the book together. Our narrator relieves Dato of the anxiety of having to entertain this woman which has become naturally increasing difficult over the years. Each relationship bends, becomes strained, resolves only to alter. These are not people who have an interest-ability-to participate in the sweat, odors, vulnerabilities of the intertwinings of a true human relationship. Living at a periphery appearing situated on a stable ground they raise the question of the worth of speculating about life or wouldn't it be easier to… Whether these accounts take place within the narrator's obsessive dreams from over the past years, in a recent dream, or have we slipped into the present seems outside of the aesthetic concerns and not noticed. Marias' train slides smoothly along the track. No jolts, jags, are present to disturb our ride. Yet, we notice these people, care about them because shyly admitted there is a little in each we find in ourselves. As with any and all works by Marias a thanks must be given out to Mike Puma for introducing this great author to myself and the GR community.
What do You think about The Man Of Feeling (2007)?
This is one of the best love stories I've read. Marías is a damn good writer (duh), although sometimes good writers overwrite."What I want there to be at the hour of my death is the incarnation of my life--what that life has been--and in order for you to have been that too, you must have lived by my sided from now until that final moment. I could not bear it if at that moment you were only a memory or a confused figure belonging to a vague and distant time which is this clear time that we are living now, because it is memory and distant time and confusion that I most detest and which I have always tried to diminish and reject and bury as soon as they began to form, as soon as each dear, noble present moment ceased to be present and became the past, and was vanquished by what I can only call its own impatient posterity, its not-nowness."
—Jin Zhao
Reading Javier Marías is like being a frog in boiling water. At any one point while reading a sentence I do not notice its quality (or the opposite) or notice that taken alone that it is somewhat banal and really, is it that interesting? Until an hour later and I've realized that the water in fact was boiling and I've never jumped out. Unlike the frog, I believe I like the feeling.The plot of "The Man of Feeling" could be summarized in one sentence. Man meets woman, other man loses woman. Plot is almost the last thing that is of interest to Marías as the interior consciousness of the narrator ruminates on love and time, art and life, and belonging and not belonging. The man of feeling is both of the men of course, the difference of feeling is what the book is about. The opera singer who imitates feeling for a living is better prepared for the "real thing" (but is it?) when it happens than the banker who doesn't realize or appreciate the real thing (or thinks it is "possession") until it is too late. Or perhaps for both the "real" thing is not real but only in their heads and only has ever been there?
—Jim Leckband
an early and exceptional work from the great spanish novelist, the man of feeling (el hombre sentimental) is "a love story in which love is neither seen nor experienced, but announced and remembered." in an explanatory epilogue entitled "something unfulfilled," marías expounds further:can such a thing happen? can something as urgent and unpostponable as love, which requires both presence and immediate consummation or consumption, be announced when it does not yet exist or truly remembered if it no longer exists? or does the announcement itself and mere memory - now and still respectively - form part of that love? i don't know, but i do believe that love is based in large measure on its anticipation and on its recollection. it is the feeling that requires the largest dose of imagination, not only when one senses its presence, when one sees it coming, and not only when the person who has experienced and lost love feels a need to explain it to him or herself, but also while that love is evolving and is in full flow. let us say it is a feeling which always demands an element of fiction beyond that afforded by reality. in other words, love always has an imaginary side to it, however tangible or real we believe it to be at any given moment. it is always about to be fulfilled, it is the realm of what might be. or, rather, what might have been. it is indeed within this realm that the man of feeling exists. as with nearly all of marías's writing, gorgeous, rhythmic prose couples with a compelling plot and beautifully-conceived characters. marías is a master of his craft and must surely be counted amongst the world's greatest living authors. the man of feeling lingers... like the scent on a letter from a long ago lover.*translated from the spanish by margaret jull costa (saramago, de queirós, lobo antunes, et al.)
—jeremy
