Javier Marías Knihy

Dvanásť poviedok zbierky Keď som bol smrteľný ponúka čitateľovi možnosť nazrieť do tajných zákutí ľudskej mysle, odhaľovať jemné, no pritom hrôzostrašné nitky zločinov a pozrieť sa na náš svet "z druhého sveta", keď máme možnosť vidieť všetko inak, kompletne. Javier Marías je dôsledný štylista, v jeho textoch je napätie, irónia, čierny humor a veľmi šikovne dávkovaný prídel hrôzy a strachu nielen z toho, čo nevieme, ale aj z toho, čo sme sa nechtiac dozvedeli.

Marias casts a knowing eye on the secrets that bring couples together and break them apart - the admissions that conceal, the lies that reveal - and the infinite capacity for self-deception in pursuit of love.

Slavný španělský romanopisec Javier Marías píše o fotbale doma i ve světě a prostřednictvím fotbalových výher, proher a různých trapasů vtipně uvažuje o vlastenectví a vlastenčení, fandění, vznešenosti a statečnosti i ubohosti a simulantství hráčů, ale i o módách účesů a dresů. Marías fotbal vidí jako nekonečný průvod hrdinů, padouchů a statistů, jako velkolepou podívanou.

Juan knows little about his widowed father Ranz, a man with a troubled past. He does know, however, that before marrying Juan's mother, Ranz was married to her elder sister, who had committed suicide. The unspoken dialogue between father and son soon becomes a spelling out of the horrifying truth once Juan marries Luisa, who turns discreet confessor to the burdened old man. What gradually emerges into the cold light of day is a repetition of scenes already witnessed by Juan in the course of his travels: a married man blackmailed by his mistress in a Havana hotel, a woman in New York pursuing a sequence of shabby lovers through the lonely-hearts columns. Produced with remarkable skill and delicacy, this is a startling picture of two generations, two marriages, and the secret commerce between spouses that rests on the gossamer-thin threads of an unspoken accord.

'We lose everything because everything remains except us'. In this book, the author recalls the strange events and people that shaped his past, including ghostly literary figures, a pilot, an adventurer, a brother who died as a child and the king of an island in the Caribbean, we begin to question the nature of time, memory and reality itself.

With high black humor, a visiting Spanish lecturer bends his gaze over that most British of institutions, Oxford University.

Every day, Maria Dolz stops at the same cafe. And every day she watches a couple following the same routine. Then one day they aren't there. She comes across a photograph of the man, lying stabbed in the street. When the woman returns with her children, who are then collected by a different man, a new light is shed on the death."

The concluding part to Marias's masterwork: 'This trilogy must be one of the greatest novels of our age (Antony Beevor)

Jacques Deza has been recruited into an undercover spy network by the inscrutable Bertram Tupra. But when he is forced to witness an act of horrifying brutality in a night-club, he finds himself falling apart, haunted by his own memories of the bloodshed of the Spanish Civil War