All Souls (1989) is possibly the first
novel by Marias in which he praises auto-
fiction. Shortly after the publication of the novel, Marias realized how much a narrator told and decided he could attribute this to himself. The genre of auto-fiction, if attributed to anyone, would no doubt be attributed to Javier Marias (Madrid, 1951). No other writer has mixed biography and fiction as well as Marias in the work of Round Kingdom. We will not blame anyone, but it is possible that the author himself has contributed to readers gossiping about his life. The worst were those who began to act as though they were characters in the
book. With the publication of All Souls and its consequences, Marias comments on his subsequent book,
Black Back of
Time (1998), a title that uses the phrase from a previous novel, Morning in the Battle Think about Me, which states: "The boarder is thick and everything is exposed to greater upsets--the reverse of time, its black back. We always condemn ourselves for what we
say, not for what we do. For what we say or what we say we do, not for what others say nor what we have done". Because of this, Marias was later forced to explain that in Black Backs of Time everything, or almost everything in Souls was fiction, not because the protagonist has a certain similarity to the author that could be taken literally. You have already said it Javier: "One should be more careful about what one writes, not only because of this incident but because sometimes it can come true". In addition to writer, translator, and now the publisher of his book Round Kingdom, Marias was a professor at the Tyler Institute of Oxford in the Complutensian of Madrid. Indeed his educational background has been the culprit for the belief that this novel is autobiographical, since there are so many elements that correspond with Marias'' life at Oxford. However, in All Souls, we are not reading an autobiography or a false novel, as Marias clarifies in Black Back of Time. All Souls narrates the story of a young Spanish professor, who teaches translation classes at the Tylor Institute of Oxford, and carries on a sporadic relationship with Clare Bayes, a married woman. This story of infidelity is united with the story of friendship between Cromer-Blake and Toby Rylands. Marias pays a literary homage to Arthur Machen--to whose literature he confesses a fervent admiration--as well as John Gawsworth, the incredible King of Round, who has never seen his kingdom but has sold it many times and is now known as Juan I. The narrator, who like the author, was a professor of Spanish Literature at Tylor for two
years, he evokes the death of friends over the years, and his stay in the city is anchored in the past. This memory appears in the lives of Cromer-Blake and Toby Rylands and their lives inter-cross. In the words of Marias, the fact that the protagonist of the novel taught classes for two years en Tylor was a literary loan. "Little of what is in the novel coincides with what I lived or knew in Oxford, only the most accessory, and it does not affect the facts: the cushioned atmosphere of the reserved city and its moderate professors...the dark and meticulous bookstores of old..." said Marias years after Black Back of Time. Curiously, the poet Alvaro Pombo, one night, and without having read it, told Marias with authority, "A book that takes place in Oxford and deals with this subject should be called All Souls".
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