When I Was Mortal
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
In the dark narratives that make up When I Was Mortal by Javier Marías, winner of the Dublin IMPAC prize and author of the bestselling A Heart So White, a dapper Paris doctor dispenses a treatment for dissatisfied wives. A mother auditions for her first porn movie. A writer working on a study of pain makes himself the subject of his experiments. A voyeur mistakes a murderer for a fellow peeping tom ... these are some of the characters observed by the narrator of these chilling stories. Ironic, unsettling, imbued with dread and with droll humour, Javier Marías' short tales cast a shrewd, sardonic eye on humanity.
Javier Marías was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published ten novels, two collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into thirty-two languages and won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for A Heart So White. He is also a highly practised translator into Spanish of English authors, including Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Thomas Browne and Laurence Sterne. He has held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like Borges, who felt that every story benefited from a good mystery, Mar as (A Heart So White) packs murder, intrigue, even ghosts into nearly every one of the dozen short narratives in this collection. Mar as, one of Spain's most prominent contemporary writers, shows his macabre playfulness right from the start. In "The Night Doctor," a dinner party leads to a nighttime walk through Paris, and introduces two similar Italian women with similarly unpleasant husbands, and a mysterious doctor whose evening visits may put a permanent end to their marital problems. In "Broken Binoculars," a seemingly innocuous conversation at the racetrack develops into a frank discussion of assassination. "Flesh Sunday" features a man looking out from the balcony of his honeymoon hotel room. While his wife lies on the bed behind him, he watches a woman who may--or may not--be waiting for him. These tales, like others in the collection, are enigmatic, almost elliptical, and are related by a narrator distinguished by his urbane wit and unflappability. The one long story here, "Blood on a Spear," typifies the author's taste for misdirection. The intriguing opening scene shows the narrator's friend murdered, impaled on his bed with a naked woman by his side. As the unnamed narrator investigates, he learns that little is as it initially seems. In a foreword, Mar as reveals that nearly all the short fictions were written on commission, and that many came with external requirements (such as a summer setting, or a crime element), which heightened Mar as's literary gamesmanship. The foreword also discloses, amusingly, that "Broken Binoculars" originally appeared with the first page accidentally discarded, in what Mar as calls "the worst printer's error ever perpetrated on one of my texts." FYI: Mar as won the 1997 International IMPAC Literary Award for A Heart So White.
