Dark Back of Time is a compelling story
of the way in which reality blurs into fiction by Javier
Marías, whose highly-anticipated new novel The
Infatuations is published in 2013. It is translated
by Esther Allen in Penguin Modern Classics. 'We lose
everything because everything remains except us', says
the mysterious narrator of this extraordinary novel,
which meditates on the transience, chance and fragility
of life. As a man called Javier Marías 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. Here the
writer is both a keeper of memories and a purveyor of
illusions, destined to be lost in the dark back of
time. 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. 'I was enthralled by his strange mix of
made-up memories, lost experiences and real-life
fantasies' Marina Warner, Guardian
'He uses language like an
anatomist uses a scalpel to lay bare the innermost
secrets of that strangest of species, the human being'
W. G. Sebald, author of Austerlitz
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