Around the World for a Good Book selection for Spain
Author: Javier Marias
Translator: Margaret Jull Costa
Title: The Man of Feeling
Publication Info: New Directions (2003)
ISBN: 0811215318
Summary/Review:
This short meditative book is narrated from the perspective of a young opera singer who travels across Europe for performances. On one of his journeys he shares a train cabin with an attractive woman, her husband, and a man who works as their handler (for lack of a better word). It seems painfully obvious that the narrator will lust after the woman, that the power-hungry husband won’t like that, and the handler will play both sides against one another, because that is exactly what happens. Marias narrator is not a sympathetic character, even as he details the reprehensible behavior of the others in this quartet, he still comes off as the worst. The saving grace is that Marias – and his translator – makes good use of lyric writing with a few turns of the flowery word and a narrative built on a dreamlike quality. This is not a book to read for the plot or the characters, just the well-crafted prose. Marias describes his work accurately in the epilogue as ‘a love story in which love is neither seen nor experienced, but announced and remembered.”
Rating: **
Panorama of the Mountains 