The anticipation and the recollection

Having read an interesting interview with the Spanish author, Javier Marias (see my post here), I picked up two books by him - The Man of Feeling and a collection of short pieces (not stories, many read like short vignettes) titled When I Was Mortal.

I'll definitely be blogging more about both books soon as I find Marias's writing very delectable.. even if some of the short stories read so far were not sumptuous in their whole, the parts thereof were like ...well.. 'tasty morsels' that I quite enjoyed.

For starters, here is an excerpt from the epilogue to The Man of Feeling, in which the author gives some background about the book.

The Man of Feeling is a love story in which love is neither seen nor experienced, but announced and remembered. Can such a thing happen? Can something as urgent and unpostponable as love, which requires both presence and immediate consummation or consumption, be announced when it does not yet exist or truly remembered if it no longer exists? Or does the announcement itself and mere memory - now and still respectively - form part of that love? I don't know, but I do believe that love is based in large measure on its anticipation and its recollection. It is the feeling that requires the largest dose of imagination, not only when one senses its presence, when one sees it coming, and not only when the person who has experienced and lost love feels a need to explain it to him or herself, but also while that love is evolving and is in full flow. Let us say it is a feeling which always demands an element of fiction beyond that afforded by reality. In other words, love always has an imaginary side to it, however tangiable or real we believe it to be at any given moment. It is always about to be fulfilled, it is the realm of what might be. Or, rather, of what might have been.

Beautiful! 

By the way, you can read the NYT Review of the book here; another review here, and lastly a review from the 'bookslut' here.

Other books by Javier Marias on my to-read list: A Heart So White, All Souls, and Dark Back of Time. Also, his non-fictional Written Lives is supposed to be an interesting look at the lives of some of the greatest authors we know.