‘Dark Back of Time’ by Javier Marías (Review)

Around a month ago, during one of my occasional stays in the big, bad city, I took a trip to The Paperback Bookshop and ended up leaving with a couple of books, both by the late Spanish writer Javier Marías. While I’d already covered one of them on the blog, many, many moons ago, the other was a book I’d long been wanting to try, and (spoiler alert) it didn’t disappoint. However, if you want to know exactly what kind of book it is, I’m afraid I’m still not entirely sure. You see, Uncle Javier could be a mischievous type at times, and you can never quite state with certainty just where the line is here between fact and fiction… ***** For two years during the mid-1980s, Marías lived and worked in Oxford, teaching the occasional class at the university and trawling the many bookshops of the city in search of rare gems. This experience formed the background, if not the main storyline, of his novel All Souls, a wonderful book that introduces us to a certain Jacques Deza, a man we’ll meet…