What a crazy book - like James Bond written by Proust!
There's almost no action - the first half of the book consists of man with binoculars watching a neighbour dancing by himself, an Oxford buffet dinner, and a bloodstain. The rest is meandering musings. By the end of the book there hadn't been much more action, but a lot more musings. I learned useful stuff about the Spanish civil war, which was good, but not what I came here for. And in total breach of Chekhov's law, the bloodstain is never resolved.
The first part of a trilogy. I'm a very doubtful starter for the next two volumes. ( )

I have read most of Javier Marías's works and this was the most difficult so far. However, as usual, the author makes up for the density with remarkable meditations on human relationships, particularly the nature and impact of betrayal. The section on the present generation trying to make up for the deeds of previous generations alone deserves four stars. I look forward to reading the rest of the trilogy. ( )

Myriad readers of the Essays by Montaigne have remarked, how'd he know? This implies some spooky insight into our interior motivations that the Mayor of Bordeaux anticipated 400 years ago. It translates into vanity. That said, I felt often over the last few days that Javier Marias was privy to many of my own streams of though. This is an astonishing treatise on language, memory and history. ( )

Il mio secondo Javier Marìas, una mezza delusione. Ho apprezzato, come nell'altro, lo stile, le parole scelte accuratamente, la costruzione delle frasi, le riflessioni sull'esistenza e sui rapporti tra le persone. Ho apprezzato i richiami da un punto all'altro del libro attraverso la ripetizione di parole o di intere frasi, e mi ha sorpresa la struttura circolare del romanzo. Tuttavia alcune parti sono estremamente noiose, lunghe e autoreferenziali, quasi pompose. Devo ammettere che in più di un'occasione non sono riuscita a stare dietro alle riflessioni dell'autore, o meglio, al modo arzigogolato con cui sono presentate. E qualche capoverso l'ho saltato, in preda alla disperazione. Due stelle e mezza arrotondate a tre per la fiducia. E anche se l'ultima pagina ti invoglia a cominciare subito con il secondo volume, ho deciso di prendermi una pausa e di leggere qualcosa di decisamente meno impegnativo. Ma ce la farò a leggere tutta la trilogia! ( )

I bought this several years ago for a world fiction reading challenge I’d set myself (see here), but only managed to get halfway through it before giving up. It had come highly recommended, so perhaps my expectations were too high… But even on this second read I found it all a bit of a chore. The prose is discursive to an extent that made my eyes glaze, and I like discursive prose. The narrator is a Spaniard working in the UK, who, thanks to contacts at Oxford University, secures a position as a “translator” with an enigmatic member of the British establishment whose role may or may not be officially sanctioned. He’s not really a translator, because the narrator is excellent at reading faces, and it is his interpolation of the mind-set of interviewees in which his employer is chiefly interested. There’s a good brainstorming sequence involving the Spanish Civil War, Orwell, Fleming, and the narrator’s own family history, but much as I wanted to like this novel I didn’t take to it enough to want to read the remaining two books of the trilogy. A shame. ( )