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“... causes. Only a generation ago, after all, you had to be pretty careful what you said and to whom. Javier Marías, born in 1951, is of an age to have been marked by the past. His parents were deeply affected by the Civil War. He witnessed fear and caution under dictatorship, and then the readjustment of guilty pasts to fit in with the democracy hurriedly ...”

“... as your research assistant. You could also just read one of the formidably intelligent works of Javier Marías, expert in what he calls the ‘shadows’ of the untold story. He is the author of eight novels, the last three of which are available in English (from Harvill) as All Souls, A Heart So White and Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. All three ...”

“... And he may be thinking,’ we read in Berta Isla, Javier Marías’s last novel but one, published in Spanish in 2017, ‘that, basically, he belongs to the category of people who don’t see themselves as protagonists, not even of their own story … who discover halfway through that … their story will not merit being told by anyone, or only as a fleeting reference when recounting another person’s more eventful and interesting life ...”

“... category is one into which no one would think of putting the work of the Spanish novelist Javier Marías, despite the bodies that pile up in his pages; his ratio of mind to matter approaches a ghostly extreme. Characteristically, the gigantic and recently completed trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow, delivers three essays on the inadvisability of ...”

“... neatly balanced judgment on her own self-serious mentor, Susan Sontag: When, recently, I see that Javier Marías has said that the worst thing a writer can do is to take himself or his work too seriously, I think I understand. I think I even agree with him. I think if I had thought this way myself when I was young, my life could have been happier. I ...”