Todas las almas was published by Anagrama in 1989 (English translation by Margaret Jull Costa, 1992), and it is the novel that established Marías’s international reputation. The narrator — a Spanish academic spending two years teaching at the University of Oxford — observes the rituals, hierarchies, and eccentricities of Oxford academic life with a mixture of fascination, amusement, and existential disquiet.
The plot, such as it is, involves the narrator’s affair with a married woman and his growing obsession with a mysterious figure from the college’s past. But plot is not really the point of a Marías novel. What matters is the quality of attention: the narrator’s consciousness, endlessly reflective, endlessly digressive, endlessly circling back on itself, transforms the apparently mundane events of academic life into occasions for philosophical meditation on time, identity, desire, and the opacity of other people.
Marías draws on his own experience as a visiting lecturer at Oxford in the 1980s, and the portrait of All Souls College (barely fictionalized) is both affectionate and precise: the rituals of High Table, the intricate snobberies of academic hierarchy, the peculiarly English combination of intellectual brilliance and emotional repression. But the novel’s deeper subject is the strangeness of being anywhere at all — the fundamental foreignness of every other consciousness, even those we think we know most intimately.
Collecting All Souls
First Spanish edition (Anagrama, Barcelona, 1989): Paperback original.
Market values:
- First Spanish edition: $20–$50
- First English edition (Harvill, 1992): $25–$60
- First US edition (New Directions, 2000): $10–$25