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Title: When I Was Mortal by Javier Marias, Margaret Jull Costa ISBN: 0-8112-1516-4 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 01 September, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95

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Average Customer Rating: 2.6 (5 reviews)

Rating: 2
Summary: Climactic Pre-climax
Comment: Javier Marías embraces apparently trivial situations and augments their attention value by emphasizing what goes through people's minds prior to engaging in thoroughly climactic experiences, such as killing one's boss or breaking into the world of pornography. Suspense keeps building up, but then it dissolves. After reading a couple of these stories one gets a hold of the trend and expects no suspense breaking. A few tales later the book becomes obviously boring.

Rating: 3
Summary: In Response to Comments by Others
Comment: A reader should consider the possibility that Marias' introduction to the book is also fictive, including the details about commissions.

Rating: 4
Summary: So just what does make us mortal?
Comment: In fairness to Mr. Marias, I think an alternative view of this collection should be offered to the book-buying public so that they can decide if they wish to purchase this item.

Although this collection does have its faults and is sometimes uneven--I think a couple of entries could easily have been left out--it offers an interesting and entertaining literary voice and suggests a universe that is uniquely cohesive and disturbing. Indeed, one could posit that in Mr. Marias's universe little true empathy exists between persons, be they husbands and wives, childhood friends, or even casual or business acquaintances. A general, undefined antipathy permeates the boundaries of most human interaction in these stories, suggesting that modern society is lacking some basic interconnectedness at its core; yes, something is rotten in the state of Denmark, but just what is not so obvious as in Shakespeare's tales.

This is not to suggest that everyone is alone and riddled by angst, anger, or fear--and spouting off about them--but merely that modern relationships display some palpable sense of absence rather than a unity at the core. The sense is that fate or accident has thrown people together--or blinded them--and that this condition of unexpressed unease is allowed to exist until, one day, it emerges in sudden flares of violent action.

Indeed, violence can be found in almost all of these twelve tales, but not the overt violence of today's movies and TV news. These tales are rarely graphic or disturbing in that sense. The violence is often suggested and its reasons masked rather than explicitly shown. One story asks, Have two women worked together with a "foreign" doctor to quietly eliminate their husbands? Another depicts a bodyguard who now seems compelled to kill the person he has been hired to protect, but we are left to ponder the reason. Still another leaves us wondering about the suicide of a main character. Indeed, Marias takes us along the path of Yeats' poems, where we are often left with questions rather than defined answers, and in that sense the tales can be confounding if you are not willing to read closely, and reread, to unearth the subtleties of the elegant prose and the barely revealed clues. Little is directly stated in these stories, and I am sure that will cause consternation among those who want clean-cut, easily defined tales that have a neat beginning, a logical progression, and an inevitable or shocking end. That is not Marias's way. More often, you are left to fill in the subtext. Fortinbras does not waltz in neatly at the end to restore order.

Was I always pleased with these stories? Nope. But did I learn from them and find some small truths about people and the way we are mortal? The answer is defintely yes. And because the prose is refined and subtlely ironic, because the viewpoint is often detached and analytical, and because Marias presents an unsettling world that truly reflects our own, I was curious enough to read them as befits their merit. They peeked my interest enough to even attempt a novel by Marias, and that may well be my next Amazon purchase.

By the way, the story "When I Was Mortal," the centerpiece of the work, is among the best conjectural narratives I have read. It may not be worth the price of admission alone, but it goes a long way toward making this volume a worthwhile purchase.