Javier Marías - Between Eternities

All Souls

A Heart So White

Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

When I was Mortal

Dark Back of Time

The Man of Feeling

Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear

Voyage along the Horizon

Written Lives

Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream

Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell

Bad Nature, or with Elvis in Mexico

While the Women are Sleeping

The Infatuations

Thus Bad Begins

Venice, An Interior

Javier Maras was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published sixteen novels, including The Infatuations and Thus Bad Begins, as well as two collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into forty-two languages and won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for A Heart So White. He is also a highly practised translator into Spanish of English authors, including Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Thomas Browne and Laurence Sterne. He has held academic posts in Spain and the United States, and in Britain as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.

Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for over thirty years and has translated works by novelists such as Ea de Queiroz, Jos Saramago and Bernardo Atxaga, as well as poets such as Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Ana Lusa Amaral. She has won various prizes, most recently the 2017 Best Translated Book Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and holds an OBE for services to literature and an honorary doctorate from the University of Leeds.

Alexis Grohmann is Professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Coming into Ones Own: The Novelistic Development of Javier Maras, amongst other studies and edited collections of essays on Spanish and European literature. He is a corresponding member of the Real Academia Espaola.

Javier Maras

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BETWEEN ETERNITIES

Translated from the Spanish by
Margaret Jull Costa
Edited with an introduction by
Alexis Grohmann

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Hamish Hamilton is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

First published 2017

This selection copyright Javier Maras, 2017

Translation copyright Margaret Jull Costa, 2017

Introduction copyright Alexis Grohmann, 2017

The constitute an extension of this copyright page

The moral right of the author, translator and introducer has been asserted

Cover photo: James Stewart in The Man From Laramie by Herbert Dorfman/Corbis via Getty Images

ISBN: 978-0-241-97579-4

Javier Marass parents, Dolores (Lolita) Franco and Julin Maras, were fervent readers, scholars and writers. They met at university in the 1930s, during the turbulent years of Spains Second Republic, and Lolita gradually set aside much of her scholarly work to bring up her sons, although she continued to be intellectually active and later published a significant book on Spain seen through its literature. Javier was the fourth of five sons (the firstborn, Juliann, died tragically at the age of three and a half in 1949 and has been movingly evoked by Javier Maras in Dark Back of Time and by Julin Maras in his memoirs). Julin Maras was a philosopher, teacher, writer, intellectual and a figure found rarely in Spain. A disciple and friend of Spains greatest philosopher, Jos Ortega y Gasset, he was a truly upright and principled person, gentle in private, religious, but at the same time politically progressive. He had the misfortune of looking for the political middle in a period of extremes and blind party loyalty, and his profound dedication to his country rendered him incapable of going into exile, as so many of his contemporaries did after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and the establishment of Francos dictatorial regime from 1939. Julin was equally incapable of complicity with the dictatorship. Though he had forged affiliations with the Second Spanish Republic, he was denounced on mostly false charges at the outset of the Franco regime by a treacherous friend, was subsequently imprisoned and only escaped the firing squad thanks to an honest witness called by the prosecution (Javier has described this incident in the first novel of his trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow). He suffered reprisals thereafter, was shunned by the establishment and by Spanish universities and travelled to the United States to undertake teaching at various universities there, occasionally accompanied by his family. Thus, Javier spent the first year of his life in Massachusetts, at Wellesley College (as he recalls in Air-Ships), where he was to return many decades later to teach a course on Cervantess Don Quixote, and another period in New Haven, when his father worked at Yale. During Spains transition from dictatorship to democracy in the 1970s and 80s, as Senator by Royal Decree and in discussions with the then young King Juan Carlos I and President Adolfo Surez in particular, Julin Maras contributed to the careful reform and democratization of Spanish society, as well as to the drafting of the Constitution of 1978.

His sons Miguel, Fernando, Javier and lvaro grew up in a house brimming with culture, books and paintings from an early age, Javier had to learn to wrestle with his parents books in order to make space on the floor to play with his toy soldiers (see The Invading Library) as well as a constant stream of visitors, ranging from North American exchange students (his father also taught US students on their year abroad) to writers, artists and intellectuals. Javier and his brothers thus received a lively and extraordinarily open-minded, progressive and international education, both at home and at the uniquely secular, liberal and co-educational Colegio Estudio, in stark contrast with the dominant nationalist, Catholic, regressive and repressive tendencies of the dictatorial regime and all its institutions. Their upbringing was therefore in many ways quite uncommon and privileged, but this privilege had been gained by Lolita Franco and Julin Maras at a high personal, professional and financial cost although they never spoke of it like that through their unwavering uprightness and independence of mind and character.

Dont specialize, they counselled their sons, learn about everything. And while it may not be surprising, given their family background, that all four sons have made a name for themselves in the sphere of the arts and humanities as film critics, art historians, musicians and music critics or writers it is perhaps Javier Maras who has heeded this advice most.

Beyond Spain, Javier Maras is best known as one of Europes foremost writers, author of twelve novels translated into forty-three languages and published in fifty-five countries, with over a dozen, mostly international, literary prizes to his name and eight million volumes of his work sold worldwide. As someone who started writing at the still tender age of fourteen in 1965 his first short story, Life and Death of Marcelino Iturriaga, was published in a Barcelona newspaper three years later and who, at the age of fifteen, wrote his first novel (