[All Souls, 19 Sep 2010] -- an account, from memory, of the Spanish narrator's 2 years at Oxford. _From memory_, that's the important bit here. Everything is account (story) and memory.
At first I was going to complain about the style, the looping, rambling voice of not only the narrator but also the other characters (everyone talks/thinks the same?, I thought to myself). In fact, at one point (the high-table scene where our narrator first meets his lover-to-be) I said to myself, this scene that's supposed to be funny (hilarious even) almost isn't because of the way he's telling it. But by the end I realized that that's the point. The whole book is in the narrator's head, I mean _coming from_ the narrator's head. That's why it's messy, anxious, agitated (as the narrator himself readily admits he was during that period in his life).
This novel is also a demonstration of what literature is: keeping going with the story; the immortality of us as persons and as a culture. All souls have a story, all souls are afraid to die because they don't want to miss out on the all the stories: those untold, those yet to unfold...
One of my favorite bits: the scene near the end where Clare recounts a scene from her past that she herself barely remembers (she was only 3 and has constructed the story from others' tellings); but we don't "hear" her finishing the story (the climax), instead the narrator does it himself in his own head, adding his own embellishments and touches...!

[A Heart So White, 20 Oct 2010] -- while reading this I was trying to figure out 2 things: 1) what was it that I didn't like about it, and 2) why I liked it so much. And that, in a nutshell, is a description of Marías's paradoxical style (and method).
One of the things that bothers me is the way all the characters seem to talk in the same way, with the same style. In the other books, I found good excuses, and in this one, the narrator out-and-out says it, This is the way I remember it, which may not be the way it actually was. But that's all minor, inconsequential stuff.
The real discovery here is Marías's method, which is outlined in an appendix, but which I was unconsciously aware of (I think). In this book in particular (of the 3 now I have read), there's a distinct lack of plot, and instead a collection of seemingly random set pieces. In fact, I was going to write something similar to what I wrote re: 2666 -- chance events that somehow fit and don't fit at the same time, through some sort of magic, and yet the "fitness" doesn't matter anyway. And then I read what Marías himself says about his working method: he has no idea what he's going to write when he sets down to write. (OK, yeah, I'm sure he has _some_ idea.) But the rest he leaves to ... flow, magic, inspiration, the spirit of the Gift?, does it matter?
But for all the supposed randomness, there's a definite structure here. As usual with Marías, the book ends where it starts (usually with a death or the mention of a death, much like with Marquez). In this one there's a lot of repetition, of entire phrases, especially at the end, like a crescendo (that make it almost musical), as the final revelation is told (recounted), and heard and overheard, willingly and unwillingly, but necessarily, because that's what Literature is, that's what Life is...

[Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, 28 Nov 2010]
I don't know, maybe it was Marías fatigue, or maybe I took too long to read it, but this one didn't work for me. Not like the others anyway. Marías himself admits that his working method doesn't always work, that it can have "disastrous" results. While I wouldn't call this a disaster, I'm not sure how well it worked. We have all the usual Marías tropes and images (time, memory, spying, the back of the neck, the face, names, death, storytelling), but somehow they don't gel, not like in A Heart So White. Or maybe it's that the "random" stories that happen between the main story aren't as interesting as they were in A Heart So White (interesting to me anyway).
Here the book ends with a story told not by the narrator but by another character. But instead of the narrator finishing the story for us (as in All Souls), we realize that his own story (told in the preceding pages) was contaminated by this story, which he is finally telling us, having delayed it with other stories, with too many thoughts, too much thinking actually. And in the end, maybe that's why this fails; the inner thoughts, the inner paranoias, that useless whirring that our brains do sometimes, overrode the storytelling, the flow, the magic...

P.S. OK, I think I have an answer to the paradox I mentioned in my review of A Heart So White: haunting. Marías is haunting. His narrators are haunted (as they themselves claim), but so are we. A spell is cast upon us, we are mesmerized and enchanted, despite the meanderings, the spiraling and looping, the "what the hell are you doing??" moments, the flaws... or it's precisely because of those things...Is this perhaps why in my least favorite of the 3 books I just read I have placed the most bookmarks? ( )