When I Was Mortal

PRAISE FOR JAVIER MARÍAS

“Marías is one of the best contemporary writers.”

— J. M. Coetzee

“By far Spain’s best writer today.”

— Roberto Bolaño

“One of the writers who should get the Nobel Prize is Javier Marías.”

— Orhan Pamuk

“Stylish, cerebral.… Marías is a startling talent.… His prose is ambitious, ironic, philosophical and ultimately compassionate.”

— The New York Times

“It is a rare gift, to be offered a writer who lives in our own time but speaks with the intensity of the past, who comes with the extra richness lent by a foreign history and nonetheless knows our own culture inside out. Yet, strangely, Javier Marías — who is famous in Spain and garlanded with prizes from the rest of Europe — remains almost unknown in America. What are we waiting for?”

— The New York Times Book Review

“Javier Marías is one of the greatest living authors. I cannot think of one single contemporary writer that reaches his level of quality. If I had to name one, it would be García Márquez.”

— Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Das Literarische Quartett

“Javier Marías is such an elegant, witty and persuasive writer that it is tempting simply to quote him at length.”

— The Scotsman

“A supreme stylist.”

— The Times (London)

“Marías uses language like an anatomist uses the scalpel to cut away the layers of the flesh in order to lay bare the innermost secrets of that strangest of species, the human being.”

— W. G. Sebald

“His prose possesses an exquisite, almost uncanny observation, re-creating moments and moods in hypnotic depth.”

— The Telegraph (London)

“Javier Marías is a novelist with style.… His readers enter, through him, a strikingly and disturbingly foreign world.”

— Margaret Drabble

“Marías writes the kind of old-fashioned speculative prose we associate with Proust and Henry James.… But he also deals in violence, historical and personal, and in the movie titles, politicians, and brand names and underwear we connect with quite a different kind of writer.”

— London Review of Books