Dark Back of Time is a compelling story of the way in which reality blurs into
fiction by Javier Marías, whose highly-anticipated new novel The Infatuations is
published in 2013. It is translated by Esther Allen in Penguin Modern Classics.
'We lose everything because everything remains except us', says the mysterious narrator
of this extraordinary novel, which meditates on the transience, chance and fragility of
life. As a man called Javier Marías recalls the strange events and people that shaped his
past, including ghostly literary figures, a pilot, an adventurer, a brother who died as a
child and the king of an island in the Caribbean, we begin to question the nature of time,
memory and reality itself. Here the writer is both a keeper of memories and a purveyor of
illusions, destined to be lost in the dark back of time.
Javier Marías was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published ten novels, two collections
of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into thirty-
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.
'I was enthralled by his strange mix of made-up memories, lost experiences and real-
life fantasies' Marina Warner, Guardian
'He uses language like an anatomist uses a scalpel to lay bare the innermost secrets of
that strangest of species, the human being' W. G. Sebald, author of Austerlitz
