While The Women Are Sleeping

While the Women are Sleeping (2010) by Javier Marías. Chatto & Windus. ISBN: 9780701186197. Condition: Good.

There are writers who produce stories.

Then there is Javier Marías, who produces questions disguised as stories, wraps them in immaculate prose, and quietly leaves them sitting in your mind for several weeks after you’ve finished reading.

While the Women are Sleeping is a perfect example.

This collection gathers short fiction from one of Spain’s greatest modern novelists, and if you have previously encountered Marías through his magnificent novels, you will already know that he possesses an extraordinary ability to transform the smallest observation into an exploration of memory, coincidence, identity and the curious unreliability of human beings.

If you haven’t read him before, this is a wonderfully unsettling place to begin.

The title itself has that unmistakable Marías quality: suggestive, faintly mysterious and impossible to forget. It hints at secrets, absence and parallel lives without explaining itself too quickly. As with so much of his writing, the reader is invited to inhabit uncertainty rather than escape it.

Marías was never particularly interested in giving us tidy conclusions.

Reality, he gently reminds us, rarely bothers.

The stories collected here move through encounters that appear ordinary until they suddenly aren’t. A casual conversation becomes morally complicated. A chance meeting refuses to remain accidental. A memory grows stranger every time it is revisited. Characters find themselves haunted less by dramatic events than by possibilities—things that almost happened, might have happened or perhaps happened differently than anyone remembers.

Life, in Marías’s universe, is full of unfinished sentences.

That is partly what makes it feel so convincing.

Reading these stories is a curious experience. On the surface, very little seems to happen. Beneath the surface, entire emotional continents shift. A single remark may reverberate through several pages. An apparently insignificant observation quietly transforms the meaning of everything that preceded it.

Some writers create suspense by asking, "What happens next?"

Marías prefers asking, "What does what already happened actually mean?"

It is a remarkably effective strategy.

His prose is famously elegant, full of long, flowing sentences that seem capable of accommodating every hesitation, qualification and fleeting thought the human mind can produce. Lesser writers attempting this would likely disappear into impenetrable fog somewhere around the third subordinate clause.

Marías somehow emerges with crystal clarity.

Indeed, reading him is rather like listening to an exceptionally perceptive dinner guest who answers a straightforward question before gently wandering into Shakespeare, espionage, marriage, mortality, memory and the ethics of observation, eventually arriving back at the original subject with such grace that you scarcely noticed the journey.

You may even wish they would continue talking.

Published by Chatto & Windus in 2010, this handsome edition presents a writer at the height of his powers. Although Marías became internationally celebrated for novels such as A Heart So White, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me and his monumental Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, these shorter works demonstrate that his remarkable gifts were never dependent on length.

He could make ten pages feel as expansive as many writers manage in three hundred.

This copy remains in good condition, making it an excellent addition to the shelves of anyone who appreciates literary fiction, beautifully crafted prose or stories that continue quietly rearranging themselves in your thoughts long after you’ve put the book back on the shelf.

From Crappy Old Books—because short-story collections often suffer from an unfortunate misconception. Readers imagine them to be literary samplers, pleasant little tasters before the "real" work begins. Javier Marías cheerfully ignores this convention. These stories are complete worlds in miniature, each one possessing the same psychological depth, elegance and unsettling intelligence that made his novels internationally admired. They ask awkward questions, refuse simplistic answers and leave behind that most satisfying of literary experiences: the feeling that something important has happened without anyone ever quite explaining exactly what it was. Like all the finest second-hand books, While the Women are Sleeping asks only for your attention. In return, it offers the quiet pleasure of discovering that the most enduring stories are often the ones that whisper rather than shout.

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