All Souls

The Chinese edition of Spanish writer Javier Marías's novel All Souls (Todas las almas), translated by Xu Lei, is introduced for the first time. The narrator, a Spaniard who is never named, comes to Oxford University's All Souls College as a foreign lecturer in Spanish literature and stays for two years. In this old, cold college, seemingly sealed in syrup, he is a foreigner whom no one knows or cares about: no one knows the important parts of his life story, but everyone knows he will not stay forever. In class he encounters a host of words he has never heard, rummages through strange books in secondhand bookshops, deals with eccentric people, wanders incurably, and finally finds the courage to admit that he is becoming more and more like a beggar. The novel has no tight plotline; the narration moves among academic anecdotes, street wanderings, literary reflections, and private memories, intertwining fact and fiction in a winding, dense manner full of black humor. At the end, the protagonist leaves Oxford and returns to Madrid. The work draws on Marías's experience teaching at Oxford from 1983 to 1985, has a strong autobiographical color, and is at the same time declared by the author to be "entirely fiction." This novel also led to Marías being crowned in 1997 as the fourth king of the Kingdom of Redonda, a famous event in which literature intervenes in reality.