The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Man of Feeling, by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa
reviewed by Steven G. Kellman

Javier Marías. The Man of Feeling. Trans. Margaret Jull Costa. New Directions, 2003. 182 pp. $22.95.

Readers in the United States have been slower than those elsewhere to discover the sophisticated pleasures of Javier Marías, the fifty-two-year-old Spanish author who has been translated into more than two dozen languages. Following the successful reception of Dark Back of Time and When I Was Mortal, New Directions offers an English translation of an earlier, less ambitious Marías novel. First published in 1986 as El hombre sentimental, The Man of Feeling is a brief, intense portrait of an aberrant artist, an artist of aberrancy. Its narrator, Léon de Nápoles, is a promising opera star who declares, “I need to try to destroy myself or to destroy someone else,” and accomplishes both objectives. During a sojourn in Madrid to perform Cassio in Verdi’s Otello, Nápoles encounters Hieronimo Manur, a wealthy Belgian banker, and his restless wife, Natalia. With the connivance of the banker’s factotum, Dato, Nápoles attempts to pry Natalia away from her husband. Hieronimo had in effect purchased Natalia, taking her as property in exchange for bailing her father and brother out of financial ruin. Believing that she will eventually learn to love him, Manur is the novel’s eponymous hombre sentimental, and, recalling the events through a scrim of dreams four years later, Nápoles, a man of scant feeling but resentment, still marvels at the other man’s patient faith in the eventual birth of love. Miscast as Cassio rather than Iago, Nápoles broods over the banker’s devotion to a woman who remains indifferent to him. “Bear in mind that there is no stronger bond than that which binds one to something unreal or, worse, something that has never existed,” observes Manur about his own uncommon marriage—and Marías about his own perverse and powerful fiction.