Javier Marias

An opera singer recounts a dream in which he relived a love affair: several years earlier, in Madrid, he had met and spent time with a couple—the wife of a prominent businessman and her male companion. The singer had fallen in love with the woman, whose husband later killed himself out of despair. While writing down the contents of the dream, news reaches him of the accidental death of his former girlfriend. The device of the recounted dream seems intended to recreate that atmosphere of enchantment, present with greater force in the author's other novel, recently reviewed. In truth, the author intended to tell a love story to demonstrate how that feeling > always requires something fictitious beyond what reality affords it. Love is based to a great extent on its anticipation and its memory . From this point of view, the true protagonist is the husband, who did not opt for reality but lives in yearning and thus in an expectation of love, constituted by his wife's acceptance of his affection and passion. I do not know why, but the book recalls a Pirandellian plot, insofar as the impression emerges that reality is not what it appears to be, but rather what one would wish it were, and despair is born precisely at the moment one realizes the profound divergence between reality and imagination. The various protagonists—the wife, the companion, the husband, and the former girlfriend herself (who held no importance while alive, yet acquires it through her death)—are analogous to Pirandello’s *Six Characters in Search of an Author*. They are attempting to escape unreality through the opera singer, who appears to be a passive subject in the affair, enduring events that he actually sets in motion. Does the passivity with which the singer accepts being abandoned by the woman perhaps intend to signal the prosaic nature of reality compared to the depth and vitality of the imagination? The book is very well written, but it possesses less depth, stylistically as well, compared to the previous one.