Javier Marias in conversation with Paul Holdengräber

Where: Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Fifth Avenue & 42nd Street / Enter at 42nd Street, NY, NY

Admired by Bolaño, Ashbery, Sebald, and Coetzee, Javier Marías is widely considered one of Spain’s greatest living writers. Poison, Shadow, and Farewell brings to a close Marías’s three-part novel Your Face Tomorrow. With its heightened tensions between meditations and noir narrative, Poison, Shadow, and Farewell takes Jacques Deza back to Madrid to both spy on and try to protect his own family, and into new depths of love and loss.

Javier Marías’s novels are renowned for the richness of his “literary thinking” and their endlessly inventive attention to the ways in which the past impinges on the uncertainties and violence of the present. For his protagonists and narrators, acts of interpretation or translation are all we have of knowledge; and memory, in its finitude, prompts proliferations of language and desire. His novels recall the uncanny intellectual play of Borges, the black humor of Pynchon, and the meditative lyricism of Proust, but they do so in a style that is uniquely his and widely praised. He has been called “a supreme stylist” and “the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature”. His works are not only critically praised but also hugely popular, with five million books in print and translated into thirty-four languages.

$25 general admission; $15 library donors,* seniors and students with valid identification.