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Publication
Espasa-Calpe (1995), 176 páginas
Description
A story of love and memory. On a train journey from Paris to Madrid a young opera singer becomes fascinated by those in his compartment: a middle-aged businessman, his alluring wife and their male traveling companion. Soon his life of constant travel, luxury hotels, rehearsal and performance will become entangled with these three people, and the singer will find himself fatefully consumed by Natalia's beauty."The Man of Feeling"is the haunting story of the birth and death of a passion, told in retrospect. Intricately interweaving desire and memory, it explores the nature of love, and asks whether we can ever truly recall something that no longer exists."
User reviews
LibraryThing member Michy
This novel certainly makes me want to read more Marias. The book's description as a story of a love affair between an opera singer and a married woman sounds simple and straightforward, but Marias' style makes it much more than it would have been in less capable hands. Much of the story is related
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to the readers not through the recollection of the actual events, but through the description of the narrator's dreams of past events, introducing even more uncertainty in the narrator's reliability. Marias also jumps around in the timeline, writes long sentences, and does not divide the book into chapters. All of this makes the reader work a little harder, but the effort is definitely worthwhile. Show Less
LibraryThing member jwhenderson
A tale of cosmopolitan love, The Man of Feeling is a novel of recollection. A memory of love remembered ala Proust, but with a shortened span of memory as if the dream is fleeting as the love. A ghost story in the sense that memory is ghost-like and this memory, while filled with desire, is
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haunting with fragments of what happened or may have happened. For an opera-love like myself it had just enough passion to suggest the music of love. It had the libretto, if not the music. Show Less
LibraryThing member donato
It's taken me awhile to write this review. Because I'm trying to get a handle on my thoughts.
I really liked the structure of the book. It turned a simple story into a suspenseful one too. Marquez-like, Marías blends past, present, future, memory and dream, but he adds something else to the mix:
Marías himself says, in an epilogue, that this is a love story where love is neither seen nor lived, but is announced and remembered.
I was going to give this 3 stars and complain: but I don't see love, not even remembered. I see selfishness masquerading as love ("I don't want to die like an imbecile")... infatuation masquerading as love (the mysterious, melancholic elegant still-beautiful wife of a banker)... and now I realize, maybe that's the point? That's how we think about love, imagine love, remember love.
But unless we live it, it's only a dream.
I really liked the structure of the book. It turned a simple story into a suspenseful one too. Marquez-like, Marías blends past, present, future, memory and dream, but he adds something else to the mix:
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imagination -- that is, the narrator imagines what other characters might be doing or thinking. Like he needs to create a story beyond his own story.Marías himself says, in an epilogue, that this is a love story where love is neither seen nor lived, but is announced and remembered.
I was going to give this 3 stars and complain: but I don't see love, not even remembered. I see selfishness masquerading as love ("I don't want to die like an imbecile")... infatuation masquerading as love (the mysterious, melancholic elegant still-beautiful wife of a banker)... and now I realize, maybe that's the point? That's how we think about love, imagine love, remember love.
But unless we live it, it's only a dream.
Show Less
LibraryThing member michaelbartley
this is a very interesting book that expores lonliness, art, and love the cover is has painting of edward hopper. perfect choice
LibraryThing member KrisR
This is yet another brilliant novel by Javier Marías. I'm not going to pretend to any kind of objectivity; he has become one of my favorite writers in a very short time. In this short, intricately crafted novel, Marías explores the intersection between love and dreams. Is the true experience of
In this early novel, the protagonist is a rising young tenor who is traveling to Madrid to sing the role of Cassio in Verdi's Otello. With scenes of the landscape rushing by the train windows, he observes a trio of fellow travelers, two men and a mysterious and melancholy sleeping woman. As the protagonist becomes acquainted with Natalia Manur, her controlling husband, and her paid companion Dato, he quickly falls under Natalia's spell. Throughout the rest of the novel, he explores the depth of his feelings, wrestles with the gap between anticipation and reality, and struggles with a series of memories, sometimes of dreams, that he hopes will lead him to love.
At the beginning of the novel, the protagonist expresses some ambivalence about his focus on his dreams, "I don't know whether I should tell you my dreams.... They are dreams that become somewhat tedious after a while because the person dreaming them always wakes before the end, as if the dream impulse had worn itself out in the representations of all those details and lost interest in the final result, as if dreaming were the only true ideal and aimless activity left." In spite of these concerns, he moves back and forth between dreams and lived experience, between imagination and memory.
The world of opera provides the perfect setting for these explorations, and not only because of the resonances between the young tenor's dilemma and Otello. Marías provides some funny, and sometimes poignant, descriptions of the follies and foibles of opera stars. The many different roles they play on and off stage, and the projection of feeling during performances, raise some of Marías's questions regarding the relationships among recollection, anticipation, and any true feelings, especially love. The characterization of Natalia also bears some resemblance to female protagonists in opera, as Marías admits in his Afterword. She seems ethereal throughout, more an imagined ideal than a flesh and blood character. This representation works perfectly, given Marías's themes of interest in the novel.
Highly recommended for Marías's beautiful, dreamlike writing style, his masterful exploration of his key themes, and the surprises he threads into his narrative along the way.
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love something a person experiences actively and with intention, or is its essence made up of recollection and imagination? And what happens when a person's best chance of happiness seems to come while dreaming? In this early novel, the protagonist is a rising young tenor who is traveling to Madrid to sing the role of Cassio in Verdi's Otello. With scenes of the landscape rushing by the train windows, he observes a trio of fellow travelers, two men and a mysterious and melancholy sleeping woman. As the protagonist becomes acquainted with Natalia Manur, her controlling husband, and her paid companion Dato, he quickly falls under Natalia's spell. Throughout the rest of the novel, he explores the depth of his feelings, wrestles with the gap between anticipation and reality, and struggles with a series of memories, sometimes of dreams, that he hopes will lead him to love.
At the beginning of the novel, the protagonist expresses some ambivalence about his focus on his dreams, "I don't know whether I should tell you my dreams.... They are dreams that become somewhat tedious after a while because the person dreaming them always wakes before the end, as if the dream impulse had worn itself out in the representations of all those details and lost interest in the final result, as if dreaming were the only true ideal and aimless activity left." In spite of these concerns, he moves back and forth between dreams and lived experience, between imagination and memory.
The world of opera provides the perfect setting for these explorations, and not only because of the resonances between the young tenor's dilemma and Otello. Marías provides some funny, and sometimes poignant, descriptions of the follies and foibles of opera stars. The many different roles they play on and off stage, and the projection of feeling during performances, raise some of Marías's questions regarding the relationships among recollection, anticipation, and any true feelings, especially love. The characterization of Natalia also bears some resemblance to female protagonists in opera, as Marías admits in his Afterword. She seems ethereal throughout, more an imagined ideal than a flesh and blood character. This representation works perfectly, given Marías's themes of interest in the novel.
Highly recommended for Marías's beautiful, dreamlike writing style, his masterful exploration of his key themes, and the surprises he threads into his narrative along the way.
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LibraryThing member stillatim
Not quite up to Marias' usually high standards, but perhaps a good place to start nonetheless, because it's a much easier read than his later work, and more similar to them than the other earlier novel that you can easily find in English, 'All Souls.' Here his method of juxtaposing a few stories to
The nice thing about MoF is the narrative technique: a man recounts a dream that itself recounts events in his own life from four years ago. Nothing is quite certain, since it's hard to know what is just dream, what is history, and what is a mix of each. It also lets Marias spend some time thinking about the value or lack in remembering, forgetting, and dreaming itself. The digressions on memory, in particular, point forward to later novels, and to the more complex narrative schemes Marias will employ in them: "I reamed what happened in another order, in another tempo and with time apportioned and divided differently, in a concentrated, selective manner... while in my mind there was synthesis, in my dream there was progression" (31-2). The 'synthesis,' I hazard a guess, is the thought-feeling I mentioned above; the 'progress' is the unfolding of that thought-feeling in his narratives.
Another interesting moment comes when the narrator considers his own writing method, suggesting that "a man writing can begin to understand what he is writing from one chance phrase that tells him - not suddenly, but slowly - why all the other phrases were as they were, why they were written in that way (which he will see now as having nothing to do with either intention or chance)" (135). That phrase in this book is "I don't want to die like a fool," p 9, which is only explained very late; in later books the 'phrase' is much more complicated.
The conclusion to the book (plot spoiler) is that the narrator, although abandoned by his lover, will write his story rather than kill himself; the woman's husband kills himself. In the afterword, Marias suggests that the suicide is the 'true' man of feeling, because he is willing to stake his life on the imaginary fictions of love, whereas the narrator is *not* prepared to take the fiction that seriously. That's a nice idea, but it doesn't quite work in the book, in large part because the husband admits to buying his wife and is hard to see as anything other than a villain. So the book is split in half: on the one hand, an emotional love triangle story; on the other, a defense of the unreal, the nonexistent and the fictional even in the worst of circumstances. They're both convincing. They're just not convincing at the same time.
***
"Bear in mind that there is no stronger bond than that which binds one to something unreal or, worse, something that has never existed," 146.
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come up with a... well, I don't really know what to call it (constellation? universal? passion? idea? myth?), but with a complex thought-feeling, is in its earliest stages. Rather than reflecting two or more original plots to each other, Man of Feeling works primarily by relating the story being told to the story of Verdi operas, particularly Otello: love triangle, deception etc etc... A further wrinkle is added by the title, which in Spanish was 'El hombre sentimental,' and recalls Flaubert's 'Sentimental Education.' The English version recalls the under-appreciated 'Man of Feeling' by Henry Mackenzie. Given that Marias is an anglophile and usually works closely with his translators, I assume the Mackenzie is the real shadow for this book, as Shakespeare is for so many others. The epigram, meanwhile, comes from William Hazlitt's 'On the Pleasures of Hating,' which more or less suggests that any form of love is subject to become hatred over time. And there may be echoes of Miller's 'Death of a Salesman,' but I don't know the play at all. The nice thing about MoF is the narrative technique: a man recounts a dream that itself recounts events in his own life from four years ago. Nothing is quite certain, since it's hard to know what is just dream, what is history, and what is a mix of each. It also lets Marias spend some time thinking about the value or lack in remembering, forgetting, and dreaming itself. The digressions on memory, in particular, point forward to later novels, and to the more complex narrative schemes Marias will employ in them: "I reamed what happened in another order, in another tempo and with time apportioned and divided differently, in a concentrated, selective manner... while in my mind there was synthesis, in my dream there was progression" (31-2). The 'synthesis,' I hazard a guess, is the thought-feeling I mentioned above; the 'progress' is the unfolding of that thought-feeling in his narratives.
Another interesting moment comes when the narrator considers his own writing method, suggesting that "a man writing can begin to understand what he is writing from one chance phrase that tells him - not suddenly, but slowly - why all the other phrases were as they were, why they were written in that way (which he will see now as having nothing to do with either intention or chance)" (135). That phrase in this book is "I don't want to die like a fool," p 9, which is only explained very late; in later books the 'phrase' is much more complicated.
The conclusion to the book (plot spoiler) is that the narrator, although abandoned by his lover, will write his story rather than kill himself; the woman's husband kills himself. In the afterword, Marias suggests that the suicide is the 'true' man of feeling, because he is willing to stake his life on the imaginary fictions of love, whereas the narrator is *not* prepared to take the fiction that seriously. That's a nice idea, but it doesn't quite work in the book, in large part because the husband admits to buying his wife and is hard to see as anything other than a villain. So the book is split in half: on the one hand, an emotional love triangle story; on the other, a defense of the unreal, the nonexistent and the fictional even in the worst of circumstances. They're both convincing. They're just not convincing at the same time.
***
"Bear in mind that there is no stronger bond than that which binds one to something unreal or, worse, something that has never existed," 146.
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LibraryThing member Othemts
This short meditative book is narrated from the perspective of a young opera singer who travels across Europe for performances. On one of his journeys he shares a train cabin with an attractive woman, her husband, and a man who works as their handler (for lack of a better word). It seems painfully
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obvious that the narrator will lust after the woman, that the power-hungry husband won't like that, and the handler will play both sides against one another, because that is exactly what happens. Marias narrator is not a sympathetic character, even as he details the reprehensible behavior of the others in this quartet, he still comes off as the worst. The saving grace is that Marias - and his translator - makes good use of lyric writing with a few turns of the flowery word and a narrative built on a dreamlike quality. This is not a book to read for the plot or the characters, just the well-crafted prose. Marias describes his work accurately in the epilogue as 'a love story in which love is neither seen nor experienced, but announced and remembered.'' Show Less
LibraryThing member bodachliath
An intriguing and haunting meditation on the nature of love, loss and the space between dreams and memories.
LibraryThing member thorold
Early Marías, but already with most of the characteristic features of his style clearly visible. The classic narrative rhythm, the subversive parentheses, the loops and digressions, the literary sidetracks: all there as we would expect, but on a slightly less monumental scale than in his more
The narrator is an opera singer, a tenor, who is telling us about a dream he's just had relating to an incident some four years ago when he was in Madrid, appearing as Cassio in Verdi's Otello, and got involved with a woman called Natalia Manur, wife of an important Flemish banker. We soon lose track of how much of what he's telling us is dream and how much really happened, and he doesn't seem to be very clear about it himself, but obviously that shouldn't make any difference to us as readers of a piece of fiction anyway...
As we might expect, there's a female character who has to die prematurely for no good reason other than to advance the plot. But despite the obvious Othello parallels in the plot, it isn't the Desdemona character who gets the chop this time. Moreover, Marías being nothing if not self-aware, it turns out that the narrator has an interesting obsession with the character Liù in Turandot, who has to kill herself so that it's possible for the story to resolve itself.
There are passing mentions of Flaubert, Nabokov, Shakespeare and other usual suspects, as well as "an Austrian writer" (Thomas Bernhard? Robert Musil?). But mostly Marías sticks to the idea that the narrator is not a particularly bookish person, more interested in the oddities of the opera world than in odd corners of world literature. And there are some good opera anecdotes, including the one about the singer who becomes so obsessive about not singing to a house that is less than 100% full that he ends up sitting in an overlooked empty seat himself and having to be removed forcibly by the men in white coats.
Good claustrophobic fun!
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recent books. The narrator is an opera singer, a tenor, who is telling us about a dream he's just had relating to an incident some four years ago when he was in Madrid, appearing as Cassio in Verdi's Otello, and got involved with a woman called Natalia Manur, wife of an important Flemish banker. We soon lose track of how much of what he's telling us is dream and how much really happened, and he doesn't seem to be very clear about it himself, but obviously that shouldn't make any difference to us as readers of a piece of fiction anyway...
As we might expect, there's a female character who has to die prematurely for no good reason other than to advance the plot. But despite the obvious Othello parallels in the plot, it isn't the Desdemona character who gets the chop this time. Moreover, Marías being nothing if not self-aware, it turns out that the narrator has an interesting obsession with the character Liù in Turandot, who has to kill herself so that it's possible for the story to resolve itself.
There are passing mentions of Flaubert, Nabokov, Shakespeare and other usual suspects, as well as "an Austrian writer" (Thomas Bernhard? Robert Musil?). But mostly Marías sticks to the idea that the narrator is not a particularly bookish person, more interested in the oddities of the opera world than in odd corners of world literature. And there are some good opera anecdotes, including the one about the singer who becomes so obsessive about not singing to a house that is less than 100% full that he ends up sitting in an overlooked empty seat himself and having to be removed forcibly by the men in white coats.
Good claustrophobic fun!
Show Less
Awards
Premio Herralde (1986)
Language
Original language
Spanish
Original publication date
1986
Physical description
176 p.
ISBN
8423973344 / 9788423973347