The Man of Feeling 

by Javier Marías

I think myself into love,
And I dream myself out of it.

William Hazlitt

A tale of cosmopolitan love, The Man of Feeling is a novel of recollection, a thoughtful novel of emotion. 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 haunting with fragments of what happened or may have happened. For an opera-lover like myself it had just enough passion to suggest the music of love. It had the libretto, if not the music.


The Man of Feeling by Javier Maris. New Directions Books, New York. 2003 (1986)

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