The Man of Feeling shares some themes (infidelity, jealousy, the idea of replacing another person in someone's life) with the later works, but it feels different. There's no one named Luisa. (There is a Berta; perhaps Marías was tired of Luisas when he wrote Berta Isla and decided to repeat a long forgotten name instead?) There were scenes in this book which I think were reused and became fully formed in later works. There's a description of a character dying in her sleep, which occupies just a couple pages of The Man of Feeling, and which was yet so familiar to me. I felt I had read it described in much further detail on a previous occasion. (I am a little alarmed that I can't remember if it was in A Heart So White or Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. I believe the latter, but can't swear to it – though I remember the scene quite well.)
Javier Marías is maybe my favorite writer, but if I have one complaint about him it is a preoccupation with heterosexual masculinity, with a jealous and proprietary approach to relationships. It's not un-self-aware. In fact, this is often the explicit flaw in his characters, but still – he has a tendency to write jealous, possessive men. The Man of Feeling is about one of these men, though in this instance he's not the one telling the story. Perhaps this gives the reader a little more room to be critical of his possessiveness; we don't sympathize with him one bit. We never find out if our narrator is a jealous lover, if he feels the sense of ownership his predecessor felt. One suspects not, but he doesn't tell us. As the book ended, I was left both unsure what he thinks, and what I think of him.
