When Marías died, I took it as an opportunity to order every book of his available in English that I didn't already own. This worked out to be three novels, two books of essays, and a tiny volume about Venice. I considered going right back to the beginning and reading Voyage Along the Horizon, his earliest novel available in English, which he started at age 19 and was published when he was 21. But I didn't think it would give me what I wanted. Last year I started the year with his second earliest book available in English, which was published 15 years after Voyage Along the Horizon. I'll admit to knowing next to nothing about the three other books that predate The Man of Feeling, which have not been translated, but operating on the assumption that it might be considered his first mature work, I decided to proceed chronologically from there and so I started All Souls, which is also notable for being the first book of his to be translated into English. Beginning with All Souls his books have been routinely translated and released in English in the expected two years or so following their Spanish publication.
With All Souls I did feel I was getting the true Marías – in short, it gave me what I wanted. This narrator was never named (though at one point he is given a false name). There's a Luisa (the first Luisa?) although she's not the woman at the center of the book. That woman – to my shock – was named Clare*. (I believe I've read only two** other books that featured Clares: Passing and The Road to Damietta, a book I read in middle school about Saint Francis and Saint Clare.) There's the Oxford don and spy, Toby Rylands, who shows up in several other books. In this one, I think, we get more of an origin story for him than in any of the others. There's Oxford itself, which plays a part in so many of Marías books. All Souls featured the usual long ruminations on what appear to be tangential topics, which of course come back in the most unexpected context.
If I am to proceed from here chronologically, the next steps would be to reread A Heart So White and Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, but I think I may jump ahead instead to the next book I haven't read: The Dark Back of Time. Near the end of All Souls that book's title pops up in the text. But once I've read that, I will have read every novel except the early works and the most recent. There's no question in my mind that I want to reread some – perhaps all – of his books, the question is only of order and timing.
* Evidently, this same Clare shows up in the Your Face Tomorrow books, a detail I'm surprised to have forgotten.
** A google search has reminded me of another fictional Clare in a book I've read. It's the rarer male usage: Clare Quilty from Lolita
