Evidently, on the publication of All Souls many readers assumed it was a roman à clef (today we'd probably be more likely to say autofiction), taking the characters in the book as stand-ins for real individuals on faculty at Oxford. This was an assumption made by readers who knew only a little about Marías (he recalls his students assuming he had a small child because that book's narrator is father to a baby), but also by some of his own colleagues at Oxford – one of whom went so far as to make assumptions about who was the married professor with whom the narrator had an affair. (Marías for his part claims he doesn't know who this colleague might be imagining he had an affair with.)
Correcting these false assumptions is where the book starts out – and goes on for quite a few chapters. (I laughed out loud early in the book when Marías forcefully states that there has never been a significant Luisa in his life. I felt I was beginning to understand his continual reuse of that name for the women in his books.) Ironically, as the book goes on enumerating apparently true events from the real life and family history of Marías, I recognized more and more instances that show up in his later books. He uses names and addresses from his own family and life (the ones that jumped out at me were Custardoy - the last name of a grand or great-grandfather, and Calle de Covarrubias a street in Madrid) as characters and settings in his novels, which bear the same relationship to the narrator as to the author.
But as with many Marías books, it takes a while before you see where things are going and understand what the book is actually about. After several chapters spent addressing these false assumptions, Dark Back of Time changes course and goes in depth into the one part of All Souls that was based in reality: the story of John Gawsworth, writer, poet, and King Juan I of Redonda. Marías – along with the narrator of All Souls – discovered Gawsworth by accident and became fascinated with his life, which took many unexpected turns, ending in poverty. Following the publication of All Souls, through a series of loose connections, Marías found several more coincidences related to Gawsworth and his circle, and recounting these unbelievable real stories (as opposed to the believable fictions) takes up the remainder of the book.
Marías is especially interested in the small events or even accidents, without which he the author, you the reader, any person in fact, might never have come to be. Or might have been instead a different person. The "dark back of time" is the (borrowed) language Marías uses to talk about the things that didn't happen, but might have. The alternate version of the world where by some accident (or the lack of it), things turn out differently. These two realities – the actual world and the alternate possibility coexist, we are always aware of the way things could have been different.
I think Marías would have been amused by the headline of his New York Times obituary, which includes both the world in which he is living, and that in which he has died.
