RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksAlthough the book is a page-turner, it’s also the case that Marías is a great philosophical novelist ... His characters brood obsessively, and one of Marías’s great skills as a novelist is to make that brooding completely compelling, hypnotic, and exciting at the same time ... It’s like watching a chess game where we are good enough to see how good the moves are, who is willing to sacrifice which pieces to defend the realm and save the king, and what a grandmaster the confabulator of that game, Javier Marías, is.
