When I Was Mortal by Javier Marías
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A 12 short-stories collection that revealed me another face of one of my loved writers: Javier Marias. He is here more a columnist than a novelist, trying to adjust his rhythm of storytelling to the penurious length of the newspaper’s columns. Therefore perhaps, I feel the stories unfinished and brutal twisted. Marias has a seductive style, with a delicate rhythm that harmoniously leads the story from “the waiting” to “the happening”. But in this collection the happening happens either too early or too late. However, the pretext is pretty smart: mystery and exploration of different “paths” of the same story. And the story is mostly about death or crime.

I cannot tell that I liked or disliked a certain story. I read them trying to find again that seductiveness from A Heart So White (funny, but Heart So White is now a horse’s name). But unfortunately, I didn’t :(
(I would really liked to give more then 2 stars, but since 2 and half do no exist...)
View all my reviews