All Souls - Javier Mar�as

From one of the most important voices in world literature, a darkly comic campus novel and love story about that most British of institutions, Oxford University. - With an Introduction by John Banville. n nIn All Souls, a visiting Spanish lecturer, viewing Oxford through a prismatic detachment, is alternately amused, puzzled, delighted, and disgusted by its vagaries of human vanity. A bit lonely, not always able to see his charming but very married mistress, he casts about for activity; he barely has to teach. Yet so much goes into simply being at Oxford: friendship, opinion-mongering, one-upmanship, finicky exchanges of favors, gossip, adultery, book-collecting, back-patting, backstabbing. Marías demonstrates a sweet tooth for eccentricity in this novel from one of the best contemporary writers (J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature).