Chapter III - Two Transitional Novels: El siglo and El hombre sentimental

Summary

El siglo

El siglo (1983) is an unabashedly stylized novel. Its narrative technique (alternating chapters told in the first and third persons), its complicated sentence structure (largely baroque-like), and the slow pacing of its plot stand in marked contrast to Marías's earlier novels, Los dominios del lobo and Travesía del horizonte. In the latter two works, as we have seen, Marías moves deftly but swiftly through multiple stories with sometimes tenuous connections. He rarely slows to allow for the development of complex characters, and he shapes the perspective of each novel largely through third-person narrators who may not possess sufficient information to tell the entire story or bring it to a sound conclusion. While these early works by no means stand apart from what will become the core of his fiction (they reveal, for example, his central concern with storytelling, the influence of movies on his literary formation, and important connections to non-Spanish literature), they nonetheless reflect the sometimes inchoate narrative practices of a young writer who has only begun to understand the more intricate malleability of language and the deliberate construction of characters.

In El siglo, however, Marías retreats deeply into the narrative discourse itself and allows it to dilate and grow through the ever more dense accretion of words, which in turn leads to the embodiment of one of the essential principles (as he himself has pointed out) of the whole of his narrative production: “You progress as you digress.”