DARK BACK OF TIME

"It's frightening to think of the hours—soon distant and forgotten, yet so slow and negligible while they're going by—during which our friends and relatives think we're alive when in fact we are dead, and they sleep peacefully, dreaming their primitive dreams, or watch television or laugh or curse or fuck instead of dropping everything and running belatedly to meet us and make phone calls and attend to formalities and not believe it, and grieve and despair, to whatever degree."
—page 179, Dark Back of Time by Javier Marías

My reading of Javier Marías's Dark Back of Time has been as fragmented yet cohesive as the novel itself. I have tried to fit time in for the book between doctor's visits, bouts of pain, lack of concentration, the need to rest, and in the wee hours of the night when I cannot sleep even though I need to. I am as equally defined by the novel right now as I am by my current ill health.

In its own strange way, the novel has become a running commentary on my life. I don't see myself in the characters or find myself represented by the plot, such as there is. Rather, I am defined by the tone and subject matter—funereal, elegiac, wondering about lives or moments not lived, but, then, not really concerned about those unlived moments after all. My own mortality rears its ugly head; the novel challenges its own creation and existence, as well as that of literary characters, and authors, and a brother of the novel's author.

Fragmentation finds a theme in both novel and my life. I become fiction, fiction becomes my life.