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A NIGHT WITH PAUL AUSTER AND JAVIER MARÍAS

Paul Auster has a seductive presence. With his silvering hair and raspy voice, he reads with poise and patience. At New York's 92nd Street Y last week, he read a passage from his latest novel, "Invisible", in which the protagonist reflects on his intimacy with his sister. His thoughts begin innocently enough, with tales of playing doctor and jumping naked on the bed. But they are soon catapulted into the realm of taboo, as childhood playfulness takes unexpected erotic turns. Auster stood triumphantly, pulling the audience to the edge of their seats, everyone wide-eyed and waiting to see where he dared go next. Later Auster spoke of how a writer always stands on the edge of a metaphorical cliff.

Wyatt Mason, an essayist and critic, then came out to introduce Javier Marías, a novelist once described by Roberto Bolaño as “by far Spain’s best writer today”. The atmosphere was so tense and tight after Auster's reading that Mason excused those who might need to step outside for a cigarette; no one dared leave. Auster is always a draw, but the evening marked Marías’s first reading in America in 20 years (he refused to set foot while George Bush remained in office). He had come to read from "Poison, Shadow, and Farewell", the final volume of his "Your Face Tomorrow" trilogy, which James Lasdun has called possibly “the first authentic literary masterpiece of the 21st century.” The Economist described it as "a literary tour de force ...as much about the past from which we are made as it is about the present we have become."

Mason took pains to link Marías with Auster, commenting on their good literary citizenship and work in literary translation. There are other connections, too. Like Auster, Marías is a literary celebrity in Madrid. (In her preface to her 2006 Paris Review interview, Sarah Fay notes that a local waiter reacted to the news that she’d come to interview Marías “as if [she’d] named a president or movie star.”) He also has a reputation as a ladies’ man. Salon even named him one of their Sexiest Men Living in 2007.

From appearances, Marías could easily blend in with a room full of academics. This inconspicuousness belies his extravagances of character. Marías owns two nearly identical apartments in Madrid—one furnished in white and the other in dark colours. He is also the King of Redonda, an island in the Caribbean.

Marías read with a poet’s cadence. His English was assured and eloquent, having spent some of his youth in the States, majored in English at university and taught for a while at Oxford. In a question-and-answer session with both authors that followed, Marías said that translating taught him to write novels. He spoke of writing programmes with disdain (“If I ever had a creative writing school, or whatever you call them, god forbid...”), and instead pined for a hypothetical school that would require students to know at least two languages and translate books. When asked which authors he avoids, Auster named George Eliot and Henry James. Marías, whose prose was called Jamesian earlier in the evening, said that some authors, like Shakespeare, open doors for those who follow, while others, such as Kafka, end up closing them. Despite the merits of Kafka's own work, Kafkaesque writers are, in Marías’s opinion, “really terrible.”

 "Invisible"(Faber and Faber; Henry Holt), by Paul Auster, and "Your Face Tomorrow" (Chatto & Windus; New Directions), by Javier Marías, are both out now

~ ANNE YODER