**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.
**
In 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).