While the Women Are Sleeping

The stately quality of Javier Marías' prose does little to disguise the intellectual unrest behind it. Speculative and discursive, the narrators of his unusual novels extemporize on philosophical themes—the nature of time, truth, love, death—with a relentless but languid intensity that demands attention while amply rewarding it. The short stories in While the Women Are Sleeping, a collection originally published in 1990 in Marías' homeland of Spain, have that same restless intellect behind them, but the content of these mostly very short sketches which deal with ghosts, doppelgangers, and letters from the deceased, feel slight rather than engaging. In one story a man ruins his own life while trying to destroy any resemblance between himself and his hated double. In another, a soldier just returned home from the war watches while his double (or is it a feverish projection of himself that he's created?) kills his wife and child. In Marías' novels, horrific violence can suddenly erupt, yet the flood of language he uses to describe it absorbs the visceral or emotional impact, resulting in gut-wrenching yet exquisite tableaux. Aside from the truly creepy title story, in which a man meets a murderer-to-be, none of that tension comes into play in WWAS. What's gathered here instead are truncated, half-hearted ideas that stop before they get a chance to start—and feel disappointingly lifeless.