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Outbyte Driver Updater FREEScan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Outbyte PC Repair FREERepair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Javier Marías could begin a novel with a death, a secret, a warning, or a question about dreams—and make the first sentence feel like the start of a much larger uncertainty. A nine-opening selection reproduced from a 2015 feature shows the range behind its playful claim that he was the “best literary start-up artist”: not an objective ranking, but an argument for the power of his beginnings.
What makes these openings work
The nine examples do not share one formula. Some begin with a disturbance—a death, a suicide, a stranger holding a dead woman. Others make the act of telling the story itself feel uncertain. Across them, Marías’s narrators question what can be known, remembered, or safely disclosed, while the sentences shift from blunt declarations to long, accumulating reflections.
The passages below are reproduced as they appear in the feature’s search-result text. Wording and punctuation may vary by translation or edition, so check the relevant edition before quoting at length. The feature’s headline calls Marías the “best”; that is an evaluative flourish, not a verifiable literary ranking. “Start-up artist” means a writer skilled at starting stories, not an entrepreneur.
Nine openings, nine kinds of disturbance
1. All Souls: return and mortality
“Of the three, two have died since I left Oxford”
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The sentence looks back from a departure and immediately measures time in losses. Its narrator suspects that the dead were waiting for him to return, making the opening feel at once retrospective and uncanny: a homecoming is already shadowed by absence.
2. A Heart So White: knowledge that cannot be refused
“I did not want to know but I have since come to know”
The opposition between not wanting to know and having come to know turns knowledge into an unavoidable burden. The opening proceeds toward a suicide witnessed indirectly, so the withheld information is not a puzzle for its own sake; it changes the narrator’s relation to what follows.
3. Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me: an impossible-seeming event
“No one ever expects that they might some day find themselves with a dead woman in their arms”
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The reader is placed beside a startling physical fact before being given an explanation. The sentence’s general “no one” makes the event sound unimaginable, while its concrete image makes it immediate.
4. Dark Back of Time: fiction and reality blur
“I believe I’ve still never mistaken fiction for reality”
The claim sounds reassuring, but its careful qualification—“I believe” and “still”—opens room for doubt. The book’s concern with the overlap between invented stories and lived experience is present from the first line.
5. The Man of Feeling: a direct question about disclosure
“I don’t know whether I should tell you my dreams.”
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Unlike the expansive openings elsewhere in the selection, this is brief and intimate. It addresses a listener directly and makes the decision to speak, rather than the dream itself, the first matter at stake.
6. Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear: narration as a risk
“One should never tell anyone anything”
The sentence turns storytelling into a warning. Telling someone something can expose information, shape memory, and create a version of another person; the opening makes those consequences part of the act of reading.
7. Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream: the weight of demands
“Let us hope that no one ever asks us for anything”
The sentence grows into a long list of demands, troubles, and misfortunes. Its accumulating rhythm performs the burden it describes: each added possibility makes the wish for quiet seem more urgent.
8. Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell: the unsettling preference
“While it isn’t ever something we would wish for, we would all nonetheless always prefer it to be the person beside us who dies”
The thought is disturbing because it admits a preference most people would rather not articulate. The sentence extends through increasingly severe examples, using length and qualification to make the reader remain with an uncomfortable idea rather than dismiss it.
9. The Infatuations: identity and a stranger’s death
“The last time I was Miguel Desvern or Deverne was also the last time that his wife, Luisa, saw him”
A name arrives with two spellings, and the sentence links the narrator’s identity to the last time a woman saw her husband. The opening folds uncertainty about naming into the aftermath of a death, immediately entangling the narrator with strangers.
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How the openings differ
Read together, the openings can be compared along four useful interpretive axes. These are ways to notice their effects, not a scoring system or proof that every Marías novel begins in the same way.
- Narrative disturbance: Some begin with an event that demands explanation, such as a suicide or a dead woman in the narrator’s arms. Others disturb the reader through an idea or a warning.
- Authority of the narrator: First-person statements can sound confident, but qualifications, uncertain names, and admissions of not knowing complicate that authority.
- What can be known or told: Several openings make knowledge, memory, dreams, or disclosure their subject before the reader knows the full story.
- Sentence rhythm: A short question can create intimacy; a long sentence can accumulate pressure. The change in pace is part of the range, not a single signature trick.
Who Javier Marías was—and where to begin
Marías was a Spanish novelist, translator, and columnist, born in Madrid in 1951 and deceased in 2022, according to Penguin Random House’s author biography. The same publisher biography reports that his work was translated into 44 languages and sold nine million copies worldwide; it does not specify when that cumulative sales figure was measured. Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial described Tomás Nevinson, published in 2021, as his sixteenth novel, a count that reflects that publisher’s catalogue description.
His institutional credentials included teaching at Oxford and Complutense and election to the Real Academia Española in 2006; he took his seat in 2008. The academy biography also records honors associated with several of his novels. In an obituary, translator Margaret Jull Costa identified secrets and betrayal as recurring concerns in his writing.
For an English-language reader choosing a first book, A Heart So White is a direct starting point: it is represented in this opening selection and is listed as a paperback by Penguin UK. Check the current listing for the translation and edition you want.
Where this selection comes from
The nine passages and their attribution to a feature dated 28 November 2015 are reproduced from a search result for the exact-title feature. The result’s URL slug does not match its headline, and the page could not be opened, so the list is best treated as the feature’s reported selection rather than independently verified source text. The novel titles and career details are supported by publisher and academy biographies; the mismatch does not establish why the URL and headline differ.
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