“I’d been sceptical of Marias. His prose style — with its endless circling, its repetitions, its pedantic tendency to descend into lists of attributes of the commonest things — had sometimes felt ponderous, unconsciously comical. His narrators — always fastidious, usually disengaged, or attempting to be so — were men I felt I needed to argue with, to counter or check in some way. It wasn’t a tenable position. Even as I argued, my objections felt hollow. This writing was already under my skin.” Hari Kunzru’s Year in Reading.
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“I’d been sceptical of Marias. His prose style — with its endless circling, its repetitions, its pedantic tendency to descend into lists of attributes of the commonest things — had sometimes felt ponderous, unconsciously comical. His narrators — always fastidious, usually disengaged, or attempting to be so — were men I felt I needed to argue with, to counter or check in some way. It wasn’t a tenable position. Even as I argued, my objections felt hollow. This writing was already under my skin.” Hari Kunzru’s Year in Reading.