His entry begins:
About ten or so years ago I read a short fictional excerpt in Granta magazine that impressed me so much I kept waiting for it to appear as a book. Well, it has, and though it’s a short book, Javier Marias’s Bad Nature: With Elvis in Mexico does not disappoint. Marias has been a favorite writer of mine for some years now—especially his mid-career work—which seems to combine maximum elegance with breakneck daring, and Bad Nature exemplifies this seeming oxymoron more than most, especially the daring part.Among the early praise for Toward You:
The narrator of the story is a guy who accompanies Elvis during his stay in Mexico while he films Fun in Acapulco. (I should add here that another movie of The King’s, Blue Hawaii, was responsible for my starting to smoke. The film was so intensely unbearable that I went out to the lobby—I’d come with friends so it was impossible to leave—and, rather than kill myself on the spot, I bought a pack of Salems. They were my first cigarettes ever.) In any case, Marias’s Elvis exits fairly early, and the rest of the piece is like...[read on]
Read reviews and excerpts from Toward You, and learn more about the novel at the publisher's website."Krusoe's surrealistically skewed, oddly affecting novel blurs the borders between life and the afterlife, what's real and what's imagined, to highly entertaining effect. . . A seriously strange, funny and affecting novel about imagining another life while being stuck in this one."
—Kirkus Reviews
“It's a funny, quirky, darkly fascinating tale told with the skill of a wordsmith and the soul of a poet.”
—Foreword
The Page 69 Test: Girl Factory.
The Page 69 Test: Erased.
The Page 69 Test: Toward You.
Writers Read: Jim Krusoe.
--Marshal Zeringue
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