This is the realm inhabited by the characters in The Man of Feeling: we are witnesses to those fragments of their stories during which — through anticipation or memory — they are obliged to live with love either when they do not yet have it or when they have already lost it. The difference between the two principal male characters lies in the fact that while one of them is not prepared to make do with that imaginary, projected, fictitious dimension, and takes the necessary steps to replace the love only glimpsed with a love lived (to have his love fulfilled), the other character, the true man of feeling, has accepted — patiently, though not resignedly — that imaginary, unilateral route and has staked his life on it. To the former, the end of his love will not prove so very terrible — as, indeed, is the case for most people in present-day society — because from the moment he chooses reality, or, if you prefer, fulfilment, he has automatically chosen the point of view of memory, which makes all things bearable. However, when the other man loses his unfulfilled love (as he perceives it), he is forced to abandon the true realm of love, that of possibility and the imagination. And it is that loss, above all, that drives him to despair.
In the middle is a female character, Natalia Manur, who is shown in the novel in a very diffuse way, as if through a veil. She is only seen clearly on one occasion, at the start of the book, asleep, just as I saw that woman on the Milan-Venice train. This might seem surprising, given that she is also one of the main characters, but she belongs perhaps to that long line of fictional women (like Penelope, like Desdemona, like Dulcinea and so many others of less illustrious ancestry) whose existence is largely symbolic: they present the greatest danger to those who come into contact with them, as the narrator of The Man of Feeling seems to acknowledge: "For, as I well know," he says, "the most effective and lasting subjugations are based on pretence or, indeed, on something that has never existed." One wonders if the narrator meant to add: "or on something unfulfilled."
— Javier Marias, March 1987