a heart so white (marias)

The novels of Marias have this irritating habit of you leaving feeling bereft and inadequate. Bereft because, like all great novels, they gradually absorb you into the warp and woof of their worlds, slowly overwhelming you until you are so lost in them that there is no reason for them to end and when they do, you are left alone in the dark. Inadequate, because in entering these worlds, you are given access to another way of thought, which is in so many ways identical to your own way of thought, only these thoughts acquire, within the texture and framework of a novel, a sense of completeness which life can never afford. In documenting the ways of the mind with such relentless and brilliant precision, the author achieves the paradox of illustrating a way of thinking we can never emulate, and in so doing we pale beside the words he leaves on the page.

A Heart so White is a story of generational conflict, hidden crimes, and the secret workings of the heart, and how these secret workings interact with the secret workings (desires/fears) of the mind. If indeed the heart and the mind might be separate entities, if they are not, essentially, one and the same. (I would love to ask Marias about this but unfortunately he passed on last month.) The story is woven around three relationships: that of Juan to his new wife, Luisa, that of Juan to his father, Ranz, and that of Luisa to her father-in-law, Ranz. For the details, as ever, one must interrogate the novel (although there is little doubt that there remain some details which will not be revealed within the novel). Ranz, in the vein of Lady Macbeth, murders sleep, Juan, who works as a translator, murders Thatcher’s words, helping to kill her off, and Luisa murders no-one. The novel is put together through a bricolage of scenes and moments, in Madrid, Havana, New York and Geneva, which create a narrative, jumping around in time, that gradually reveals itself, the end rarely in sight, until it arrives, in a hurry, leaving you, the poor reader, desolate, bereft, alone again, or.

It is the very mundanity of the worlds Marias depicts that lend his novels their terrifying power. Because most who inhabit the Europe he depicts have been blessed with mundanity, a lack of dramatic action, a sense of inconsequence, and yet, at the same time, we still feel our lives to be inundated in action and dramatic action and the presence of seismic events, because this is what it means to be human. It means to experience the universe as though it has been constructed in order to give us heartache and terror, and a few good things too. The fact that we haven’t fought in wars or visited the moon doesn’t make this any less so. It was the genius of Marias to recognise and value this mundanity, to spin from its inaction stories and insights that pay homage to the trials of tribulations of living in peacetime, long may it last. 

berta isla (marias, tr jull costa)

The eponymous heroine of Berta Isla is an archetype for the kind of heroine that shouldn’t work. Berta does nothing except wait. Her husband, Tomas, is an agent for the British secret services. Where he goes and what he does remains a mystery, both to Berta and the reader. He might be in Northern Ireland, he might be in Buenos Aires. We and she will never know. Marias’ novel riffs off the work of Le Carré and Fleming, but where their writing takes us inside the workings of the secret service, Marias leaves us, like his heroine, firmly on the outside. She is Penelope, and the author stitches together her patient story with a minimal colour palette. This is also a novel about the beginning and the end, with very little in the middle, the middle being dedicated to the art of patience.

All of which makes for a curious, deliberately frustrating novel, which seems to undercut the demand for narrative and action. The plot points are staked at the beginning and ending, the suspense comes from not knowing, the jeopardy is ever-present but kept at arm’s length. In this sense, the novel subtly adopts the position of the reader. Few readers will be engaged, as Tomas is, in the defence of the realm. This is the luxury of peace, of modern European life. The dramatic action of our lives is tepid. Movies and literature seek to spice up this bland existence with tales of unlikely heroism, which have little to do with the realities of the cold war fought by those like Tomas. We sit at home, patiently awaiting our little drama of mortality, as we watch Netflix and contemplate which colour car to choose in order to destroy the planet.

Perhaps there is a cold fury lurking somewhere in Berta Isla, but it is so deeply buried that it can only emerge in the occasional news reports Berta catches of a murder in Belfast or the sinking of a ship in the South Atlantic. These currents, the book declares, course back and forth beneath the fabric of our lives, enabling us to circumvent tragedy. The price we pay for this, which is also our reward, is a kind of atomised, civilised banality.

And we should remember, as we flirt with other realities, the value of this banality.

“Why is there bread in the baker’s shops and cakes in the cake shops, why do the street lamps turn on and turn off, why does the stock market go up and down and everyone receive his or her high or low salary at the end of the month? This seems perfectly normal to us and yet it’s really quite extraordinary, it’s amazing that each day begins and ends.”

madame deffand and the idiots (marias, tr. margaret jill costa)

Marias’s brief account of the lives of five writers (Madame de Deffand, Nabakov, Djuna Barnes, and  Emily Bronte) is a brilliant piece of economic writing, which benefits from the sympathy Marias has for the travails of the process of composition, be that letter-writing or novel writing. It’s a book that can be read in its entirety on a flight, in between multiple films, no sleep and terrible food, and still seem inordinately enjoyable and there’s really no greater compliment that can be paid to any book than that. It will only take you an hour, but it might be the best hour you’ll ever spend doing anything at all ever. 

thus bad begins (marias, tr margaret jull costa)

 After finishing Marias’ novel, the third of his I have now read, I sought out some commentary, mostly Anglo-Saxon. There was praise, but there was also criticism. Notably from McCrum in the Guardian, who wrote: “The problem is simple: Thus Bad Begins is far too long. Vanity is the thing that kills successful writers and too much of Marías’s 14th novel reads like a self-conscious parody of earlier work. It is, as Hamlet might say, a bad case of “words, words, words”. So: countless elegant, and serpentine, sentences, sinuous meditative passages mixed with provocative paradoxes, but not enough substance.”

I quote McCrum in order to open up some kind of dialectic between Anglo-Saxon literary trends and, let us say, Hispanic literary trends. Because., and one hopes Marias might agree, it is precisely the words, words, words which lend Thus Bad Begins its remarkable power. The narrative as such is banal, even melodramatic, as the author himself suggests. Literature is made up of banal stories, which are little more than the warp and woof of everyday gossip. A man is cruel to his wife. His wife is unfaithful. Another man, a confidant of the husband, sleeps with the wife. There is nothing new under the sun (or as Marias prefers, beneath the light of the moon). What distinguishes this tawdry story, is the author’s capacity to extort shards of moonlight, which shine through his purple prose, and which reveal that the reason the story has some bearing in his hands is because it tells us something about the banality and the exceptionality of our own lives.

As such McCrum’s vapid criticism seems to gloss over at least one of the most brilliant passages I can recall reading. One where Marias talks about the moon and rumour and Shakespeare. His narrator, whose shallowness as a character within the story is beautifully shadowed by his nagging wisdom as a narrator, recounting the story twenty years later, succeeds in elevating this banal tale to another level altogether. Only, and here’s the rub, it isn’t quite so banal, because this is also a tale about evil, about vile acts, and how we compartmentalise our lives and learn to accept this evil, letting it seep into our everyday normality, even accepting that this evil should be rewarded, both in financial and affective forms. Setting the story in 1980, shortly aft4r the end of Franco’s dictatorship, Marias’ tale highlights the way that those who profited and indeed were permitted to indulge their vices under Franco’s regime were never brought to justice, were never forced to come to terms with their actions. Society turned a blind eye (Muriel, the film producer at the heart of the story, is literally one-eyed), and the perpetrators found a way to carry on doing their thing. The relevance of this scenario echoes today in the country where I am writing; and in the articles upon the release of the novel in the USA, many noted that it came out just as Trump was about to ascend to the presidency. In a world of Epstein and Trump and Manini Rios and Bolsonaro, it’s not just the monsters that need to be taken into account, it’s all those who benefitted from society’s’ reluctance to look evil in the face, to allow it to “get away with it”.

There are other layers of subtlety to the novel. Notably in the way it treats Muriel’s misogyny towards his wife, Beatriz, a misogyny which leads to tragedy. Marias must be aware that this will alienate his female readership. The narrator, De Vere’s, lackadaisical criticism of his boss’ misogyny will also be held against him, not to mention his actions. As such, Marias would appear to be seeking to vilify a whole generation, using a stiletto rather than an axe. De Vere pardons and even effectively condones Muriel’s cruelty, just as Muriel pardons and effectively condones Van Vechten’s vice. The tendrils of fascism reach out and corrupt everything, even the country’s finest sons. It’s a cold-eyed vision, one which is stitched into an Ellroy-ian interperation of power, offered by the remarkable sub-plot of the real life US producer Harry Dean Towers and his relationship with actors such as Herbert Lom and Jack Palance. For anyone of my generation, the extended scene with Herbert Lom is one of the most amusing. unlikely but ultimately plausible scenes you will ever read.

Marias’ novel is not bite-sized. It is vast, sweeping, ambitious. It is composed of a glory of words, words which rush up against the reader like the relentless tide. Words which have the fluency and power of the tide. Thus Bad Begins is a remarkable achievement, a devastating vision of the sweeping infiltration of vile deeds and rumour into the warp and woof of civil society. 

tomorrow in the battle think on me [marias, tr. margaret jull costa]

Back in the day, working for some Stakhovian corner of the BBC, we were constantly being told about the importance of creating “sympathetic” characters. No-one would want to engage with a central character they couldn’t warm to. The mealy-mouth tediousness of this dictum seems to me more or less fully responsible for the shit-storm which has since overwhelmed Britain. No-one ever wants to engage with anything or anyone they don’t like, as though the complexities of story and discourse are of secondary importance. All that matters is that we feel good about ourselves: that the mirror held up to our society shows us that we are nice, likeable, and therefore worthy of our own attention. I realise that there have been dramatic and literary exceptions, nevertheless, the pervading need to ‘complacer’ the audience has had a deadening effect on our culture. It’s as though Britain hasn’t had a civil war or been invaded in so long that people have forgotten that good people can do bad things, and bad people good. The complexities of moral representation have been eroded. We  have turned into the land of Harry Potter. All of which springs to mind because Marias, whose affection for Britain would appear to be considerable, has such a radically different attitude towards character. At times it’s as though he’s seeking to challenge the audience to engage in spite of his characters, rather than because of them. The narrator of Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me is a brilliant but flakey man, whose first thoughts on meeting the sister of a woman who died in his arms only weeks ago, is to seduce her. The husband of the woman who died in the narrator’s arms turns out to be an even less likeable specimen of humanity, recounting at the book’s denouement a terrible tale of mortal betrayal, a tale which occurs in a London which crucially still had open-decked double deckers. Like The Infatuations, Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me is another curious tale of unfortunate death and the mixed reactions people have towards death. As though the writer is determined to puncture any kind of sentimentalism regarding that most inevitable of processes. Philosophical asides are smuggled into the great rolling tide of Marias’ prose. The story takes a Cortazarian twist when the narrator sleeps with a prostitute, in a bid to find out whether she’s his ex-wife or not. Everything teeters on the brink of the unbelievable, the unpalatable and yet, somewhere in these morbid, amoral observations, there lurks a deranged wisdom. The oft-dismissed whispers of those who don’t paint pretty, palatable pictures, those who insist on reminding us that the world isn’t a box of chocolates; it is full of random cruelty and stupidity. Those who die young aren’t necessarily good; those who mourn them aren’t necessarily noble. Humans are fickle creatures, easily lead. 

los enamoramientos (the infatuations) [javier marias, tr. margaret jull costa]

Marias is an author much in vogue. I had tried to read one of his previously, and hadn’t got on with it. I opted for The Infatuations as I read it was a novel about Madrid. Where I find myself at present. In truth, Madrid is but a marginal presence in the novel. True, the book is predicated around the act of going for breakfast, a regular Madrileño habit. Thereafter it feels as though it could occur in any capital city. Which in no way diminishes the book’s quality. The narrator, Maria, becomes mildly obsessed with a perfect couple she spies on over her breakfast coffee, whose happiness raises her spirits before she goes to work. When the husband is brutally murdered, she finds herself an unwitting confidant of the murderer. As this brief outline might reveal, there’s a fair amount of contrivance in the plot, something the erudite author plays on, as he riffs on Shakespeare and Balzac, among other references for unlikely death scenarios. The pleasure of the text is to be found in the way Marias teases out the thoughts and permutations of the unlikely scenario he has constructed. With an almost forensic or neurotic diligence, depending on your point of view, Maria explores every conceivable avenue that the book possesses. Marias clearly loves to write and he never seems to use one word where half a dozen would do. The effect is sometimes exasperating, but it also delivers nuggets of brilliance, as the writer sifts through the narrator’s stream of his consciousness.

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(It crossed my mind as I was returning to the city from the Casa del Campo, that one way in which this might be said to be a Madrileño novel is that the city’s perspective is sentinel. Madrid is perched on top of a steep hill, looking down towards the river and the plain. Marias’ perspective, and that of Maria, feels similar. The story is looked down on from on high, with every detail in the landscape inspected and surveilled. A forensic consciousness.)