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Posts from the ‘Javier Marías’ Category

Nov 3

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The Photograph Worth 297 Words

In the last book he wrote before his death, Tomás Nevinson, Javier Marías reproduced a single photograph, an image credited on the copyright page to the Spanish photojournalist Pere Tordera. Marías used 297 words to describe what he saw in the photograph. He has used ekphrasis in a similar manner in several earlier books, describing in words what we can see in a photograph on the same page or a nearby page with our own eyes. What’s he doing in this description?

In this book, Nevinson is a Spaniard who thought he had retired from a career spying for England and who had returned to his position at an embassy office in Madrid. But then he is asked by his old handler to do one last job: ferret out which of three women now living in a provincial Spanish town was the fundraising mastermind behind several bloody terrorist attacks that occurred more than a decade before. For a long time, Nevinson wants to say ‘No.” He’s been away from his wife too long, he feels estranged from his children, and he is worried that he is rusty. His handler tries to convince him that this terrorist must be identified and must pay for the deaths and injuries she helped to cause in two horrific bombings in Barcelona and Zaragoza, Spain in 1987. The mention of these two events causes Nevinson to recall a photograph he saw in the press at that time. “It was just one of those images you never forget.” Marías then proceeds to have Nevinson describe and think about the photograph for a full page and a half.

At the heart of Nevinson’s recollection of the photograph is his 297-word description of what it depicts. This description occurs on the page prior to the reproduction, so we read his verbal version first.

Against a backdrop of desolation and destruction, the ground was strewn with rubble and, hanging over it all, a malignant cloud of smoke, a policeman, his tie visible beneath his uniform, and his face all bloodied, is running towards the camera carrying in his arms a little seven- or eight-year-old girl whose face is a picture of pain, pure pain. In the background – it was one of those black-and-white photographs you can’t take your eyes off of – you could see a couple, the husband with his arms around his wife, and the wife with one hand on a buggy in which her baby is still sitting, the child is, at most, a year old, and given his or her age, would forget everything it was now hearing and seeing. Elsewhere, you can see a father (I assume he’s the father) putting his arms out to another child of four or five, and beside him a taller girl, who appears to be staunchly coping on her own. What I remember most clearly, though, is the expression of the face of the young policeman, or was he perhaps a fireman, carrying the little girl. Although much of his face was covered in blood, so that you really couldn’t make out his features (the blood could have been his own or someone else’s, like the blood on the girl’s arm), his expression was a mixture of determination and profound pity, perhaps there was also an element of postponed rage and another of sheer incredulity at what he was witnessing. Determination to save the injured child he wasn’t even looking at, instead staring straight ahead, his gaze perhaps fixed straight on the hospital that he needs to reach as soon as possible. And profound pity for many possible reasons.

The very fact that this photograph is reproduced in Tomás Nevinson requires some slippage between the book’s narrator and its author. Tomás Nevinson is only remembering an image he saw ten years ago. (It’s a remarkably accurate memory, but then Nevinson has spent more than two decades risking his life on his ability to see and remember details.) It was Javier Marías who decided to have this photograph reproduced in the book so that readers could see it for themselves. I think this should prompt us to be more than a little curious about his text concerning the photograph. One of the things that Nevinson is doing in his description of the photograph quoted above is focusing our eyes on where he wants us to look. But I think Marías is intervening here, as well. Presumably, Marías saw the photograph in a somewhat better version and the image would have been clearer for him. As a result, he would have been aware that he needed to prepare the reader to pay attention to something that is nearly lost among the half-tone dots of the mediocre reproduction that his book would produce. I definitely think that is why he wanted to make sure the reader noticed that the young girl in the man’s arms has lost not only one of her sneakers but part of her left foot as well.

It might seem odd that Nevinson spends only sixteen words on the site of the bombing or on any other evidence of the terrorists’ bomb, such as the blown out car windows. If this photograph wasn’t reproduced in the book, the only thing we would know about it other than the commentary on the people in the forefront is this: “The ground was strewn with rubble and, hanging over it all, a malignant cloud of smoke.” Nevinson says absolutely nothing about a street that is lined with automobiles and buildings. Then again, we have to keep in mind the reason that Nevinson has recalled this image of a newspaper or magazine photograph from so long ago. He’s in the middle of making a very human equation. What would it take for him to go out and try to bring a terrorist to justice one more time? Apparently, property damage doesn’t enter into the equation for Nevinson, he’s only sensitive to the human cost of terrorism. Does visualizing the pained face and damaged foot of a young girl tip the scales for him? This is why Nevinson is only focusing on the human cost of the terrorist bombing that is visible in the photograph.

Nevinson’s 297-word description is embedded within a longer discussion of the photograph that takes place in his head because the photograph has led him to recall both the public horror and the political arguments that took place when ETA, the terrorist wing of the Basque Separatist Party, began bombing locations that involved children victims. As he sits and debates his own future with his handler, this factor weighs on Nevinson, but he still doesn’t make the decision to accept the job for another forty pages.

Ω

Marías/Nevinson uses nearly half of the 297-word description of the photograph to tell us about the expressions on the faces of the man and the girl in the foreground. The girl’s face, the reader is told, is “a picture of pain, pure pain.” Several phrases are used to explain what should be seen on the face of her rescuer: “a mixture of determination and profound pity” . . . “an element of postponed rage and another of sheer incredulity” . . . “Determination” . . . and, once again, “profound pity for many possible reasons.” Furthermore, the reader is told that that “his gaze [is] perhaps fixed straight on the hospital that he needs to reach as soon as possible.”

The idea that we can accurately read the emotions on other people’s faces is as old as time, but it first achieved a real scientific stamp of approval in 1872 when Charles Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, illustrated with numerous photographs intended to show what certain emotions looked like on a variety of faces. Most of the photographs used in the book were made by the French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, who, along with his colleague, Jean-Martin Charcot, conducted experiments on patients at Paris’ Salpêtrière, a university hospital. At least two decades before he published On the Origin of Species in 1859, Darwin had begun wondering whether the psychological aspects of life were hereditary. After considerable research and consultation with psychiatrists on the subject, he became convinced that there were some core expressions that were universal among all peoples and certain animals.

Photographs illustrating emotions of grief from Darwin’s “The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” 1872. Image courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne performing facial electrostimulus experiment.

As a fiction writer, Marías can make up whatever story he wishes about the events that take place within a photograph. But when he lets the reader compare the photograph to his words, he is giving us the ability to compare his ekphrastic version with what we see. I happen to be of the school that believes that it’s not always possible to accurately judge what the expressions seen on the faces in photographs are “telling” us. I’ll let you be the judge if the face of the man in the photograph represents determination, pity, rage, and incredulity.

Javier Marías’ Tomás Nevinson. Knopf, 2023. See my earlier post on this novel.

Oct 22

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Tomás Nevinson – Javier Marías’ Farewell Novel

“Perhaps. You never know.” With these four words, Javier Marías (1951-2022) ended his remarkable literary career and fifteenth novel, Tomás Nevinson. These four words also aptly characterize the level of heightened uncertainty in which he kept his readers for many of the several thousand pages of his novels, throughout all of the lengthy, winding sentences in which he often said something one way, then said it another way, then found yet a third way to suggest the very same thing, and, more often than not, found a fourth variant, leaving the reader agasp at his gift of language. And, as his narrators and characters talked themselves through situations and options, weighing the pros and cons, they usually found themselves momentarily capable of convincing themselves of any possibility.

When you feel forced to do something, the solution is to convince yourself not only that you have to do it, but that it’s the best possible option. You can always find a reason for everything, or two or three or more, there’s nothing easier than coming up with reasons and thus feeling, quite impartially of course, that you have right on your side.

That is certainly the case with Tomás Nevinson. The plot is such that I can’t reveal much without spoiling the book, and I don’t want to let anything get in the way of your reading this book. These could be some of the most luxuriant 635 pages in your near future. Tomás Nevinson is a finely tuned, thinking person’s spy novel, with several ingenious plot twists. Nevinson, a Spaniard who had thought he was retired from a career spying for England and who had returned to his position at an embassy office in Madrid, is called back to do one last field job: ferret out which of three women in a provincial Spanish town was the fundraising mastermind behind several bloody terrorist attacks that occurred more than a decade before. Following a well-worn formula in spy fiction, Marías’ spy immediately regrets his decision and wonders if he is over the hill.

I had grown rusty, my faculties and my resolve had waned, perhaps I had grown lazy. I no longer believed in the defence of the Realm, in the purity of democracies or of the Crown, nor in the aseptic nature of the State or indeed in anything . . . I wasn’t even sure I wanted to punish crimes already committed. What was the point, what did it solve, since they could not be undone?

In fact, Nevinson had only recently returned from being away for a remarkable twelve years on secret assignments, “not just a continuous absence but a continuous silence too.” During that time, he had literally been declared dead and his wife, Berta Isla, technically became a widow. (Marías’ prior novel, Berta Isla, looked at the marriage and absences from her point of view.) Now, after all the times he has been ordered away on missions over a career of some twenty-five years, into other countries, with fake identities, and into total silence, Nevinson and his wife live in separate but nearby apartments.

As Nevinson becomes more aware of being manipulated into this decision by his handler, he begins to rethink the legitimacy, even the morality, of his own role, as well as his former loyalty to his adopted country England. He looks askance at his own spy agency; in fact, he is no longer sure if he works for MI5 or MI6. “How closely,” he thinks, “our [spy] organizations resemble mafias.” Nevinson’s growing insecurity gives Marías a forum to let Nevinson ponder all sorts of spy-adjacent topics, like trust, vengeance versus justice, loyalty, responsibility, democracy, terrorists, and state terrorism. Marías also writes more freely and at greater length than in any of his prior novels about ETA, the terrorist wing of the Basque Separatist Movement. But even as Nevinson questions the authority of his own spy organization and the possible legitimacy of his previous assignments, he must also come to terms with the matter of his own complicity, his personal guilt from the actions he had taken as a secret agent of the British government for two and a half decades.

Fifteen years ago, in a post about Fever and Spear, the first volume of his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, I wrote: “Marías uses the world of spies and spying as a vast, flexible metaphor for literature.” Many of his novels have been about spies or their literary equivalents, translators, people who sit at the cusp between two worlds, moving information from one into another. Partway into Tomás Nevinson I began to wonder if perhaps Marías didn’t sometimes think of himself as a spy on the world around him, a spy who whose duty it was to report back to us what he thought about whatever he saw. It’s a role he never seems to exhaust in his fiction. Here, it takes until page 123 for Nevinson, who narrates his eponymous novel, to finally agree to accept the job that will consume him through the remainder of the book. Until the moment that he reluctantly makes this decision, he thinks at length about his past career, his mixed feelings about his handler, and how his life as a spy (or agent) has affected his marriage and relationship with his children. (In every one of Marías’ novels, the narrators and main characters spend great swaths of time just thinking.)

Ironically, when Nevinson is finally situated in the provincial Spanish city under cover as a schoolteacher named Centurión, he often sees his spy cover as a separate character from himself. During the time he is actively working on the problem of identifying the terrorist, he vacillates between referring to himself as “I” and as “Centurión,” sometimes within the same paragraph. Nevinson seems to need this literary schizophrenia to stay sane as he goes about his final job.

Marías reproduces a single photograph in Tomás Nevinson, an image credited on the copyright page to the photojournalist Pere Tordera that shows the aftermath of a terrorist bombing on a narrow street lined with cars. A policeman “is running towards the camera carrying in his arms a little seven- or eight-year-old girl, one of whose feet appears to have been half blown off, and whose face is a picture of pain, pure pain.”

It has always been easy to think of Marías as a conservative, highly traditional novelist. He’s an erudite writer of intricately plotted novels about highly educated, articulate characters who love to quote Shakespeare, John Milton, John Donne, William Butler Yeats, and other writers of the British and European canon. But with his death we’ve lost a writer we need now—someone humane, compassionate, and deeply moral. Late in Tomás Nevinson, the narrator has occasion to think of one of the important lessons he learned from a former MI5 instructor who taught him that: “We must always remain immune to the five contagions . . . Cruelty is contagious. Hatred is contagious. Faith is contagious.  Madness is contagious. Stupidity is contagious.” Marías, always a harsh critic of the reign of Francisco Franco (who “contaminated” Spain), and who kept a wary eye on the compromises of post-Franco Spain, used Tomás Nevinson to offer some worrying opinions about the future of our democracies. “You only have to introduce a little truth into a lie for the lie to seem not just credible, but irrefutable.”

Javier Marías. Tomás Nevinson. Knopf, 2023. Translated from the 2021 Spanish original by Margaret Jull Costa.

Apr 15

The Trouble with Secrets

Thus-Bad-Begins

That’s the trouble with secrets, one can never ask for forgiveness.

In the highly refined world of Javier Marías, where any emotion, action, or statement can be surgically probed for pages in order to reveal every nuance and possible interpretation, the bar for what counts as an affront to the system is set frightfully low.  At the outset of Thus Bad Begins, Marías’s narrator, twenty-three year old Juan De Vere, is told by his new boss, the filmmaker Eduardo Muriel, that a friend of Muriel’s, a certain Dr. Van Vechten, has possibly committed some sort of heinous act in the past. It’s Madrid, 1980, five years after the death of Franco. Spaniards are tasting new freedoms, illicit drugs flow freely, the discos are packed until dawn, and unhappy couples await the legalization of divorce. “Is it something to do with the Civil War,” De Vere breathlessly asks? “Did he participate in a massacre? Did he carry out summary executions?” No, Muriel answers. His friend is believed to have “behaved in an indecent manner towards a woman or possibly more than one.” And with that bizarrely unexciting revelation, Marías sets in motion this fascinating, but overlong novel of lies and secrets.

Eventually, a second and somewhat more meaty mystery arises. Why does Muriel, a man deeply offended because his friend might have “behaved in an indecent manner toward a woman,” verbally abuse his own wife night after night? For a dozen years or so, he and Beatriz have had separate bedrooms and separate lives. But on multiple occasions, De Vere has overheard them arguing bitterly, during which Muriel maliciously insults his wife. Apparently, Beatriz once lied to Muriel in a manner that estranged the couple. But this tragic secret has somehow only managed to strengthen the force field that keeps the two clinging to each other despite their almost nightly bursts of anger. What is this terrible lie that Beatriz has told?

...[Muriel’s] was not, to put it in pedantic terms, a quotidian or perfunctory aggression. There was on his part a deep-seated antagonism, vital and pulsating and far from ordinary, and a kind of strangely inconstant desire to inflict frequent punishments. It was as if he had to force himself to remember (once the right ice-cold button had been pressed) that he must behave towards her with a complete lack of consideration, with revulsion and scorn, to make it clear to her what a curse and a burden it was to endure her presence; to mistreat and even abuse her, and certainly to undermine her and make her feel insecure and even hopeless about her personality, her work, her body, and he was doubtless successful; after all, anyone can do that, even the most stupid of us, it’s the easiest thing in the world to destroy and wound, you don’t have to be especially wily or astute, still less intelligent, a fool can easily crush someone cleverer, and Muriel was a clever man.

So far, all of this is standard operating procedure for Marías, who is a master at promising a big reveal and then diving into the minutiae of daily life for hundreds of pages. At one point, De Vere even seems to speak on behalf of Marías’s readers, as he listens to one of Muriel’s particularly long-winded tales :

I had a sense that he was enjoying keeping me hanging on: now that he had agreed to tell me the story, he would do so at his own pace and in his own way. That is the prerogative of the one doing the telling, and the person listening has none at all, or only that of giving up and leaving.

It will take Marías 400 pages before the answer to the initial mystery is finally laid bare, and the revelation of why Muriel’s friend “behaved in an indecent manner” is shockingly anticlimactic. Next, he discloses the secret to the second mystery, and, fortunately, the backstory to the ongoing arguments between Muriel and Beatriz is considerably more interesting than the first disclosure. But even then, Marías takes a leisurely and digressive thirty pages to slowly unwind the surprise.

So, with over 500 pages behind me and just a handful of pages left to go in Thus Bad Begins (the title comes from Hamlet), I found myself thinking that these revelations did not seem worthy of the promise held out at the beginning of the novel. And then, without warning, Marías dropped two bombshells that changed everything. And instantly I began to recognize and track some of the little breadcrumbs that he had dropped along the way and which I had overlooked, thinking they were insignificant. Like a great magician, Marías had me looking in the wrong direction all along.

Ω

Lying just beneath the surface of this novel of a marriage and its secrets is the troubling ethos and guilty conscience of post-Franco Spain. On several occasions, Marías’s characters speak about the almost Faustian bargain that Spain made to exit the four-decade era marked by the Spanish Civil War and the rule of Francisco Franco. “One of the conditions for granting us democracy and for that astonishing act of hara-kiri had been an agreement that, to put it bluntly, no one would call anyone else to account,” the narrator tells us. How one was likely to feel about this bargain, depends on which side of the Franco divide one was on. Regardless, “something strange happened.”

The social pact became so internalized that we ended up fulfilling the condition almost too scrupulously, especially when it came to talking about the past. It made good sense for us not to get embroiled in the courts and for the courts not to get clogged up with painful lawsuits that would have made it impossible for us to continue to live together and would have ended very badly. Preferring not to know and not to talk about it was another matter entirely. And yet most people chose that route, chose to remain silent, certainly in public, but often in private too.

Ω

mariella-novotny-being-taken-into-custody-by-the-fbi

There are two images in Thus Bad Begins. The first reproduces an 18th century painting owned by Muriel that depicts a cavalier on horseback. The painter is identified as “Casanova’s brother,” which is to say, Francesco Casanova, the brother of the more famous Giacomo. Muriel often stares at this painting during his often lengthy talks with De Vere. The cavalier looks back over his shoulder in the direction of the viewer, “as if,” Muriel muses dramatically, “wishing to retain, before he rode off, the image of the deaths he had caused.”

The other image is a press photograph of Mariella Novotny, a woman who appears as an extremely minor figure in Marías’s novel. The photograph shows her “wearing a ridiculous and yet very modest hat,” at the moment she is bring arrested by a thug-like FBI agent from the era of J. Edgar Hoover. Novotny was involved in several 1960s sex scandals (including a rumored fling with President John F. Kennedy). She was later associated with the notorious Christine Keeler, the woman at the heart of the Profumo Affair, which brought down the government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. (If only it were so easy today.) For De Vere, this image demonstrates the “effect passing time has on reality, turning everything into fiction, and when we ourselves are long gone, any photograph of us will suffer the same fate and we, too, will look like invented people who never existed.”

Javier Marías. Thus Bad Begins. London: Penguin, 2016. Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa.

Jan 25

Recently Read – January 25, 2013

Three recent books from my Kindle.

1. Javier Marias. The Infatuations. Knopf, 2013. For the moment at least, The Infatuations is my favorite book by Javier Marias. While it doesn’t have the scope of the three-volume series Your Face Tomorrow, it benefits from an unwavering intensity of focus that is both exhilarating and harrowing at times. With five main characters and a noirish murder mystery plot, The Infatuations focuses in on the psychology of the characters and minutely examines the social and interpersonal dance of their interactions.

Maria, the narrator, analyses seemingly every sentence, every movement that the other characters make in her presence. And when there are gaps in her knowledge, she obsessively fills the gaps with speculations, with stories carefully crafted to fit the facts as she knows them. “When we get caught in the spider’s web – between the first chance event and the second – we fantasize endlessly.” There is a continual push-pull relationship between knowledge and uncertainty. Each of the characters hungers to have their questions answered, their fears resolved, their hypotheses confirmed.  And yet each feels equally sure that there is never a final, definitive truth. “Being certain of anything goes against our nature.” Maria works in a Madrid publishing house, which allows Marias to toss off some jibes at the unpleasantness of self-important writers and, at times, to perhaps have a bit of fun at his own expense.

He had a marked tendency to discourse and expound and digress, as I have noticed to be the case with many of the writers I meet at the publishing house, as if it weren’t enough for them to fill pages and pages with their thoughts and stories…

2. David Rose. Vault: An Anti-Novel. Salt Publishing, 2013. An aspiring professional cyclist, who spent the Second World War as a sniper, reads a fictionalized account of his life, retelling the story in his own words and correcting the novel’s errors chapter by chapter. (“Hasn’t he checked any of the history?”) While Vault is not really the anti-novel it sounds like it ought to be, there is a beautiful spareness to Rose’s writing in this short debut novella. 

Surrender to the bias of the weight in my pocket? My God. Is that what my life has been reduced to? Amateurish purple?

Look, I don’t so much mind my life being borrowed. It’s what novelists do. They have to make a living. I understand that. And besides, I can correct it, put the record straight.

What I do mind is having my death stolen.

3. Donald Richie. The Inland Sea. Stone Bridge Press, 2002. When this was originally published in 1971, Donald Richie had already lived in Japan for more than two decades. Richie, who just died last year, was the consummate guide to the people and culture of Japan, and The Inland Sea deserves to be one of the great travel classics. He combined an impeccable insider’s knowledge with the awareness that he would always be an outsider. The reader quickly learns to trust the set of eyes through which we view Japan. As the book moves farther into the Inland Sea, Richie brings us deeply and intimately into his own interior. This edition includes a insightful new Introduction by Pico Iyer.

 

Nov 9

Javier Marias on Using Photographs

javier-marias-port_2503061b


In case you have not already read Oli Hazzard’s substantial and excellent interview with Javier Marías over at his own blog, I highly recommend it.  Among other topics, Marías addresses the use of photographs in his novels, starting with Todas las Almas (All Souls) in 1989, a year before W.G. Sebald inserted photographs into his first volume of prose fiction Schwindel. Gefühle. “I remember the surprise of my publisher then – photographs in a novel? Yeah, why not. It was a really strange thing to do then, now it’s not strange any more of course.”

The main reason is very simple. I discovered reading Erwin Panofsky and others, art historians or art theorists, what a pleasure it is to look at an image and read about it at the same time. When Panofsky describes something it you can check and say, yeah, he’s right, I can see it, I wouldn’t have thought of this but now he mentions it, I see it. And then it’s only fair, if in a novel someone talks about a painting or photograph, to show it to the reader a well. That’s mainly it. There is no hidden purpose or enhancement of things – I’m talking about an image, let’s show the image, let’s allow the reader to see it.

Marías then proceeds to discuss the ethical issue of showing photographs of violence and the long debate he held with himself (and others) before deciding not to include in Your Face Tomorrow a much-discussed photograph of a teenager who had been tortured and murdered during the Spanish Civil War. The episode, he tells us, was based on the true story involving his mother and her brother. (I discussed this ” curious decision of discretion”several years ago when I wrote about Your Face Tomorrow.)

One reason the interview is so fascinating is Marías’ infectious, self-deprecating candor.

If I didn’t know myself, I wouldn’t read my works. If someone came to me and said you must read Javier Marías, Spanish guy, contemporary, written a novel of 1500 pages? Come on. Give me one Dickens I haven’t read and then maybe I’ll read it, but not this contemporary thing by a Spanish writer.

Jan 5

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Written Silhouettes

In a world accustomed to in-depth author interviews in the Paris Review, lengthy New Yorker-style profiles, and obsessive Wikipedia biographies, Javier Marías’ Written Lives, a book of brief writings about dead authors (the pieces average about 7 pages in length) is a real throwback to earlier, simpler times when sources were irrelevant and footnotes an annoyance. As Marías says in his short Prologue, he wanted to go against the grain in “the age of exhaustive and frequently futile erudition” in which any “curious reader can find out absolutely everything down to the last detail.”

The idea, then, was to treat these well-known literary figures as if they were fictional characters, which may well be how all writers, whether famous or obscure, would secretly like to be treated.

The writings collected here, it should be noted, are neither profiles nor biographies.   Instead, as this sampling of chapter titles suggests, Marías focuses on a single attribute or quirk and constructs a tight and usually amusing narrative that resembles something not unlike a jazz improvisational solo: William Faulkner on Horseback, James Joyce in his Poses, Arthur Conan Doyle and Women, Robert Louis Stevenson Among Criminals, Thomas Mann in his Suffering, Djuna Barnes in Silence.  But although the book is about writers, don’t expect anything about their books.  Marías rarely mentions or discusses their writings.  And in place of erudition, Marías writes as if rumor and whisper were the chief sources of fact.  Take the piece Oscar Wilde After Prison, which is full of statements introduced by “According to all who met him…”, “Others have said…”, “Many people…found him…but all agree…”, “…according to legend…”, “…they say…”, “”Legend has it…”, and so on.

Marías pretends to be a neutral and bemused observer, except in a handful of cases, most notably with Yukio Mishima, where a fair amount of vitriol finds its way into Yukio Mishima in Death.

The death of Yukio Mishima was so spectacular that it has almost succeeded in obliterating the many other stupid things he did in his life, as if his previous non-stop exhibitionism had been merely a way of getting people’s attention for the culminating moment, doubtless the only one that really interested him.

Something about Mishima, in particular, offends Marías.  “Although to those who knew him, Mishima was an extremely likable man with a lively sense of humor.” Nevertheless, Marías cuts Mishima no slack whatsoever and finds him pompous, narcissistic, cunning, immodest, and guilty of obsessing on eroticism, death, cannibalism, and other unpleasant matters.  Marías, who often strikes me as trying to be more English than a true Englishman, responds to Mishima by demonstrating no attempt whatsoever to comprehend Japanese culture.  But that said, Marias’ writing really comes alive when he’s out to destroy someone’s character.

Aug 30

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Whose Horizon?

We will never know the answers to these questions – I, at the very least, have been unable to reach any real sort of conclusion.  But then sometimes I just tell myself that it isn’t so important after all and that in the end, no matter what really happened, it is not a story that is really worth repeating.

For the bulk of Javier Marías’ early novel Voyage Along the Horizon, a man sits in his extensive library and reads aloud from a manuscript called Voyage Along the Horizon, the product of an obscure author.  When he finishes, he declares the novel “mediocre” and he swears to his audience of one (the narrator of the book we are holding) that he will never let the work be published.  What is the poor reader of Javier Marías’ book to think, having been told that nearly all of the novel he is reading is mediocre and unworthy of being published?

Voyage Along the Horizon is a brilliant parody and for the most part an interesting read.  Marías was just 21 when it was published in 1972 and he says he was thinking of authors such as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the time.  What Marías does so well in Voyage is adopt their language, their novelistic conventions of plots within plots and voluble, omniscient narrators, their strong awareness of class – well, in short, he adopts just about everything except their inherent moralizing, their gravity of purpose.  Without this grounding, Voyage quickly turns to farce.   The characters are as thin as paper dolls and the plot is simultaneously convoluted and meaningless.  I don’t mean it to be derogatory to say that what remains are little more than the social exercises of polite conversation and after-dinner story telling, because Marías can turn tired material like this into a feast for the reader that is partly comedic and partly pure linguistic pleasure.

As the title implies, perspective is everything.  No voyage can proceed along the horizon except to a distant viewer – and here (as with all of his books) Marías’ multiple narrators maintain layers of distance between themselves and the actual story they are telling.  On board the Antarctic-bound Tallahassee, whose voyage is the subject of the manuscript called Voyage Along the Horizon, are assorted scientists, a novelist, a short story writer, a pianist, and a hold full of Manchurian ponies that are slowly dying off.  Ill-fated from the outset, the voyage gets no further than Tangier after an extended and meaningless detour through the Mediterranean, several murders and attempted murders, and a very deadly duel.   In the midst of this hopeless voyage, the novelist tells of an earlier, utterly nefarious voyage led by their ship’s captain through portions of the South China Sea and the western Pacific – another voyage that fails to reach its destination.  Like every book by Marías that I have read so far, this one is far more concerned with beginnings than with endings.  Marías likes to ask the question “When does a story really start?”  Hence, his narratives tend to recede into the past in search of their roots rather than making much forward progress.

One must learn to cultivate the art of ambiguity.

It does seem fair, after having read a half dozen or so of his books, to ask if all the sound and fury (so to speak) of a Marías novel actually signifies anything.  While I always find is a pleasure to entrust myself to the unending flow of his writing, I’m not yet sure I have much sense of the kind of universe Marías is building – if any.  So far, I am tempted to say that all I see when I look back is an unfinished monument to Babel.  But then I have a few more of his books in my stack to read soon.

Voyage Along the Horizon was published in 2006 by Believer Books.  The delicious cover design by Alvaro Villanueva, using artwork by Jonathon Rosen that  refers back to the work of Hergé’s Tintin books, is a stroke of genius.

Aug 8

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The Muffled Tones of the Past: Javier Marías’ All Souls

There are many wonderful moments and observations in All Souls, Javier Marías’ book about lost souls of all types, but I’ll start with this one.  The narrator, a Spanish scholar teaching at Oxford, has been shopping the used bookstores and has just picked up a book signed and annotated by a long-dead author whose works he collects.

It was precisely that feeling of temporal vertigo or of time annihilated that is provoked by holding in one’s hands objects that still speak in muffled tones of their past that first aroused my curiosity…

Yes, it’s probably true that I tend to fall for references to vertigo, but my point here is the recurring fascination with the past in Marías’ books.  The lonely and homesick narrator, having a mostly desultory affair with a colleague’s wife, and generally disenchanted with the professorial routine in Oxford, has far more fruitful relationships with the dead – and with their books – than with the living.  He comes to life only during the book collecting and research that serve as acts of resuscitation for eccentrics of the past with whom he has become fascinated.  The remainder of the time he observes the dead souls and the living dead that surround him, worried that he, too, will become one of them before long.

All Souls is haunted by the uneasy relationship between Time and the Self.

The person recounting here and how what he saw and what happened to him then is not the same person who saw those things and to whom those things happened; neither is he a prolongation of that person, his shadow, his heir, or his usurper.

So who is “he,” then?  I’m not sure the narrator ever settles this.

Here is another example.  Will, the elderly porter at the building where the narrator lodges, exists in a kind of Alzheimer’s time machine.  Unknowingly, he lives every day as if it were a different year from the past.

Will literally did not know what day it was and spent each morning in a different year, traveling backwards and forwards in time according to his desires or, more likely, quite independently of any conscious desire on his part.  No one could predict which date he would choose, far less why he chose it.  It was not just that on certain days he believed it was 1947, for him it really was 1947 or 1914 or 1935 or 1960 or 1926 or any other year of his extremely long life.

…That particular morning it was 1962 and so he addressed me as Mr. Trevor.  Had Will found himself in the 1930s that morning, I would have been Dr. Nott… Each day I was a different faculty member from the past, although always the same faculty member from any one particular period… And he never got it wrong.

Which brings me the to the pair of photographs that show up in All Souls.  On successive pages a little more than halfway through the novel, we are presented with a photograph of the author John Gawsworth (whose signed book provoked the moment of collector’s vertigo quoted above), followed by a photograph of Gawsworth’s death mask.  Even though they are right there on the pages in front of us, Marías spends a page and a half carefully describing the two photographs.

 

Curiously, as I wrote in May, Marías uses photography in a similar vein in Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear.  There, the narrator discusses two photographs of his uncle, who was murdered at the time of the Spanish Civil War, before the narrator was even born.  The photograph that is reproduced shows the young man, nattily dressed on a bright, sunny day.  The other was a post-mortem photograph of the same young man, made for the purposes of identifying bodies and was not reproduced in the book.

Whether or not there is a photograph involved, Marías’ narrators often try to read the faces of the people they observe or meet.  Marías seems enamored with the now antiquated notion that deep insights or reliable personality traits can be discerned by studying the face, a reminder that Marías, for all his post-modern attributes, is essentially a novelist of the late 19th and early 20th century.  There are direct bloodlines from writers like Henry James and Joseph Conrad and Thomas Mann to Javier Marías.  Here’s a moment that could have come right out of Death inVenice.  In the Ashmolean Museum, the narrator runs across Clare, his lover, who is also visiting the museum and who is accompanied by her son and her father, thus permitting the narrator to study three generations of family faces at once.  He follows the trio and observes the faces of Clare and the elderly gentleman before turning his attention to the young grandson.  Almost immediately, the three faces are transposed on top of each other as if they were transparent.

…what I saw was the same identical face for the third time, Clare’s face that I knew so intimately and that I had kissed and whose lips had kissed me so many times. …They were one and the same face, the face whose lips had kissed me in one of its incarnations, representations, figurations or manifestations…

Here, in contrast to Will, who lives in different years every day, Marías seems to be insisting on the fluidity of personality across three generations.  To kiss the lips of his beloved is to kiss the father and the son as well.

All Souls, which Conversational Reading calls “something of a precursor” to Marías’ recent three-volume novel Your Face Tomorrow, is less ambitious, more traditional, but I think it might be more successful.  It has a companion novel, which I have not yet read, called Dark Back of Time.

May 15

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The Fatal Word, The Confirming Photograph


Fever and Spear, the first volume of Javier Marías’ Your Face Tomorrow is a novel about two parallel and often interchangeable fields of activity: spying, with its concomitant actions of betrayal and deception, and language, with its subsets of translation and digression.  Marías uses the world of spies and spying as a vast, flexible metaphor for literature.  The narrator, a Spaniard named Jacobo Deza, is drawn into this mysterious world because he has a special gift, which is explained to him here by a friend:

Toby told me that he always admired, and, at the same time, feared, the special gift you had for capturing the distinctive and even essential characteristics, both external and internal, of friends and acquaintances, characteristics which they themselves had often not noticed or known about.  Or even people you had only glimpsed or seen in passing, in a meeting or at high table, or whom you’d passed a couple of times in the corridors or on the stairs of the Taylorian without exchanging a single word.

Jacobo’s job becomes to observe and occasionally interview strangers and deliver oral opinions or write reports.

Do you think he would be capable of killing someone?  In some extreme situation, for example, if he felt really threatened?  Or would he be simply incapable of it, would he be the sort who would just give in and allow himself to be knifed to death, rather than get his blow in first?  Or, on the contrary, do you think he could kill, even in cold blood?

When Marías has Jacobo describe his role within the spy industry, Marías might as well be writing a description of his own role as a novelist.

Some of us have been paid…to tell and to hear, to put in order and to recount.  To retain and observe and select.  To wheedle, to embellish, to remember.  To interpret and translate and incite.  To draw out and persuade and distort.

Fever and Spear begins with a seventeen page excursus on the inevitable risks of speech – “treachery, misunderstanding, and chaos” – but for the next 370 pages Jacobo and his two main cohorts simply don’t know how to stop talking.  Marías gives Jacobo a narrative tic: Jacobo can’t just say something once.  He will make a statement, then rephrase it, and then rephrase it again and again.  It’s a kind of sculpting effect that Jacobo uses, perhaps thinking that he’s providing extra shape and clarity to his ideas.  But the net result is to make language more opaque, to distance words from their referents.  In the end, the reader doesn’t seem to know what the narrator believes or what is true.   Jacobo himself  has no idea what becomes of his reports. “They didn’t usually tell me when I had been right and when I had been wrong.”  He has no idea if his special gift is for real of if it is even useful.

If words are “fatal,” as Jacobo declares at one point, he seems to feel very differently about photographs.  Nearly halfway into Fever and Spear, the reader turns the page and suddenly comes face to face with a blurry, full-page photograph of a twenty-something young man.  Suit, tie, pocket foulard, brilliantined hair.  The photograph falls in the midst of a long digression about an event that happened before Jacobo was born.  During the Spanish Civil War, his mother-to-be  has gone off to search for her younger brother, who she fears has been murdered by the militia. Many years after his mother’s death, Jacobo discovers a tin containing some mementos, including two photographs that he presumes are of her brother, who was indeed murdered before he had a chance to become Jacobo’s uncle.  One of the photographs in the tin is a post-mortem photograph, probably taken by the Red Cross to certify the death of the young man.  The other photograph is the one reproduced in the book.   Jacobo spends four pages describing the photographs and his reactions upon finding them.

Upon seeing the post-mortem photograph:

“My first impulse was not to look at it, at the photo…My first impulse was to cover it up again with the little piece of satin, like someone protecting a living eye from seeing the face of a corpse, and as if I were suddenly aware that one is not responsible for what one sees, but for what one looks at, that the latter can always be avoided – you always have the choice – after the first inevitable glimpse, which is treacherous, involuntary, fleeting, and takes you by surprise, you can close your eyes or immediately cover them with your hands or turn away or choose to pass swiftly on to the next page without pausing (‘Turn the page, turn the page, I don’t want your horror or your suffering, Turn the page, and save yourself’).

Jacobo imagines that his mother took the photograph away with her when it was shown to her by the authorities “because to leave that photograph in the file of administered deaths would have been rather like abandoning to the elements a body she never actually saw and whose final resting place she never knew, tantamount to failing to give it a decent burial.”  For Jacobo, the photograph is a “confirmation”, not a betrayal.  The photograph commands respect. “…there are images that engrave themselves on the mind even if they last only an instant, and so it had been with that photo, so much so that I could draw it precisely from memory…”

It’s a curious decision of discretion that Marías does not reproduce a photograph that corresponds with the post-mortem photograph  of the bloodied face, which Jacobo describes in some detail.  Rather, we see only the sunlit image of the young man while still alive, unaware of the fate that awaits him and that surrounds him in the text.  Although there are other illustrations in Fever and Spear (mostly reproductions of British World War II-era posters from a campaign warning the population against spilling secrets to the enemy – “Careless Talk Costs Lives”), this is the sole real photograph in the book.

Javier Marías and W.G. Sebald knew and admired each other, with Sebald purportedly referring to Marías as a “twin writer.”  Sebald included a photograph of Marías’ eyes in his book of poems and photographs Unrecounted.  Marías dubbed Sebald the Duke of Vertigo in the imaginary Kingdom of Redonda that he administers.