Review

Tomás Nevinson by Javier Marías review – the final mystery

Five of the best translated novels of 2023

This article is more than 2 years old

The last novel from the late Spanish author is a mesmerising addition to his world of spies and lies

 

Review

Five of the best translated novels of 2023

This article is more than 1 year old

Javier Marías’s final book, a love affair in 1980s East Berlin, reincarnation in France, a story of obsession and a South Korean romp

John Self
Friday 8 December 2023

Tomás Levinson
Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (Hamish Hamilton)
“I was brought up in the old-fashioned way, and could never have dreamed that one day I would be ordered to kill a woman.” Ah, how we will miss the late Javier Marías and his unique genre of slow-motion page-turners, blending thrillery plots with long, equivocating sentences. His final work, a “companion novel” to its predecessor, Berta Isla, tells the story of a washed-up spy chasing down a terrorist, and is full of the complexities, comedy and most of all contradictions that define his work. Fittingly, its closing words are “Possibly. You never know.”

 

Review: Your Face Tomorrow, by Javier Marías

REVIEWED BY STEPHEN SMITH

SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL

PUBLISHED MARCH 29, 2010

Javier Marías, who is Spanish, may be the best novelist you've never heard of. People say this, though they never get around to explaining why you've never heard of him, and whether the fault is yours or his or somebody else's. Other people, who have heard of him, say that Marías needs a Nobel Prize; Orhan Pamuk is one of those. Margaret Drabble has confessed to reading one of Marías's novels and then, when she wanted to forget it, well, guess what, she couldn't. Which is strange praise, I have to say, and even a little bit spooky.

Your Face Tomorrow III: Poison, Shadow and Farewell by Javier Marías

 

Your Face Tomorrow III: Poison, Shadow and Farewell by Javier Marías

The culmination of a triumph of storytelling

James Lasdun
Sat 21 Nov 2009 00.07 GMT


Your Face Tomorrow III: Poison, Shadow and Farewell

by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa 560pp, Chatto & Windus, £18.99

Part two of Javier Marías's metaphysical epic, Your Face Tomorrow, culminated in one of the more bizarre scenes of recent fiction. Jacques Deza, a Spanish academic recruited into a nameless sub-section of MI6, finds himself in the handicapped lavatory of a glitzy London disco, looking on helplessly as his boss, Bertram Tupra, attacks a young Spanish diplomat with a sword – "a double-edged Landsknecht sword", no less – breaking several of the man's ribs before all but drowning him in the lavatory.

Javier Marías / Addictive 'Infatuations' Takes A Metaphysical Look At Crime

Addictive 'Infatuations' Takes A Metaphysical Look At Crime

John Powers
August 12, 2013

If you're like me, you probably feel exhausted just thinking about how much cultural stuff is out there. A friend recently told me he was reading an acclaimed Hungarian novelist whose books I've never opened. "Please tell me he stinks," I begged, "so I don't have to read him."

Spanish novelist Javier Marías dies at home in Madrid aged 70

Javier Marías

Spanish novelist Javier Marías dies at home in Madrid aged 70

Marías, also a translator and columnist, was described as ‘one of Spain’s greatest contemporary writers’

Sam Jones in Madrid
Sunday 11 September 2022

The Spanish novelist Javier Marías, author of All Souls, A Heart so White, and the epic, three-part Your Face Tomorrow – and a writer regularly touted as a candidate for the Nobel prize for literature – has died at home in Madrid at the age of 70.

Marías, who had been ill with pneumonia for the past month, died on Sunday, according to his publisher, Alfaguara.

“It is with enormous sadness that we regret to inform you that our great author and friend Javier Marías has died in Madrid this afternoon,” the publisher said in a brief statement.

Tributes to Marías, who was also a celebrated translator and columnist, flooded in.

Writing in El País, his friend and fellow writer Eduardo Mendoza said Marías had overcome his early influences to “to find a voice, a subject and a style that were so distinctively his own that they turned him into a strange phenomenon”. He added: “Javier Marías’s writing doesn’t resemble anyone else’s. It’s easy to parody, but impossible to imitate.”

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, called Marías “one of the great writers of our time” and said Sunday was “a sad day for Spanish literature”.

The Spanish journalist and writer Rosa Montero said she had been “hit for six” by the news, adding: “For me, he was the best candidate for the Nobel in today’s Spain.”

Javier Marías

Pepa Bueno, the editor in chief of El País, to which Marías was a regular contributor, said: “The death of Javier Marías is so painful. Today is a day of mourning in Spanish literature and column-writing. [He leaves] a huge void in the paper.”

Marías, who was born in the Spanish capital in 1951, published his debut novel, The Dominions of the Wolf, at the age of 20. It was followed by 15 others, among them All Souls, which was inspired by his time teaching at Oxford University, and A Heart So White, a mysterious meditation on love, family and the past that is perhaps his best-known book.

Despite being a member of Spain’s Royal Academy and an international member of the UK’s Royal Society of Literature, Marías was not easily impressed with some literary gongs.

He caused a stir in 2012 when he turned down Spain’s €20,000 national narrative prize for his novel The Infatuations. Although he insisted the refusal was not a snub and had been motivated by his lifelong opposition to the way Spain awards state-backed literary prizes, it did not go down well with the organisers.

“All my life I have managed to avoid state institutions, regardless of which party was in government, and I have turned down all income from the public purse,” he said. “I don’t want to be seen as an author who is favoured by any particular government.”

Marías also claimed to have spent his entire career improvising for the lack of a literary project.

“But I do recognise certain recurring themes: treason, secrecy, the impossibility of knowing things, or people, or yourself, for sure,” he once said.

“There is also persuasion, marriage and love. But these things are the matter of literature, not just of my books. The history of literature is probably the same drop of water falling on the same stone only with different language, different manners, different forms adequate to our own time. But it remains the same thing, the same stories, the same drop on the same stone, since Homer or before.”

Earlier this year, when asked by El País what inspired him to write, he replied: “I write about what seems to me to be particularly serious, dangerous, unfair or stupid. Obviously, I sometimes get it wrong or I can go very much against the current.”

THE GUARDIAN

Javier Marías / Books

Javier Marìas

BOOKS

by Javier Marías

Between Eternities

A new and exhilarating collection of writings from the author of The Infatuations and A Heart So White

Internationally renowned writer Javier Marias is a tireless examiner of the world around us, an enthusiastic debunker of pretensions of every kind, and a true polymath. This new collection of essays shows the full extent of his curiosity and wit, ranging from the literary to the philosophical to the autobiographical, from football to cinema, comic books to mortality to 'Why Almost No One Can Be Trusted'.

Javier Marías / A Spanish novelist, translator and columnist

Javier Marias

A Spanish novelist, translator and columnist

The Spanish writer is most well known for his original pieces and success as an author translating works from English to Spanish.

Javier Marias Franco a Spanish novelist, translator and columnist was born in Madrid on September 20th, 1951. Marias is most well known for his original pieces and success as an author translating works from English to Spanish. Probably not by coincidence, many lives of his characters in his novels revolve around the life of an interpreter or translator.

Javier Marìas

Thus Bad Begins by Javier Marías review – ‘a demonstration of what fiction can achieve’

An unhappy marriage reflects the trauma inflicted by years of fascist rule in a probing novel from the celebrated Spanish author

Hari Kunzru
Friday 26 February 2016 07.30 GMT

“This is a grubby c ountry.” So says Eduardo Muriel, a producer of B-movies, to Juan, the narrator of Thus Bad Begins, the latest novel by the revered Spanish writer Javier Marías. The grubbiness in question is the taint of decades of rule by the fascist victors of the civil war, the franquistas who have revenged themselves upon their Republican colleagues and neighbours, leaving many of those not dead or in prison unable to pursue careers or support their families.

The Infatuations by Javier Marías / Review by Alberto Manguel

Clifford Harper/Agraphia.co.uk/Illustration

The Infatuations by Javier Marías 

Review

Is there such as thing as chance, asks Javier Marías's masterly new novel

Alberto Manguel
Friday 1 March 2013 17.30 GM

T

he strict sequence of events that makes up our lives seems to us, as it takes place, haphazard. A chance encounter, a sudden death, love at first sight, an overheard conversation, all belong, we imagine, not to a tightly plotted thriller but to the erratic jottings of a distracted dreamer. A woman might notice a couple meeting every day in the same cafe, discover later that the man has been stabbed to death by a demented beggar, and decide to speak to the widow the next time she sees her. Each of these events seems whimsical and arbitrary and yet, as Javier Marías shows in this masterly novel, chance is nothing but the result of our own negligent reading. Read in the proper order, from the first to the last chapter, everything we do and everything we witness, however unlikely or disconnected, fits into a story in which we are both narrators and protagonists.

Such is the case of María Dolz, a middle-aged woman who works for a Madrid publisher, who witnesses the couple's meetings, and then their absence; who discovers in the papers the murder of the husband, a certain Miguel Desverne; and who seeks out the widow, Luisa Alday, to offer her condolences. As it happens, Dolz meets Alday's new companion, a handsome man called Díaz Varela, who was Desverne's best friend. Dolz becomes infatuated with Díaz Varela and, shortly afterwards, they begin an intermittent sexual relationship.

"Infatuations" is the only possible English translation for the "enamoramientos" of the original title. Margaret Jull Costa, with her habitual skill, has rendered Marías's precise, somewhat laconic Spanish into graceful and equally laconic English, but the title necessarily defeats her. "Enamoramiento" is the act of falling in love, briefly but not less passionately; "infatuation" (the dictionary tells us) is to become inspired with intense fondness, admiration, even folly; unfortunately, in the English term, love is absent. As Dolz's lovely last words have it, after the end of an "enamoramiento" we continue to sense the loved one's presence, "knowing that he is still on our horizon, from which he has not entirely vanished, and that we cannot see, in the distance, the dust from his fleeting feet".

Dolz's narrative is studded with questions: What is her new lover's involvement with the widow? What are his true feelings towards both women? Did he have a hand in the husband's murder? And above all, what is her own role in the convoluted plot into which she seems to have fallen? Who, in fact, is she?

The classical themes of love, death and fate are explored with elegant intelligence by Marías in what is perhaps his best novel so far. The story's literary underpinnings are Macbeth (as is usual in Marías), Balzac's Colonel Chabert and, more surprisingly, Dumas's The Three Musketeers, all glossed by Díaz Varela, who paternalistically instructs Dolz on the importance these three books have for him. Central to Marías's novel is Balzac's colonel, a man supposed dead who returns among the living, much like the dead Desverne returns to haunt the minds of the survivors. Over this literary chorus echoes a grisly observation quoted by Díaz Varela from the Musketeer saga: "A murder, nothing more." For Dolz, the banality of murder implied in Dumas's words becomes translated as murder's monstrous immutability. "A thief can give back the thing he stole, a slanderer can acknowledge his calumny," Dolz thinks to herself. "The trouble with murder is that it's always too late and you cannot restore to the world the person you killed." She adds: "And if, as they say, there is no forgiveness, then, whenever necessary, you must continue along the road taken." Except that, eventually, the murderer will no longer think of his crime "as a monstrous exception or a tragic mistake, but, rather, as another resource that life offers to the boldest and toughest." He will feel as if he has simply inherited the terrible action, or won it at a raffle "from which no one is exempt". And this feeling will lead him to believe "that he didn't wholly commit those acts, or not at least alone". In these extraordinary words, Marías has defined the ethos of our time.

Marías is an old hand at hoodwinking the reader, layering his novels with plots that seem, each one, final, but then suddenly blossom into something unexpected. In The Infatuations, Marías may have been thinking of Macbeth's address to the witches: "If you can look into the seeds of time,/ And say which grain will grow and which will not,/ Speak then to me." Neither the reader nor the protagonists are capable of such foresight, but the clear knowledge that every event, however minuscule, might develop into a sprawling web of roots and branches, lends every detail in the novel (as it does in detective fiction) a possibly dangerous meaning. Over the events in the The Infatuations, this other, untold and latent story casts an ominous and uneasy shadow.

"Once you've finished a novel," says Díaz Varela to Dolz, "what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel's imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention."

THE GUARDIAN

DRAGON

Javier Marías / The Art of Fiction

Javier Marías turns down prize

Javier Marías / Fewer Scruples

Javier Marías / A Heart So White / Quotes

Javier Marías / A Heart So White / Reviewed by Samantha Scheneed and Others

Javier Marías / Stranger than Fiction  

Javier Marías / A Heart So White / JDP

Javier Marías / While the Women Are Sleeping

Javier Marías / While the Women Are Sleeping / Reviews

Javier Marías / A Heart So White and All Souls

Javier Marías / There are seven reasons not to write novels (and one to write them)

Javier Marías / A life in writing

The Infatuations by Javier Marías / Review by Robert McCrum

The Infatuations by Javier Marías / Review by Alberto Manguel

The Infatuations by Javier Marías / Review by Robert McCrum

The Infatuations by Javier Marías

Review

Javier Marías's haunting murder mystery, embracing all the big questions about life, love and death, is an instant Spanish classic.

Marías’s study of fatal obsession begins with an encounter at a breakfast cafe.

Robert McCrum
The Observer, Sunday 10 March 2013 00.04 GMT

A fine murder story is like a great love affair: an infinite catacomb of excitement, sorrow and desire. Apart from tales of love and death, what else matters to mankind's stone-age brain? While we continue to push back the frontiers of knowledge, most recently in digital technology, our consciousness remains hard-wired with some very primitive storylines. The lasting challenge to literature is to achieve a satisfying marriage between high art and the low drives of a simple plot. The latter is usually much more demanding than the former. To find such a rapprochement in the pages of a novel is indeed a rare treat.

This is where Javier Marías, one of Spain's greatest contemporary writers, steps into the picture. The son of a victim of Franco's dictatorship, Marías is a characteristically European version of the literary man. He works as a distinguished translator, has a column in El País, and runs his own publishing house. He is also the author of two short story collections and 13 novels whose lyrical, conversational, and even errant, style has sponsored widespread literary admiration. There's an irony here because, rather appealingly, Marías writes fiction as if there were many other, better things to do. At his investiture into the Royal Spanish Academy in 2008, he confessed that the work of the novelist was "pretty childish", a teasing line of thought derived from Robert Louis Stevenson. His other exemplars are Joseph Conrad and Laurence Sterne. So it's no accident that he went on to argue that the writer "can only tell stories about what has never happened, the invented and the imagined".

The Infatuations is just such a novel, a murder story of archetypal simplicity whose slow unravelling becomes a vehicle for all the big questions about life, love and death. There are passages on almost every page that cry out for quotation. This may be a literary and metaphysical fiction, but it's never boring. Marías plays with perception, memory and guilt like a toreador. With every flourish of his literary cape, the enthralled reader is never allowed to forget that, in the end, the author will make a killing. Just as Macbeth is a thriller that's also a great tragedy,The Infatuations is a murder story that's also a profound study of fatal obsession.

A story that might have been torn from a crumpled page of Home News starts with el enamoramiento, a Spanish term for which there is no English equivalent – the state of falling or being in love, or perhaps infatuation. María Dolz, a publisher's editor, has become fascinated by the glamorous couple she sees every day in the cafe where she takes breakfast on her way to work. "The nicest thing about them," says María, "was seeing how much they enjoyed each other's company." Then, one day, they are no longer there, and María feels lost without them. Later, when she sees a newspaper photograph of the husband, lying stabbed in the street, she begins to learn more about this mysterious couple and to uncover their story.

She becomes infatuated by the infatuees. When her own romantic life, brilliantly imagined by Marías, links her to the murdered man's widow, Luisa, an apparently random killing becomes, inexorably, a much darker tale of calculated homicide. In the process, María the narrator becomes an unwitting accomplice to a dreadful crime, a young woman trapped in a prison of guilt. "No one is going to judge me," she says at the end with a doomed insouciance, "there are no witnesses to my thoughts." It's a terrifying conclusion to a haunting masterpiece of chilling exposition.

The Infatuations has already been showered with awards and acclaim. With this exemplary translation, Penguin adds a European master to its distinguished list of contemporary international fiction. Great Spanish novels don't come along too often, but they sometimes find a place in the hearts of the British reading public. The full text of Don Quixote was first published as long ago as 1620. I wouldn't be surprised if The Infatuations soon acquired an equally devoted following.

THE GUARDIAN

DRAGON

Javier Marías / The Art of Fiction
Javier Marías turns down prize
Javier Marías / Fewer Scruples
Javier Marías / A Heart So White / Quotes
Javier Marías / A Heart So White / Reviewed by Samantha Scheneed and Others
Javier Marías / Stranger than Fiction  
Javier Marías / A Heart So White / JDP
Javier Marías / While the Women Are Sleeping
Javier Marías / While the Women Are Sleeping / Reviews
Javier Marías / A Heart So White and All Souls
Javier Marías / There are seven reasons not to write novels (and one to write them)
Javier Marías / A life in writing
The Infatuations by Javier Marías / Review by Robert McCrum
The Infatuations by Javier Marías / Review by Alberto Manguel