More than a dozen novels, various stories, essays, press articles, translations and even an incursion into children’s literature… Javier Marías has died at the age of 70, leaving one of the most relevant literary works in Spanish of the last 50 years. However, the writer and academic of the RAE was not some canonical textbook toston.
In fact, refused during his career to accept institutional prizes or public money to “avoid being linked to power” and became involved in beef’s and polemics (some made it clear that she hadn’t fully grasped modern feminism). However, it is well worth immersing yourself in the beauty of her prose as a novelist. Don’t worry because, if you haven’t done it yet, you’re not late. The man from Madrid will live forever in his books and, above all, in these four stories that have become readers’ favorites.
Heart So White (1992)
“I didn’t want to know, but I did know that one of the girls, when she was no longer a girl and had not long since returned from her honeymoon, went into the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror, opened her blouse , took off her bra and went for her heart with the point of the gun…”
This is the legendary beginning of a contemporary classic, whose protagonist and narrator: Juan Ranz, always prefers not to know, aware of how dangerous it is to listen (ears have no eyelids, and what reaches them is no longer forgotten). Translator and interpreter, he is now also newlywed. On a honeymoon in Havana, leaning out of the balcony, he is mistaken for a stranger waiting on the street and, inadvertently, overhears a hotel conversation.
From then on “premonitions of disaster” will envelop their marriage. But the key to this discomfort may lie in the past, since her father had to marry three times so that he could be born. A hypnotic novel about secrecy and its possible convenience, about marriage, murder and instigation, about suspicion, talking and keeping quiet and persuasion. About hearts so white that little by little they are dyed and end up being what they never wanted to be.
Heart So White (Pocket) (Paperback)
All Souls (1989)
This is the story of the narrator’s two unique years spent at Oxford University, a city outside the world and time and where the novel’s captivating characters live: the narrator’s married mistress, Clare Bayes, a woman conditioned by something she attended but doesn’t remember; the friend Cromer-Blake, ironic homosexual who lives manufacturing intense experiences for an old age that he anticipates lonely; prowler Alan Marriott, with his three-legged dog and his knowledge of the “creepy couple” we all have; and many others until reaching the one who comes from another time, the enigmatic writer John Gawsworth.
In a world of secrets and intrigues, of ceremonious rites and crazy dinners, of hidden pasts and sickly present, the narrator weaves his own “disturbance” and his own history with that of the inhabitants of the city “preserved in syrup”, until discover that elements as disparate as a railway bridge over a river in India, some unhappy lovers, a career as a spy or the tiny island of Redonda, will become part of his life, already marked forever by those unexpected relationships of love and friendship between all souls.
The Crushes (2011)
“The last time I saw Miguel Desvern or Deverne was also the last time his wife, Luisa, saw him, which was still strange and perhaps unfair, since that was what she was, his wife, and I was, on the other hand, a stranger. …”
Thus begins the novel in which María Dolz, narrator and protagonist, only learned his name “when his photo appeared in the newspaper, stabbed and half shirtless and about to become dead: the last thing he should have realized was about what they stabbed him out of confusion and without cause».
With a deep and captivating prose, the novel reflects on the state of falling in love, almost universally regarded as something positive and even redeeming at times, so much so that it seems to justify almost everything: noble and disinterested actions, but also the greatest excesses and baseness. It is also a book about impunity and about the horrible force of the facts; about the inconvenience that the dead could return; also about the impossibility of ever fully knowing the truth, not even that of our thought, oscillating and always variable.
The Crushes (Hardcover)
Bertha Island (2017)
“For a while she wasn’t sure if her husband was her husband. Sometimes she thought he was, sometimes she thought he wasn’t, and sometimes she decided not to believe anything and go on living her life with him, or with that older man like him. But she, too, had grown older on her own, in his absence, she was very young when she married.”
Berta Isla and Tomás Nevinson met very young in Madrid, and very soon was their determination to spend their lives together, without suspecting that an intermittent coexistence awaited them and then a disappearance. Tomás, half Spanish and half English, is gifted with languages and accents, and that means that, during his studies at Oxford, the Crown lays its eyes on him. Any given day, “a stupid day” that he could have saved, will determine the rest of his existence, as well as that of his wife.
Bertha Island is the enveloping and exciting story of waiting and evolution, that of its protagonist. Also about the fragility and tenacity of a love relationship condemned to secrecy and concealment, to pretense and conjecture, and ultimately to resentment mixed with loyalty.
Or, as a quote from Dickens says towards the end of the book, it is proof that “every beating heart is a secret to the nearest heart, the one that sleeps and beats by its side.” And it is also the story of those who want stop misfortunes and intervene in the universe, to end up being banished from it.
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Cover photo | Alfaguara
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