2023-09-08 20:17:50
by GIUSEPPE ANTONELLI
From Saturday 9 September on newsstands the first of the books by the great Spanish author who died in 2022. Lightning-fast incipits, enveloping developments: a master of style. The series, in eighteen releases, starts with Tomorrow in the battle think of me
Stories don’t belong only to those who witness them or to those who invent them, once told they belong to anyone, they are repeated by word of mouth and change and deform, nothing is told twice in the same form or with the same words, not even if what the same person tells twice (Tomorrow in the battle think of me). As happens with certain great artists, the works of Javier Maras – who died on 11 September 2022 at the age of seventy – are many faces of a polyhedron that allow us to glimpse, each from a different perspective, a single conceptual nucleus. That idea according to which the truth of things is never attainable nor is it ever possible to really know a person: not even for those who have experienced those things or for those who – or bear the name of – that person. If I call myself, or if I use a name that has accompanied me since I was born or by which some will remember me, or if I tell things that coincide with things that others might attribute to me – says the narrator of All Souls – just because I prefer speak in first person.
The narrative gaze of Maras, undoubtedly one of the greatest European writers of the last decades, focuses from time to time on an object; but in the meantime he invites us to rest our eyes on the lens of a kaleidoscope. Whether we move through the streets of Madrid or the university environments of Oxford, whether the protagonists are men or women, whether we are talking about interpreters or secret agents, the author’s hand acts on that mechanism in such a way that the reader he remains enchanted waiting for the next scene of that glittering plot to take shape. Everything – love, death, waiting, violence, doubt, deception, choice, surprise – moves around a center that continues to escape our sight. Because, in life even more than in novels, the meaning always remains hidden behind layers of story. The only truth is the one that is not known and is not transmitted, the one that cannot be translated with words or images, the one that is hidden and not controlled, perhaps for this reason so much is said or everything is told, so that nothing has ever happened, once told (A heart so white). Life, Maras seems to remind us every time, is nothing more than a narrative institution.
He does not live on optical illusion for literature, but linguistics: every true novel – and a writer like him, imbued with the great literary tradition that cites and reuses with elegance, knows it well – a spell of words. It is in fact the disruptive energy that in his books releases right from the dazzling incipits, and then manages to keep the narrative tension high for hundreds of pages, fueled above all by the power of the words. Words that often leap out of the lines and are made the object of specific attention: of reflections and comparisons, of etymological digressions. Like the one that in Tomorrow in the battle think of me – the novel that opens the Corriere della Sera series dedicated to the Madrid author on Saturday 9 September – refers to the English to haunt and the French hanter, very related and rather untranslatable verbs, which they denote what ghosts do with the places and people they frequent or spy on or revisit. Ghostly words which in this case haunt the voice of whoever finds himself acting as a ghost writer: the ghost writer, in fact. Etymology uncertain, but apparently both come from other Anglo-Saxon and Old French verbs meaning to dwell, inhabit, settle permanently (dictionaries are always fun, like maps). And the words, with their semantic edges, map the mental landscape in which the characters move.
In Tomorrow in the battle think of me the word word appears 92 times, in A heart so white as many as 112: there, moreover, the protagonists are people who work as interpreters and therefore have a concencia de las palabras: awareness of words. Yes, because we must never forget that here in Italy we read the books that Maras wrote in Spanish in translation. But Maras himself – a refined translator – was the first to have this aspect in mind, often thematizing it in his novels; his autobiographical experience as a polyglot that reverberates the story through the filter of linguistic relativism. Just as happens to the husband of that Berta Isla after whom the book with which Maras won the Reading prize in 2018 is entitled: a spy story that contains a splendid reflection on identity.
Berta married, unaware at first, a secret agent: she will never know who he really was, what he did, where he spent most of his life. But even her husband – Toms Nevinson, half Spanish and half English – risks no longer knowing who. Of course I was someone else, but it was still me. In many years I have been many people, my job has partly consisted of this, and yet I have always remained me. Just like a writer. And Toms Nevinson Maras named his next book after him, the one destined to remain his last.
In the final scene, the two spouses, now advanced in age, find themselves taking stock of the past years together and Toms looks for the right words for a declaration of love. It’s easier to say them in a language than your own, almost as if it were another self speaking. But the last sentence of that book is pronounced by Berta, with her thoughts turned to the future: It could be. Could be.
An adventure in 18 volumes – With the newspaper for 9.90 euros
On the occasion of the anniversary of the death of Javier Maras (September 11), Corriere della Sera brings his complete works to newsstands, in collaboration with Einaudi. Saturday 9 September the first volume, the novel Tomorrow in the Battle Think of Me, published in Spain in 1994 and translated by Glauco Felici. The price is 9.90 euros plus the daily newspaper and the release frequency will be weekly. The series will have 18 volumes. Next week A Cuore Cos Bianco from 1992 will be distributed (translated and edited by Paola Tomasinelli). The graphic design of the covers signed by XxYstudio.
The prize
Javier Maras won the Reading Quality Ranking with Berta Isla in 2018: the award signed by the artist Vasco Vitali and created at the Fonderia Artistica Battaglia in Milan
September 8, 2023 (modified September 8, 2023 | 8:14 pm)
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