The last words express a doubt, they assign further uncertainty to the future: «This can be. It could be”. We will not reveal who says them and the reason why they are said, accompanied by a contained gesture of tenderness. It ends like this Thomas Nevinson (Alfaguara), Javier Marías’ longest novel, continuation of Berta Isla, published in Spain fifty years after his youth debut, The territories of the wolf. While that sentence remains in the air, suspended between the ambiguities of existences, we must gather strength to close the book: the hands tremble, they do not want to obey. But before starting it again, eventually, the obligation of comparisons is imposed. The best thing is to reopen Lives written – unsurpassed portraits of sacred monsters of literature told as characters – to give its author the place he deserves among the great ones dear to him. It will be – we anticipate – an exceptional place.
Let’s browse Lives written in search of examples, hinting at affinities. Think of Joseph Conrad, “who was a man of great irony,” recalls Marías. Or to Vladimir Nabokov, “irritated by those who believed that the validity of art depended on its simplicity and sincerity”. As and perhaps more than them (which are also unique in the seductive “recognizability” of what they have published), the author of Such a white heart with his novels he created a real “system”, not only entrusted to the recurring presences of the characters, to their obvious and hidden connections, to the conceptual references between one book and another, to the historical, artistic and cinematographic references. There is even more. The “moral dilemmas” that life constantly presents to us always represent the core of the plots. The voice of what has been called “literary thought” spreads by stopping or lengthening the timing of the narration at its discretion. The plot is consolidated by organizing all the possible tools and figures of fiction. The structure exploits the ambiguity of the coexistence between first and third person, enhancing the splitting between the narrators – protagonists and the almost alter ego of those who “put their signature on the cover”. Nobody would probably be surprised, for example, if Thomas Nevinson (which is also the «prequel» – so to speak – of Your face tomorrow), released seven years later Thus begins the evil, was entitled “Thus Evil Hides”. We will see why.
“You should never tell anything,” is perhaps the most famous of the opening words by Marías. This intellectual warning, linked in reality to the perception of how “rare” the “trust that sooner or later will not betray itself” is, can perhaps be extended to the way in which one should talk about his books. It is not appropriate to spoil the surprises, take away the pleasure of witnessing the invention, scratch that unprecedented tension that dominates stories in which the “core of the matter”, as Graham Greene would say, is always a secular ethical question. On the other hand, Marías’ very opposition to revealing or seeing revealed what happens in his novels is an eloquent sign of the great role that the complex category of the “novel” plays in them. It is also a confirmation of how much the Spanish writer is linked to a “creative process” in which, Elide Pittarello noted in The heuristic image in the novels of Javier Marías (Oxford, Keble College), «presents himself to himself as an involved subject». It is no coincidence that in an interview with “Corriere” in February 2019, on the eve of his arrival in Milan to receive the “La Lettura” award, Marías announced for the first time his intention to “continue” from where was stopped, explaining that he was “curious to know” what had become of Tomás Nevinson after his return to Madrid, “too young (albeit old and nearly dead in spirit) to stay the rest of his life gazing at the trees ahead to the house of Berta, his wife ». Curious to know. Like the readers.
It is from there, in fact, from that return to Madrid, that everything begins anew. The young man whose normal life had been canceled, the spy sent to the most dangerous fronts, the missing husband who was no longer expected, decides to accept another secret mission, tempted by the possibility of interrupting the quiet monotony of his rediscovered existence. . “It is unbearable – he thinks – to stay out once you have been inside”. To convince him is once again Bertram Tupra, the great puppeteer of the British secret services and the organizer of their darkest fringes: the “expert on slander”, the man of many names who had recruited him with a devious deception in Oxford , in Berta Isla, and that a few years later, in Your face tomorrow, will lead the group in London charged with guessing and reversing the lives of others. But, unlike the protagonist of that novel, Jaime Deza, and unlike the young Patricia Pérez Nuix (whom we find here again, persuaded that “in the anti-terrorist struggle there are things that must not be done, that if they are done they must not be said and that if they say they must be denied “), Tomás has the gift of tongues, he knows how to imitate accents, he is able to infiltrate everywhere but he cannot see” clearly “the evil that people can hold inside. However, he knows how to evaluate its scope, so much so that he reflects on the fact that “killing is neither extreme nor difficult nor unfair if you know who, what crimes he has committed or is preparing to commit, how many wickedness people will be spared, how many innocent lives they will preserve with a single shot… ».
Much of the action unfolds in a foggy city in northeastern Spain, partly imaginary, fictitiously called Ruán. The ex-boy prodigy of the Oxford years is hiding under the identity of the English teacher Miguel Centurión. His task, difficult and risky, is to unmask a terrorist, half Irish half Spanish, who lives under a false name after having collaborated ten years earlier in attacks by the IRA or ETA and in particular in the massacres carried out in 1987 by Basque nationalists in ‘Hipercor of Barcelona and in the barracks of the Civil Guard of Zaragoza. “My childhood and early youth were plagued by Francoism. My second youth and maturity from the Age, which did not kill so much as the dictatorship, but a lot and for free, heir to Francoism in this “, the Spanish writer told Juan Gabriel Vásquez in an interview published by” El País ” . That dark age is firmly recalled, the mission wanted by Tupra to “do a favor” to his colleagues in Madrid is charged with unexpected nuances and, as we said, with moral questions. But neither Tomás nor Marías lose their way. «It is undeniable – observes the author of All souls – the similarity between the spy and the novelist. If only because the novelist discovers and unravels the story he writes at the moment he is doing it ». And in this story, marvelously, there will still be time to be looked at, with clear melancholy, by Berta’s “thinking eyes”.
April 9, 2021 (change April 9, 2021 | 08:31)
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