Las obras de Javier Marías en Vintage

[También en castellano y en ebook]
Vintage

‘All Souls’ triunfa en Oxford

All Souls, la traducción inglesa de la novela de Javier Marías Todas las almas, ha sido elegida “libro del año 1992″ por la prestigiosa librería Blackwell’s Oxford en su selección 25 Books for 25 Years.

Nueva edición de ‘Gli innamoramenti’

GLI INNAMORAMENTI
JAVIER MARÍAS
Traduzione di Glauco Felici
Mondadori, 2013

Entrevista en la RAI
L’ANIMA DEGLI INNAMORAMENTI

Traducción al estonio de ‘Todas las almas’

OXFORDI ROMAAN
JAVIER MARÍAS
Varrak, 2012

‘The Infatuations’. Reseñas y entrevista a JM en la BBC

The Infatuations by Javier Marias: The Best Book Dostoevsky Didn’t Write

Diversions make Infatuations a book to fall in love with

Thoughts at Intervals. Blog

Bookemstevo. Blog

Entrevista en ‘The Forum’. BBC Radio

‘The Infatuations’ Top Ten Book Reviews

1 Top Ten Book Reviews
The Infatuations by Javier Marías

Born in Madrid in 1951, Javier Marías is the author of ten novels, as well as two collections of short stories and several books of essays. in 1997, he won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, one of the world’s most lucrative literary prizes, for the novel A Heart So White.

(Nowadays, the IMPAC prize is valued at €100,000 – if the winning novel is not in English, €25,000 goes to the translator.) A Heart So White was translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa, who has also translated The Infatuations, his first new novel for Penguin. The author’s work has been translated into 42 languages in total.

While his philosphical speculations may prove trying for some readers, The Infatuations is regarded as one of the Spanish writer’s most accessible novels. In terms of pace and focus, it certainly helps that its core event is a frenzied stabbing incident on a Madrid street, resulting in the death of a seemingly loving husband and father.

It is at first surmised that the crime is the random act of a madman. Or it may be a case of mistaken identity by an unhinged father who believed his victim was responsible for luring his two daughters into prostitution.

The story is told by one María Dolz who breakfasts at the same café each morning, where she watches with fascination a man and his wife. Their apparent conjugal happiness and ease with each other simply intrigue her.

Indeed watching the pair becomes part of her ritual, before she moves on to her job at a publishing house, and husband and wife also separate for the day. The couple, she notices, have two young children. A male friend also appears from time to time.

Such is Marías’ compelling gift that the reader can’t help but be drawn in, and the portrait of these two middle-aged people in love is wonderfully evoked. Where will the novelist take this thread you wonder?

Following a period during which the couple fail to appear at the outside table, María discovers that the husband – whose name it transpires is Miguel Desverne – is dead, the victim of the frenzied stabbing which has naturally made headline news in Madrid.

Eventually, his widow Luisa returns to the café and María approaches her to sympathise. She tells her how much she and her late husband intrigued her each morning at breakfast, even though they were perfect strangers.

María is duly invited to Luisa’s apartment where she meets the aforementioned male friend Javier. María and Javier begin to have a no-strings-attached affair. Luisa, it seems is the real object of Javier’s affections, as he waits for her to overcome her sadness at losing her husband, who is also, we are given to understand, his close friend.

One day, lying in Javier’s bed, María hears a male visitor come into the living room and talk excitedly to Javier about a man who appears to be Desverne’s murderer. It is a conversation that she wishes she hadn’t heard. She begins to fear for her own life, insisting to Javier that she heard nothing through the slightly-opened bedroom door.

Although it is not strictly in the genre, The Infatuations is as sophisticated as crime fiction can be, managing in its 346 pages to say so much about human nature, with its myriad fragilities, uncertainties and self-deceptions. No wonder Marías is translated into 42 languages; his themes are universal.

PADDY KEHOE

RTÉ (Raidió Teilifís Éireann, Ireland’s National), April 2013

Gli innamoramenti. Entrevista, reseñas, y más

Anatomia dell’ amore
RITA SALA
Il Messaggero, 30 dicembre 2012
La verità secondo María
MICHELE DE MIERI
24 Ore, 16 dicembre 2012
Marías, l’innamoramento è un thriller di parole
ROBERTO COTRONEO
Il Messaggero, 15 dicembre 2012
Questa volta ho voce di donna
PAOLO PETRONI
Il Cittadino, 13 dicembre 2012
La passione e le colpe inconfessabili
ANNA FOLLI
Gazzetta di Parma, 8 dicembre 2012
Comportamenti amorosi
EDMUNDO PAZ SOLDÁN
Letras Libres, 13 dicembre 2012
Due ragazze scomparse e una strana coppia perfetta
ALESSANDRO MARONGIU
La Nuova, 17 dicembre 2012
Se osservi due che si amano, il loro amore ti contagerà
LIANA MESSINA
F, 23 gennaio 2013
Gli innamoramenti
GIANLUCA VELTRI
Mucchio, 1 gennaio 2013
Alta letteratura con un tocco noir
PIERO MENARINI
Libero, 14 dicembre 2012
Poesía del matrimonio…
ROMANO MONTRONI
Corriere di Bologna, 26 gennaio 2013
Madrid, misteri e amori. Il nuovo incanto di Marías
ROSSELLA MARTINA
QN, 20 gennaio 2013
L’ amore secondo lei
PIERO MARIO FASANOTTI
Liberal, 15 dicembre 2012
Elogio della fantasia e della spietatezza amorosa
Panorama, 6 febbraio 2013
Dire buon Natale regalando un libro
ROBERTO PERROTTI
Corriere Nazionale, 16 dicembre 2012
Il Giornale, 26 gennaio 2013

Reedición de ‘I territori del lupo’

I TERRITORI DEL LUPO
JAVIER MARÍAS
Einaudi, 2013

Quando Marías ironizzava sull’ epoca d’ oro di Hollywood
PAOLA DEL VECCHIO
Il Mattino, 6 febrero 2013

Digressive progress: Spanish author Javier Marías

With plenty of observations, reflections and suppositions, Marías likes telling readers things ‘they didn’t know they knew’

When Javier Marías was a student of English Philology in Madrid in the 1970s he says it was with a sense of “awe and reverence” that he would buy copies of “the then grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics. The authors ranged from Conrad to James, Faulkner to Joyce, Thomas Mann to Ford Madox Ford, Woolf to Camus. Not even Nabokov was allowed to be there.” Last year Marías himself became one of just a handful of living writers to join that same list. “I must assume, therefore, that these are much less demanding times than the 1970s,” he explains modestly. “But, still, I feel very honoured, even if I can’t help thinking I must be a fraud.”

Far from being a fraud, it is difficult to think of many other living writers who are such an obvious fit for the list. In brute commercial terms, as was noted at the time, you could say his inclusion is not a bad hedge bet from his new publisher Penguin in the event of his winning the Nobel prize, something he is regularly tipped to do. In purely literary terms there is an even more compelling case. Few writers have sustained such an engagement with the classic (Anglophone) canon. As a translator he has rendered into Spanish work by Hardy, Yeats, Conrad, Nabokov, Faulkner, Updike, Salinger and many others. As a novelist, he has threaded his work with traces of these writers, and is explicitly underpinned by an empathy with Shakespeare and Sterne, as well as Cervantes and Proust.

“I’ve never had a literary project and feel I have been improvising all my career,” he recently claimed. “But I do recognise certain recurring themes: treason, secrecy, the impossibility of knowing things, or people, or yourself, for sure. 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.”

This flair for improvisation has seen him selling millions of books that have been translated into more than 40 languages. His 12th novel, “The Infatuations”, has just been published in English, and works such as “All Souls, A Heart So White” and, more recently, his monumental “Your Face Tomorrow” trilogy have received almost universal critical acclaim. And he has not only been garlanded with prizes. Among his other titles is King of Redonda, a real, if uninhabited, lump of Caribbean rock, the monarchy of which has been passed down through a line of writers.

“I’ve taken my responsibilities lightly,” he smiles, “but I do follow the tradition of an intellectual nobility.” He funds a literary prize and awards dukedoms to the winners, which so far have included among others Alice Munro, A.S. Byatt, William Boyd and Umberto Eco. “J.M. Coetzee was the first winner, and I was delighted that he accepted and joined in with the playfulness of it. Maybe it is time that I should start thinking about an heir. I inherited through an abdication, so I shall have to find another writer, as it is not passed on by blood but by letters.”

Marías has never visited Redonda and lives in a book-packed apartment overlooking one of Madrid’s oldest squares where he works on an electric typewriter, doesn’t have internet and is equally old-fashioned in his prodigious cigarette consumption. He has a long-term partner, but she lives in Barcelona. “And that is usually my lot. Either my girlfriends have been married at a time when there was no divorce in Spain, or they lived somewhere else or there was something else in the way.”

“The Infatuations”, featuring a rare Marías female narrator, is, among other things, a cool-eyed examination of love; in fact “Los enamoramientos”, the Spanish title, could also be translated as “The Crushes”. Maria has breakfast in the same café every morning, where she observes a married couple with the same routine. Some time after the couple stop coming to the café Maria learns that the husband has been brutally murdered, and she becomes embroiled in the life of the widow and the emotional ramifications of the husband’s death.

“Loving and falling in love have a very good reputation,” he says. “That may be justified sometimes, but sometimes it is the opposite. I have seen very generous, kind and noble people behave very badly because they are in love. Equally there is this idea of destiny. People remember how they met and wondered what would have happened if they hadn’t gone to that restaurant or that dinner. But we are in fact very limited in our choices of partner by location, class, history and who is willing to accept our advances. How many times are we not the first choice? Or even the second, or the third?”

The book has sold more than 160,000 copies in Spain and was awarded the national narrative award, which Marías declined because the 20,000-euro prize was funded by the state. He has been criticised as a novelist for not engaging directly in Spain’s turbulent political life although in fact the civil war and Franco’s rule have been dark presences in his books — but he has shown no reticence about engaging in the day-to-day as a newspaper columnist for the last 18 years.

“As a columnist I write as citizen and maybe have too many opinions” — he has published a whole book of just his football articles — “but writing as a novelist is different. I don’t like the journalistic kind of novel which is now rather fashionable. If a book or film takes a good subject from the everyday press — say domestic murders in Spain, which are a historic disgrace — everyone will applaud, but it is easy applause. Who will say it is bad? People say the novel is a way of imparting knowledge. Well, maybe. But for me it is more a way of imparting recognition of things that you didn’t know you knew. You say ‘yes’. It feels true even though it might be uncomfortable. You find this in Proust, who is one of the cruellest authors in the history of literature. He says terrible things, but in such a way that you know that you have experienced those thoughts too.”

Marías was born in Madrid in 1951, the fourth of five sons. Three of his brothers — the eldest died before he was born — went on to have careers in the arts. Their father was Julián Marías, a leading philosopher whose republican activities had seen him briefly imprisoned following the Spanish Civil War, an episode (Javier) Marías drew on in “Your Face Tomorrow”. Their mother, Dolores Franco, was a translator and an editor of an anthology of Spanish literature before starting a family. As a child Marías was taken for several trips to America where his father was teaching, having been blacklisted at home. Back in Madrid, his early writing came directly out of his reading; he created his own musketeer and Just William stories when he had finished all the books. “Richmal Crompton had been very popular in Spain since my parents’ time.”

The family home was full of books, art and elevating conversation. But Marías’s introduction to professional writing was facilitated by an uncle who was a maker of horror films. During the six weeks the 17-year-old Marías stayed at his uncle’s Parisian apartment he not only watched 85 films but also broke the back of a debut novel, “Los dominios del lobo” (“The Dominions of the Wolf”), which was published in 1971 when he was only 20.

“It was a sort of a tribute and parody of American films of the 1940s and 1950s. A youthful work, but not the usual autobiographical story of most young writers. And also not deadly serious in the way young people often are. As such, I’m actually not ashamed of it.”

He says the dominant trend in Spain at the time was social realism. “Franco was still alive. The idea was that writers, as far as censorship would allow, must try to raise the consciousness of the people about the terrible situation. I thought it was well meant, but had nothing to do with literature. My generation knew that a novel couldn’t end the dictatorship, and so as writers we did as we wanted.”

In fact over the next decade he published only another two novels as his career as a translator came to the fore, most notably with his 1979 version of “Tristram Shandy”, which won the (not state-funded) national translation prize. He categorises a translator as both a “privileged reader and a privileged writer. If you’re capable of rewriting in a different language something by Conrad or Sterne then you learn a lot. I’ve not got involved with the creative writing industry, but if I ever had my own creative writing school I would only admit people who could translate, and I would make them do it over and over again.”

During his years translating he found that some writers helped the translator by being stylistically contagious. “There is a pace and a rhythm of prose that, if the translator catches it, you can surf the wave of cadence. I certainly felt it with Conrad and in a way with Sir Thomas Browne. But it is not essential to good writing. It was not there with Yeats’s prose, or Isak Dinesen’s or Thomas Hardy’s. I like to think that my prose has some cadence that can contaminate, in the good sense, and help a translator. And I always want to help as much as I can because I remember being so annoyed that I couldn’t ask Conrad what he meant.”

He says that what is now regarded as his own distinctive style — the long, digressive, almost musical sentences that loop around observation, reflection and supposition — took many years to achieve and wasn’t really in place until his 1986 novel about an opera singer, “A Man of Feeling”. “I had written four novels before then. The impatience of the publishing world today might mean that I wouldn’t have been given a chance to get that far. So many worthwhile writers must have been lost because of this impatience. The change has been brutal.”

His next novel, “All Souls” (1989), based closely on his experiences teaching at Oxford in the 1980s, was a success, but it wasn’t until “A Heart So White” in 1992 that he first became a fixture on the bestseller lists. After selling well in Spain it became a global hit after “the Pope of German critics”, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, recommended it on television. “He was known as a tough critic who had once, literally, ripped up a Günter Grass book. But he said some exaggerated things about my book and that it should be No 1. Obediently, as sometimes Germans in their history have been, they went out and bought it.”

The book sold 1.3 million copies in Germany and later won the Impac prize. Marías’s novel-writing technique — “which I know could be suicidal” — is to set out with only minimal planning (all his notes for the 1,200-page “Your Face Tomorrow” trilogy were scribbled on just four sheets of A5 paper; not all of them were used) and then not to redraft the book, “although I do go back to change a Tuesday to a Thursday and things like that”. It is a high-wire act that is sustained by what must be a remarkable memory as he shapes his story round complicated digressions and repetitions. “What Sterne said always struck me as true: ‘I progress as I digress.’ And you realise that what seemed anecdotal is actually part of the story. I like to use a system of echoes and resonances and characters that reappear not only within the same book, but from one book to another.”

He describes the present situation in Spain as “scary”, and lambasts the government for using the economic crisis to impose labour reforms, toughen abortion laws, cut education and culture spending, and privatise the health system. “Those opinions I stand by. It is not quite the same as a novelist. A novel is a more savage and wild thing in the sense that you can say anything, and your narrators or characters can say anything. Yet it still arrives at a kind of truth. It is like the theatre where you know the name of the playwright, but when the curtain rises the accepted convention is that the audience doesn’t take all the actions or opinions on the stage as the author’s. It is the same with a book. You turn from the cover to the biographical note, then maybe a dedication until you reach page one and the curtain rises. From that moment on the name on the cover doesn’t matter any more.”

NICHOLAS WROE

Gulf News, Weekend Review, 4 April 2013

Nueva edición alemana de ‘Todas las almas’

ALLE SEELEN
JAVIER MARÍAS
S.Fischer, 2013

Edición sueca de ‘Los enamoramientos’

FÖRÄLSKELSER
JAVIER MARÍAS

Nuevas reseñas de ‘The Infatuations’

Strangers and fiction

Amanda Hutt

Javier Marías’s The Infatuations is, on one level, a traditional psychological thriller set in the aftermath of a seemingly random murder. It is also a love story and a meditation on life, fate and moral ambiguity – as well as being much concerned (as Marías often is) with the dead, who play a surprisingly active role in the lives of those they have left behind.

The narrator of Marías’s 13th novel is María Dolz, a single woman in her late thirties who works in a Madrid publishing house. María, who has to deal with the inflated egos and the (very funny) absurdities of a “megalomaniac boss and his horrible authors” is unflashy and underrated by the pompous men who surround her.

Her observer status, however, allows her to notice everything, especially the attractive and in-love “Perfect Couple” who breakfast every morning at the café she frequents. Nothing of their appearance and manner escapes her (or us): “he only wore suede towards the end of spring, when he started wearing lighter-coloured suits – and his hands were carefully manicured”. Although they never actually speak to María, we later learn that they knew her as “the Prudent Young Woman”, which pleases her.

This stylish husband, Miguel Deverne, is murdered by a deranged drifter and then referred to throughout the book by two surnames – Desvern or Deverne; in death, exact personhood is no longer fixed. (María notes drily: “His real surname was Desvern, and it occurred to me that perhaps his family had changed it at some point for business reasons.”)

The gradual revelation of how Deverne came to be killed forms the core psychological drama. We see everything as María does, and the novel bursts into life from the opening sentence – a perfect slice of Marías, writing as and through his almost-namesake narrator: “The last time I saw Miguel Desvern or Deverne was also the last time that his wife Luisa saw him, which seemed strange, perhaps unfair, given that she was his wife while I, on the other hand, was a person he had never met, a woman with whom he had never exchanged so much as a single word.”

Marías’s long-serving translator, Margaret Jull Costa, makes sure that English readers lose nothing from being one step removed from the author’s conversational, winding, and often bleakly funny Spanish prose.

Marías, 61, is tipped as a future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. In his native Spain he covers the cultural bases, from novels (like this one) strewn with literary references to a column in the newspaper El País, in which he discusses politics, football and other of-the-moment affairs. Fluent in English (Tristram Shandy is just one of the works he has rendered into Spanish), Marías has made translation a regular theme of his work.

María is not a translator-narrator, but inhabits the world of authors and their stories, although she sees nothing she wants to emulate: “I don’t want to be like those written voices that so often sound like muffled sighs, groans uttered in a world of corpses in the middle of which we all lie, if we drop our guard for a moment.”

Marías burrows deep inside the heads of his narrators, giving the reader a bumpy, brilliant ride through monologues in which it can be hard to tell what is said out loud between characters and what is internal stream of consciousness – or, at a further remove, what is merely conjecture, a narrator’s re-imagining of how the conversations or thoughts of others might play out. The prose requires attention and effort, and in return the author rewards us tenfold, allowing the verbal tricks of persuasion that we play on each other – and on ourselves – to be examined at length.

María gradually grows close to Deverne’s circle, and uncovers versions of the truth, although, as she admits: “The truth is never clear, it’s always a tangled mess. Even when you get to the bottom of it.” Even with imperfect knowledge, she has a moral choice to make and keeps us guessing until almost the last page. Yet what lingers in the reader’s mind is not the murder mystery, compelling though it is. Rather, it is the author’s examination of the ebb and flow of flawed relationships; the chances that bring us together and the fates (in this case, murderous intent) that pull us apart.

María’s narrative is by turns dreamlike and prosaic, confirming the author’s status as a brilliant modern incarnation of the ancient storyteller, bringing together the living and the dead, the real and the imagined. As the novel ends, having seen and heard so much, María suggests: “Everything becomes a story and ends up drifting in the same sphere, and then it’s hard to differentiate between what really happened and what is pure invention. Everything becomes a narrative and sounds fictitious even if it’s true.”

ISABEL BERWICK

The Financial Times, 22 March 2013

Agence Opale

Brief encounters

Javier Marías, a Spanish novelist, is fond of taking genre fiction and playing games with it. In his engrossing Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, the spy novel became an existential inquiry. His new book, The Infatuations, is a murder mystery, but one less interested in whodunit than in moral and psychological conundrums: how the dead haunt the living, how the living move on and how friendship can shade into enmity.

The narrator is María Dolz, a 30-something living in Madrid. At the start of the book she sees a newspaper photograph of a man stabbed to death in the street. The victim is Miguel Desvern, one half of a couple who have breakfast every morning in the same café as María, and enchant her with their contentment. In the aftermath of the crime, María briefly befriends Miguel’s widow Luisa, starts a relationship with Miguel’s best friend Javier Díaz-Varela, and ends up being drawn into the dark story of Miguel’s murder.

For all the drama, Mr Marías is not much interested in plot. The book’s power lies in its long sentences, translated with great agility by Margaret Jull Costa. Mr Marías can take a word or gesture and turn it like a diamond in the light, letting every facet shine. From a single meeting between María and Luisa, he draws penetrating insights into the grieving mind, and how the effects of bereavement “far outlast the patience of those prepared to listen”. In one gripping scene he spends a whole page unpacking the persuasions contained in a single touch, “a wordless way of saying to him: ‘Nothing has changed, I’m still here, I still love you.’” He sets up echoes like a composer. Early in the book, Luisa’s daughter touches her cheek in an act of comfort. Later Díaz-Varela touches María’s in an act of intimidation. It’s a thrilling transposition.

But for all that’s dazzling in the book, its foundations are too flimsy. Díaz-Varela says at one point: “once you’ve finished a novel, 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.” However, the weakness of the plot makes these ideas less forceful. Mr Marías takes the murder mystery’s denouement and replaces revelation with ignorance, guilt with reasonable doubt. “The truth is never clear,” says María, “it’s always a tangled mess.” But she was never intimate with Miguel and Luisa, her relationship with Díaz-Varela only fragile. Once you finish this novel, her confusion is less surprising, less moving, than it could have been.

S. W.

The Economist, 19 March 2013

Francis Tsang

Mystery man

This absorbing and unnerving new novel by the man hailed by Roberto Bolaño as “by far Spain’s best writer today” takes up once more a theme that he has pursued obsessively in ­previous novels: interpretation. He is fascinated by how we can “read” each other, and how we can extrapolate stories, Sherlock Holmes-like, from the smallest signs observed in others.

Jacques Deza, the cold-blooded protagonist of Marias’s acclaimed trilogy Your Face Tomorrow, has this natural gift for “seeing through” other people, for “reading” the tiniest detail of their appearance and behaviour. The female narrator of Marias’s latest novel, The Infatuations, has this gift, too, but where Deza’s gift was used for professional surveillance and investigation, hers is motivated by sexual obsession.

[Leer la reseña completa]

ADAM LIVELY

The Sunday Times, 17 March 2013

Javier Marías en Gran Bretaña

The Infatuations

Javier Marías está en Londres para presentar la versión inglesa de Los enamoramientos.

Hoy, 18 de marzo, a las 18,30 h., estará en la librería WATERSTONE’S (Piccadilly. London).

Mañana, 19 de marzo, a las 20,00 h., presentará  The Infatuations en la librería TOPPINGS BATH (The Paragon. Bath).

El miércoles, 20 de marzo:  a las 14, 45 h., firmará ejemplares de sus obras en la librería BLACKWELL’S (100 Charing Cross Road. London), y a las 19,30 h., acudirá al SOUTHBANK CENTRE (The Purcell Room in the Queen Elizabeth Hall building. London).

El jueves, 21 de marzo, a las 12,00 h., participará en el OXFORD LITERARY FESTIVAL (Bodleian: Divinity School. Oxford).

Entrevistas en BBC RADIO

Hoy, !8 de marzo, a las 20,32 horas, en BBC World Service ‘The Strand’, y a las 22,00 horas, en BBC Radio 3 ‘Night Waves’.

Javier Marías: the Spanish master of mystery

David Annand delights in The Infatuations, a pared-back, morally ambiguous study of a murder

Writers of crime fiction find themselves in the middle of an arms race. To compete in this new world today’s thriller must be equipped with multiple conspiracies that reveal ultimately, and always, pan-institutional corruption going all the way up to the President/the Pope/God himself. Into this world of massacres and media manipulation, drone strikes and biological weapons steps Spanish novelist Javier Marías with a simple blade with which he pares back the form to its essence: a single death and the attempt at its cover up.

Every morning Maria Dolz takes her breakfast at the same café. Across from her always sits the “Perfect Couple”. She watches them admiringly until one morning they don’t turn up. He has been killed, knifed to death by a vagrant. When the woman eventually reappears Maria approaches her and is invited to her house, where she meets Javier Diaz-Varela, with whom she begins an affair that pulls her into the orbit of the murder.

Steeped in the literature of his continent – the complex morality of Balzac’s Colonel Chabert, Dumas’s The Three Musketeers and Shakespeare’s Macbeth are minutely dissected – Marías’s novel is also a riposte to the relentless pacing of genre fiction. For as well as paring down the form he has extended it, telescoping time in such a way that he can articulate the moral and ethical assumptions that inform our seemingly intuitive decisions. Whole chapters are devoted to thought processes a few seconds long, and the characters communicate in epic meditations on love, death and enamoramientos, an emotional state far more urgent than the translation “infatuation” suggests. Unsurprisingly, these almost Kundera-like mini-essays impact on the verisimilitude of the narrative, but this matters not for they are beautifully written, and impish in their moral ambiguity.

By contenting himself with a single death Marías is able to cut through the fat of the modern murder mystery so that we might see homicide for what it is: the worst of crimes but also something commonplace, a cliché. As the musketeer Athos says enigmatically of one of his own crimes: “It was a murder, nothing more.”

DAVID ANNAND

The Telegraph, 14 March 2013

The Infatuations

Javier Marías does lots of things novelists aren’t meant to do. He tells, not shows. His sentences are long and flowery, with sub-clauses hanging off sub-clause like chains of tropical flowers. There is little action. He’s prone to lengthy philosophical detours. Yet he constructs some of Europe’s finest novels, and not just academics or highbrow critics celebrate him: he is popular, selling big in dozens of countries.

Marías published his first novel in Spain in 1971, aged 19. In the next two decades, he published four others, translated several from the English (winning a prize for Tristram Shandy – a clear influence) and taught in Spain, the US and at Oxford. Then, with the Oxford-set All Souls in 1989, he found his voice as a major novelist. It is the voice of a first-person narrator who observes intently, all the time doubting and speculating. His narrators’ elliptical meditations are rich in erudition and shifts of emotion, which can suddenly change pace into tense action scenes. Proust comes to mind as his stylistic forerunner.

All Souls was followed by three novels in the 1990s, including A Heart So White (winner of the 1997 IMPAC award). After 2000, the 1500-page trilogy Your Face Tomorrow raised his already substantial reputation. Marías reverted to the Oxford narrator of All Souls, but the themes darkened, embracing a public world of secret agencies spying and killing on behalf of the British state.

Marías expresses a left-wing view, in his books (implicitly) and in actions. In 2012 he refused Spain’s National Fiction Prize for The Infatuations. He wanted to maintain independence from the state; he complained too that his father, philosopher Julián Marías, a victim of the Franco dictatorship, never received recognition.

The Infatuations is confined to no more than half-a-dozen characters and settings in his native Madrid: a quiet street where a man is killed, a couple of flats, a cafeteria. Its air is claustrophobic. Overheard conversations are only half-understood.

For the first time, Marías sets himself the challenge of a female narrator, María Dolz, a publishing employee. She works well, but is little different from his other narrators: an observer, something of a voyeur. At breakfast, she watches a handsome, youngish couple in love. Marías readers know that such routine happiness cannot last and suddenly the “Perfect Couple, as she dubs them, is no longer seen at the café. Later, she sees in an old newspaper a photo of a man lying in the street: the husband, killed in a knife assault. The plot, the inquiry into what happened and why, is set. As usual, Marías makes unlikely situations feel plausible and creates a sense of sinister danger.

Marías barely suffers from the lack of authorial omniscience that the first-person entails. If he does want to tell you more than the narrator can see or overhear, his characters deliver a long monologue. The first person also enables Marías to indulge his pessimistic (and probably realistic) theme that other people’s lives are unknowable. The most delightful person may be a murderer. Can we ever know what our lover is thinking?

The book’s other themes are the fragility of normal life, whether love has any meaning and how easy it is to betray friends or lovers. Marías’s method is to set up parallel relationships, and explore them. María and Javier, another Marías charmer whose morals do not match up to his handsome face, are mismatched. She is infatuated – or “in love” as the Spanish title Los enamoramientos  suggests – while he is infatuated with Luisa. Though she’s no fool, she acts like a fool. Is this love? Or diseased infatuation? Or is love merely infatuation?

It is pleasing to see Marías’s fine translator, Margaret Jull Costa, given as much space inside the front flap as Marías himself. You do not notice her presence: when the translator vanishes, it means the translation’s good. The Infatuations is not Marías’s greatest novel: the tale is slighter than in others and the set-piece tours de force not so exciting. There is less humour, too, despite several fine scenes. The novel is pleasurable in its rhythm and in the voice, with its insights and doubts. Few writers catch so well the inner rhythms of a – neurotic – person’s mind.

MICHAEL EAUDE

The Independent, 15 March 2013

Allan Massie escribe sobre ‘The Infatuations’

She likes to watch a husband and wife who also breakfast there, and dubs them in her mind “the Perfect Couple”. One day they are missing, perhaps, she thinks, away on holiday. Then the man is murdered. She sees his photograph in the newspaper. There is apparently no mystery about the death. He has been stabbed by a deranged beggar apparently suffering from the delusion that the dead man had wronged him by making his daughters prostitutes.

A few weeks later, the widow is back at the café, with her young children. María impulsively approaches her to offer condolences. She learns that the Perfect Couple had a name for her in turn; they called her the “Prudent Young Woman”. The children are then collected and taken to school by a different man. The widow Luisa invites María to visit her. When she does so, they talk at length about the killing and bereavement. The other man, Javier, calls and is introduced as the dead husband’s best friend. Later María meets him again; they embark on an affair, even though it is clear that he really loves Luisa.

It sounds simple and straightforward enough, but nothing is simple in a Marías novel, partly because everything that is said and thought is subject to analysis and elaboration, and indeed much of the dialogue is not spoken, but consists of what the narrator supposes might have been said. This which is not said may be as revealing as what is said, may indeed be more truthful. On the other hand it may be quite mistaken and misleading. At the same time how much that is said is itself intended to mislead? María will discover that the circumstances of the murder were not as they appeared, but are they as she comes to suppose they may have been?

Marías is a remarkable novelist. You have to read him slowly, thinking about what he is saying, especially when his narrators goes off on a tangent which may last for many pages.

The Infatuations is, like all his books, very literary. The narrator broods on Macbeth’s response to the news of his wife’s death: “She should have died hereafter.” The best friend, Javier, draws her attention to Balzac’s novella, Le Colonel Chabert, the story of a French officer reputedly killed at the Battle of Eylau, who returns to France some years later and finds his wife married to another man. The dead shouldn’t come back, he says. Is he speaking about his murdered friend? Does he mean it’s a good thing he has gone? At the end of Balzac’s novella, the lawyer tells his clerk that “we lawyers see the same wicked feelings repeated over and over, and nothing can correct them, our offices are sewers that can never be washed clean.” But this too is ambiguous; after all, the function of a sewer is to carry the ordure away.

In the end an explanation of the murder may be offered to the narrator. But should she believe it? Should she question it? Should she, as it were, exhume the body? In doing so she would assume the responsibility of disturbing the new shape that the widow’s life has taken? She asks herself who she is to disturb the universe. Marías has written before about the power of the lie. But he also knows that the lie may make what would be insufferable tolerable. “Fiction,” one of his characters says, “has the ability to show us what we don’t know and what doesn’t happen”. Fiction is about revealing possibilities. Marías is less interested in telling a story – though there is always a story being told – than in extracting the significance of what is said, thought, supposed, imagined, and the relation of these things, of gestures also, to what is happening, has happened, or seems to have happened. He writes with restraint. “It is more horrifying,” he once said, “when something is insinuated” – rather than being thrown in your face. His novels are voyages of discovery – for himself first then for the reader. He finds out what he is writing about by writing it.

In one sense this book is a departure. In a Paris Review interview some six or seven years ago, he said that he found the idea of a male author using a female narrator “a little absurd” and implied that he didn’t think he could bring it off. Now he has. His “prudent young woman” rings true. That said, like his other narrators, she is more observer than actor; indeed her most important action may be the decision not to act – but then this is often the best course we can take.

The translation by Margaret Jull Costa, seems exemplary. By that, I mean that it reads naturally as English, yet retains a certain Spanish flavour.

ALLAN MASSIE

Scotsman, 2 March 2013

Reseña de ‘The Infatuations’

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 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.

ROBERT McCRUM

The Observer, 10 March 2013

‘The Infatuations’. Críticas

The Infatuations

Javier Marías – welcome to the funhouse

One of the books I dream of but will never write is a history of private jokes in the novel, a guide to all those concealed birthdays and vendettas. The book would be gigantic, and also an exercise in proving its own irrelevance –for in the end the only true way to read a novel is to dismiss the question of provenance: fiction is its own oddly impervious reality. There would be chapters on embedded quotations, or the names of friends– and one chapter specially reserved for the fiction of Javier Marías.

In a series of novels that includes The Man of Feeling (1986), All Souls (1988), A Heart So White (1992), Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me (1994), the three-volume giant Your Face Tomorrow (completed in 2007) and now The Infatuations (first published last year as Los enamoramientos), Marías has constructed a suite of first-person narratives that delight in tricks of perspective. Nearly all his narrators share elements of his biography – from his previous jobs to his first name. His most extensive exploration of this game is Dark Back of Time (1998), which Marías once described as a “false novel”. It was published between Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Meand the first volume of Your Face Tomorrow, and its inside-out form is like a mini funhouse mirror, splintering the novels before and after it into loopy refractions. It is the only one of his books explicitly narrated by “Javier Marías”, and its surface charm is the true story it tells – about how Marías came to “inherit” the minuscule kingdom of Redonda. But its deeper interest lies in the series of digressive stories he includes – many of which concern the strangely literal ways in which friends and strangers read his books, as systems of private messages and portraits. And the reason for this exploded experiment, I think, is very simple: the more the border between the fictional and the real is emphasized, the more its irrelevance is stressed. “What I present to the reader comes from my experience and from what I have invented, but it has all been filtered by literature”, Marías once told the Paris Review. “That is what matters: the filter.”

And Marías, of course, is right. So that when one of the recalcitrant readers in Dark Back of Time, Professor Francisco Rico, the distinguished scholar and editor of Cervantes –who was first disguised as Professor Del Diestro in All Souls, then as Professor Villalobos in A Heart So White– appears in The Infatuations in the guise of himself, his presence is another warning to the literal reader. As soon as you exist in a novel you are no longer yourself, not even if you keep your own name.

The Infatuations is narrated by a woman called María (even with a switch of gender, a Marías narrator is still an abbreviated pun on her inventor). She becomes attached to a couple who, like her, go every day to a café before work. She never talks to them, just observes. And the plot begins when the husband, Miguel Desvern, is found stabbed to death by a tramp in the street. The next time María sees Desvern’s wife, Luisa, she is moved to tell her how sad the news has made her: they always seemed, she says, the model couple. Luisa invites María home, where she meets Javier Díaz-Varela, a friend of the Desverns (and also, briefly, Professor Rico); some time later María encounters Díaz-Varela by chance again and they begin an affair, in the course of which she discovers –or does not discover, because nothing is ever quite certain– a plot behind the dead man’s murder.

It looks like both a love story and a murder mystery, but the surface plot is never the true plot. A plot is just a toy for thinking, and all of Marías’s narrators –so often experts in other people’s words, whether as ghost writer, translator, spy, singer or, like María, a publisher– are mavens of conjecture. María confidently describes imaginary conversations between characters she has just met, or never met, or ascribes imaginary motives to them. The author has often noted the influence of Henry James on his snaking sentences (which have been translated with gorgeous consistency across his oeuvre by Margaret Jull Costa) but the real larceny is much grander. He has borrowed James’s “supersubtle” narrators and observers, who “convert the very pulses of the air into revelations”. And he has also inherited James’s luminous belief in art, the belief he once famously explained to H. G. Wells: “It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance”. Even the most lurid events, according to this theory, achieve their true form through imagination, and this is the philosophy of Marías’s constructions. His plots are based on sensational desires – and these desires only exist through a web of recondite, elegant thinking. One of Marías’s discoveries has been to reveal the B-movie and the self-reflective novel as twin aspects of the same thing.

This makes for a reading experience that is sometimes urbanely sensual –one of María’s most brilliant riffs in the novel is an expanded meditation on the various implications of appearing with or without a bra in front of a stranger– and sometimes abstractly philosophical; or, maybe more precisely, sensual and philosophical, simultaneously. For the real pleasure is in the strange things his narrators do to the business of narration. Marías has discovered a unique form – even if he himself might deny the possibility of uniqueness in literature. He has a fastidious dislike of originality. In an essay he once wrote in praise of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, he admitted that he did not believe in the idea of literary progress. For everything in literature, he argued, exists in a state of timelessness: “Old and new texts breathe in unison, so much so that one wonders sometimes if everything that has ever been written is not simply the same drop of water falling on the same stone, and if, perhaps, the only thing that really changes is the language of each age”. But Marías is original; he cannot help it. And this originality derives from these ghostly first-person narrators, who possess an unusually double talent: for digression and transition. In a recent book of conversations, the composer Thomas Adès quoted Morton Feldman’s aphorism on Beethoven: “it’s not so much how he gets into things that’s interesting, it’s how he gets out of them”. And this is also true of Marías. Like Beethoven, he is a brilliant escape artist. His narrators can drift for giant lengths, and yet still re-emerge, calmly, on to the same stage, transformed by their reflections.

The problem is that –like so many novelistic techniques– Marías’s acrobatics between paragraphs or chapters can only be coarsely paraphrased. There is one swarming sequence inThe Infatuations in which María’s lover Díaz-Varela describes the plot of Balzac’s novella Colonel Chabert –the story of a man who is mistakenly buried after the Battle of Eylau. Years later, Chabert returns to Paris to reclaim his former life. But his wife does not want him back. She has moved on; her old self is dead. It is a realist story that is also a ghost story. Díaz-Varela tells this story at a length that seems entirely disproportionate within the novel, a disproportion made all the more exorbitant when María herself then reads the novella, and notices a mistranslation by Díaz-Varela– prompting a new cadenza, which lasts for several pages, about whether there is “a difference between preparing someone for their early ruin and death and killing them outright”. And yet, simultaneously, the reader is entering, unaware, one of the novel’s deep preoccupations.

Marías manages to convert the expectation that very little will ever happen in his novels into his own brand of suspense. The real meaning seeps through his narrator’s stalled hesitations and digressions. The melody emerges from the harmonies, and vice versa. He loves to let his plots hang suspended, the present moment of narration an absence, described through its anticipation and recollection. All his novels are experiments in time frames. Time is his basic subject. So many of his characters are “beings not made for time, for whom the very notion of time and its passing is a grievance”, as Marías wrote in All Souls. And this is true of his new protagonist, too.

Early in her affair with Díaz-Varela, María considers the humiliations a lover is happy to suffer when considering her beloved:

“When we get caught in the spider’s web, we fantasize endlessly and, at the same time, make do with the tiniest crumb, with hearing him, smelling him, glimpsing him, sensing his presence, knowing that he is still on our horizon, from which he has not entirely vanished, and that we cannot yet see, in the distance, the dust from his fleeing feet.”

Much later, after the affair is over, she meets Díaz-Varela again, and once again conjures the same image. But this time, her sentence is interrupted by two new phrases:

“It’s true that when we get caught in the spider’s web – between the first chance event and the second – we fantasize endlessly and are, at the same time, willing to make do with the tiniest crumb, with hearing him – as if he were the time itself that exists between those two chance events – smelling him, glimpsing him, sensing his presence …”

Her thinking about love has become contaminated or deepened by her thinking about death. Díaz-Varela once told her that Desvern had few qualms about dying –since both birth and death are random events: “We don’t object to our date of birth, so why object to our date of death, which is just as much a matter of chance”. This is the conversation she now distantly remembers, and it represents the final pattern of the novel. Everyone, in the end, will disappear– however lingeringly, or slowly. Not even memory will survive, not even love. That is what the murder plot investigates, through the intricacy of María’s thinking.

Even here there is a private joke. In his essay on The Leopard, which he admiringly described as a study in mortality, Marías quoted the novel’s famous ball scene, in which Don Fabrizio watches the couples dancing: “his disgust gave way to compassion for all these ephemeral beings out to enjoy the tiny ray of light granted them between two shades, before the cradle, after the last spasms”. María’s phrase about the time between “the first chance event and the second” is the author’s private homage –and therefore another test of the abstract reader. Only the filter matters, after all. In The Infatuations the phrase has multiple ramifications. Those “two chance events” are birth and death, or the birth of desire and the death of desire– but they are also, in the end, very simply, María’s two chance meetings with two separate couples that open and close the novel. All the clues the reader needs are already there, on this noirish novel’s uniquely luminous surface.

ADAM THIRLWELL

The Times Literary Supplement, 6 March 2013

‘The Infatuations’, by Javier Marías

A café in Madrid. From her table across the room a solitary woman watches an attractive couple share breakfast morning after morning and speculates pleasurably about their relationship. One day they fail to appear and as time passes she feels a deepening sense of loss. Later she learns that the man has been murdered, stabbed to death in the street — an apparently senseless crime.

The tragedy of the happy couple touches and disturbs her. Then, almost accidentally, she finds herself becoming involved with the widow and the dead man’s best friend. At first all is straightforward: loss, grieving, consolation. Gradually the relationship becomes more complex: she begins an affair with the friend, recognising that she is little more than a stopgap in his life. And so things continue, until, at a certain point a remark overheard, an ominous hint, sets up unease and leaves her floundering. Nothing is quite as it seems — but how could it be? We’re in Javier Marías territory. This is a novelist who doesn’t deal in the straightforward; his narratives are serpentine, his vocabulary one of ambiguity, his landscape a place of shadows.

The Infatuations is a metaphysical exploration masquerading as a murder mystery. The narrator, the widow and the best friend spend much of the book engaged in conversation, or imagined conversation, or recollected conversation, living simultaneously in a past both real and fantasy, tinged with nostalgia and regret, and a future imbued with suspicion and impossible hopes. The truth is slippery. There is action: but the killing will have taken place in the past, as will the love-making. Head-clutching stuff, but quietly addictive.

Marías is a wolf in sheep’s clothing: his ostensible subjects look seductively mainstream: his 1,600-page trilogy Your Face Tomorrow reads like Proust re-imagined by Le Carré — spying, adultery, betrayal, sex and violence. But these are devious means to other ends. Calm, labyrinthine sentences last for pages; an authorial pause button can freeze a violent act while an examination of treason or loyalty runs its course, and the action is resumed.

His novels (13 so far) have brought him prizes and an international following. There is talk of the Nobel. In Spain he spans the worlds of literature and academe, while writing a popular weekly column in El País.  He has translated Shakespeare, Nabokov and Faulkner, and his past includes a spell at Oxford, lecturing on translation, an experience which inspired his novel All Souls. He followed it with A Heart so White, which won the 1992 Dublin IMPAC prize.

While critics have invoked Proust and Henry James in reviews of previous books,  Marías himself claims Sterne as a major influence — he translated The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy into Spanish, and his own playfulness and tantalising side-trips are very Shandyesque, though the sinister, disturbing undertones and occasional casual violence are all his own.

At several points in The Infatuations, the male protagonist recounts snatches of a Balzac story. When the narrator asks how it ended; what happened? he replies:

It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, 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… Fiction has the ability to show us what we don’t know and what doesn’t happen.

Between the interstices of the fragile plot of The Infatuations are disquisitions on life and death, freedom, the consequences of love, the impossibility of ever knowing another, and the role of fiction. Marías’s books generally feature a narrator who observes the scene without necessarily understanding everything. Translation enters repeatedly into his narratives, and Margaret Jull Costa, who has provided superb translations for most of his books, including this one, says he’s like Paul Klee who claimed he ‘took a line for a walk’: Marías, she says, ‘takes a thought for a walk. He makes us think.’

Along the way we get his immaculate prose and his sardonic view of the implacable nature of time — what Larkin called the long perspectives open at each instant of our lives.

LEE LANGLEY

The Spectator, 9 March 2013

The Infatuations

The only certainties in life are generally held to be death and taxes. But in this metafictional murder mystery by acclaimed Spanish author Javier Marias even the dead can’t be taken for granted.

The victim in this novel is wealthy businessman Miguel Desvern. For years, narrator Maria has taken pleasure in the sight of Miguel and his wife, Luisa, breakfasting together at the café that she too frequents. In her mind they are the perfect couple – but one day a deranged homeless man stabs Miguel to death in the street.

In the aftermath of this apparently random killing, Maria visits Miguel’s grief-stricken widow, subsequently meeting Javier, a friend of the murdered man, with whom she is instantly smitten. But Javier is infatuated with the mourning Luisa, and soon Maria is entangled in a plot so strange that even she finds it hard to credit.

‘Our convictions are transient and fragile,’ Maria imagines Javier saying. ‘It’s the same with our feelings. We shouldn’t trust ourselves.’ Wise words, it turns out.  As Maria attempts to reconstruct events, she realizes how hard it is to know the truth – as, increasingly, do we.

Plotted with tremendous skill and elegance, this cerebral tale is entirely absorbing.

STEPHANIE CROSS

Dailymail Online, 7 March 2013

The Infatuations

Even if your idea of a good time isn’t reading an emotionally complex and intellectually subtle novel that takes the tragic powers of love as its subject, and that nearly hums with latent erotic energy and mystery (and if that isn’t your idea of a good time, then you’re a miserable so-and-so), I would still recommend reading Javier Marias’s latest book, The Infatuations.

Before I try to back that up, a question: what is a romantic writer? Is it someone whose prose favours feeling over thought? Is it a writer unconcerned with theoretical questions, whose greatest ambition is to move the reader? I’m not sure. Probably the question requires hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of meticulous argumentation from a team of only the most prestigious and erudite of scholars to be answered. All the same, I’m going to go ahead and say that Marias is amongst the most romantic of contemporary novelists. Love and death, those evergreen sources of sublime literary material, are his bread and butter.

The Infatuations runs deep. The story –of a woman who falls in love with a man after an improbable and gruesome murder– is the sort of thing a more conventional writer might deal with in a novella. There are only a handful of characters, connected via a web of relationships that forms following the death of Miguel Desvern, a handsome and charming Madrileño. Marias probes leisurely and delicately at the thoughts and feelings of each. Never rushing, he teases out allusions and possibilities. Secrets abound. Marias knows how to cater for doubt and curiosity, and to engage the intelligence as well as the emotions of his readers.

The Infatuations is a holistic and atomic examination of the behaviour of those citizens that Marias takes to be the most dangerous members of society: people in love.

WILL HEYWARD

Readings, 21 February 2013

‘Gli innamoramenti’

CONSIGLI DI LETTURA:

Gli innamoramenti

Per quale ragione Maria Dolz, la protagonista, voce narrante,  dell’ultimo romanzo di Javier Marias, Gli innamoramenti (Einaudi, 2012) sente il bisogno di fermarsi in un bar ogni mattina prima di recarsi al lavoro  per osservare una coppia di perfetti sconosciuti, Luisa e Miguel Desvern, mentre fanno colazione? Certamente perché quell’uomo e quella donna così sereni le consentono una contemplazione concreta della felicità negata dalla letteratura: Maria che lavora in una casa editrice sa bene che se i due fossero personaggi di un romanzo qualcosa di brutto accadrebbe loro, qualcosa di storto a un certo punto devasterebbe la loro esistenza. Dunque di quell’ipotesi illusoria di bene  la donna è destinata ad “innamorarsi”.

Ma ben presto il quadro va in frantumi, l’incantesimo svanisce e la  tela di regno cui non è possibile sfuggire svela un volto equivoco: un parcheggiatore disperato uccide Miguel scambiandolo per un’altra persone, Luisa ne è sconvolta, Maria le si presenta e per qualche ora ha l’occasione di penetrare l’intimità domestica della coppia; proprio in casa di Luisa  conosce il miglior amico dei due coniugi Javier, se ne sente attratta, ne diventa l’amante, pur essendo perfettamente consapevole di non essere ricambiata e non pretendendolo neppure.

Il secondo innamoramento nella mente della protagonista non è che un pallido riflesso del primo: il triangolo ideale con lei al centro, giovane prudente,  non può ancora realizzarsi, Javier non ama lei, bensì Luisa, se non che questa è ancora legata al marito, e quindi i due sono ancora distanti. Ma in quale direzione porta la vera trama de Gli innamoramenti e cosa davvero cerca Maria e perché il cuore del dramma, l’omicidio di Miguel, non viene chiarito mai fino in fondo?

In realtà Marìas trova una chiave originale per riscrivere Il colonnello Chabert di Balzac e la parte meno nota de I tre moschettieri relativa alle vicende passate di Athos. Sia l’uno che l’altro, citati spesso dai protagonisti de Gli innamoramenti,   raccontano di come la resurrezione di persone credute morte non è mai la benvenuta. Lo scrittore spagnolo porta alla luce ciò che gli intrecci di Balzac e Dumas sottendevano: il modo con cui l’animo umano percepisce gli eventi, ne dilata o ne sminuisce le conseguenze, li deforma o li rimuove deve finire sotto la lente del microscopio, i fatti  nella loro nudità di circostanze accessorie sono irrecuperabili e in fondo trascurabili. Per questo  in Marìas lunghi monologhi e soliloqui interminabili costituiscono il nerbo di una prosa analiticamente lucida su ogni sfaccettatura del ragionamento.  La realtà ignora di se stessa ciò che la letteratura ha il coraggio di inventare e scoprire: come reagirei se…? E’ la verità su noi stessi a cui i libri ci consentono di rispondere. Ascoltando la voce di Maria Dolz veniamo a sapere che vivere significa sempre tradire, e che nessun innamoramento come nessun lutto  dura a lungo. Detto con parole più semplici: “ Chi muore giace e chi vive si dà pace”.

Javier Marías (Madrid, 20 settembre 1951) è uno scrittore spagnolo. Tradotto in tutto il mondo e vincitore dei più importanti Premi letterari, tra i quali il premio internazionale di letteratura Impac e il Nelly Sachs, Javier Marías è anche traduttore e saggista. Domani nella battaglia pensa a me ha vinto il premio Rómulo Gallegos e il Prix Femina Etranger].È nipote del regista Jesús Franco e figlio del filosofo Julián Marías (discepolo prediletto di José Ortega y Gasset). In Italia la maggior parte della sua opera è tradotta da Einaudi.

Il Recensore, 7 Marzo 2013

‘The Infatuations’

Toward the end of last year, Javier Marías was awarded a prestigious Spanish literary prize and the €20,000 that came with it, both of which he had no hesitation in refusing. 

His reasons were simple. All his life, he said, he has avoided state institutions and refused to accept any income from the public purse. “I don’t want to be seen as an author who is favoured by any particular government.”

Noble – and unusual – as Marías’s sentiments surely are, he was nevertheless keen to point out that his views applied only to Spanish literary awards. Were the Nobel Committee to call him that would be another matter. And well it might, for Marías must one day be a prime contender if he is not already on the radar.

In his new novel, The Infatuations, the 14th to be translated into English and the first to feature a female narrator, mention is made of the Nobel laureateship. María Dolz works in a Madrid publishing house where she is obliged to stroke the egos of authors. One night, after returning from her lover’s apartment, she considers how the most unlikely things happen; how, for example, “the school dunce is made a minister and the layabout turns banker”. Then, muses María, there is the “most simple-minded student” who “becomes a venerated writer and a candidate for the Nobel Prize”. This is Marías at his most mischievous, content to have his croissant and eat it.

The first thing to say about The Infatuations is that it is a thriller, but not of the kind that routinely clogs the bestseller lists. On the contrary, it avoids cliche and cardboard characters and is written in a testing style that is reminiscent of Henry James or Virginia Woolf in stream of consciousness mode. Often several pages go by without paragraph breaks and sentences are allowed to run for hundreds of words.

The effect is mesmerising and, on occasion, bewildering. This is not a book to speed read. It was Raymond Chandler who said that “when in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand”. Marías would never stoop to such unsubtle attention-grabbing. He works by stealth and an accumulation of detail, clarity emerging slowly and circuitously. There is nothing linear about a Marías novel and The Infatuations is no exception.

It begins as Marías means it to go on: “The last time I saw Miguel Desvern or Deverne was also the last time that his wife, Luisa, saw him, which seemed strange, perhaps unfair, given that she was his wife, while I, on the other hand, was a person he had never met, a woman with whom he had never exchanged so much as a single word.”

No-one in a creative writing class teaches students to open a novel in this manner. Immediately, though, questions clamour to be answered. Every morning, it transpires, María visits a restaurant for breakfast where she observes Luisa and Miguel, a seemingly happy, well-to-do couple with two young children.

She is fascinated by them, possibly more than that. Her interest seems to go beyond curiosity and veers toward stalking. “The nicest thing about them,” she writes, “was seeing how much they enjoyed each other’s company.”

Of course, in novels idylls are simply harbingers of disaster and it strikes soon enough when Miguel – dimple-chinned like Robert Mitchum or Kirk Douglas – is brutally murdered in broad daylight, apparently in a random act by one Madrid’s many unemployed.

Now Luisa is a widow  and is befriended by María, whom she and Miguel had nicknamed the “Prudent Young Woman”. Over several glasses of wine Luisa wallows in grief and tries to figure out how to tell her children what has happened. With such an abrupt death there is so much unfinished business, so many loose ends, such a feeling of incompletion, of raggedness and emptiness. and widow a is Luisa Now

Nevertheless, María suggests that Luisa will eventually get over her loss and remarry. Heading the list of suitors is a man called Díaz-Varela, with whom María is soon having an affair. But though she is in love with him, he refers to her as his “bird” and behaves in a manner that suggests any infatuation is not reciprocated. Could it be because Díaz-Varela has designs on Luisa? If so, did he conspire to have her husband killed in order to possess her?

As in his previous work, Marías is adroit in evoking tension. His prose is chillingly clear and hypnotically eerie. Like a film director who is content to allow the camera to linger on an actor’s face, registering every blink and tic and sniff, he lets his characters talk and talk, as if they were addressing a psychiatrist or a mirror. But at this very fine and disturbing novel’s core is a compelling meditation on love in all its ramifications.

ALAN TAYLOR

The Herald Scotland, 2 March 2013

‘The Infatuations’, por Manguel

The Infatuations

The 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.”

ALBERTO MANGUEL

The Guardian, 1 March 2013

‘The Infatuations’

This cerebral, coolly compelling crime novel appears in the first instance to have one of those observant but passive narrators recognisable from works such as The Great Gatsby, Brideshead Revisited and The Secret deal to alter its course. As it turns out Maria, our guiding voice here, gets a little closer to the flame than the reader is initially given to expect – and responds in a rather more complex way. But the lines between passive and active participation, individual and shared responsibility, indirect influence and direct instruction, also turn out to be central to the novel as a whole. When is a murder not a murder? What influences might play in, above, beyond and perhaps behind the hand that grips the weapon? Can a great love justify a destructive act – and could killing somebody ever be the right thing to do?

Maria is a solitary young Madrid woman employed by a publishing house – largely, it seems, to babysit obnoxious writers, who are given to calling her to ask which socks they should team with their outfits. She sources secondhand glamour not from these fêted figures, but from a couple she sees every day in the café where she breakfasts. Well-dressed, confident, a little older than she, this pair – whose names she gleans to be Miguel and Luisa – make ­Maria happy with their obvious happiness. When tragedy befalls them, their watcher has a choice: let go of the fantasy of their relationship, or wade in and involve herself in the aftermath of its abrupt curtailment? She picks the latter path; and duly makes discoveries that both round out and challenge her simplistic characterisation of Miguel and Luisa­ as ‘The ­Perfect Couple’. One revelation is that she has been a character for them as well: they call her, ‘The Prudent Young Woman’, and that soubriquet too turns out to have both insight and dark ­inaccuracy to it.

Having instilled herself in what remains of the couple’s life, Maria meets their friend Javier, and is drawn into a relationship that appeals both in its own right, and as a way to find out more about her favourite couple. (It also creates a pairing – Javier and Maria – which forms a playful echo of the author’s name.) As its title suggests, much of what occurs in Marías’ novel is powered by the supposed passion stirred by one character for another, and this primacy of emotion does not languish unanalysed: over screeds of conversation and conjecture, these characters assess love and what it might drive them to do.

Yet Marías, perversely, takes a distinctly non-carnal approach to this romantically charged subject matter. We must take his word that these characters are hot for one another, since the prose keeps a fastidious distance from the meat of their affairs. (Although Marías does fall into a strangely common trap of the male writer occupying a female perspective: that of supposing women spend a lot of time thinking about their breasts.)

This is a mature, thoughtful take on potboilerish content: a crime thriller seen through a philosophical and literary ­filter, which, while it dwells ­little on the gory details of its central misdeeds, can find ­copious pages on which to ­synopsise and muse on slightly relevant texts by Balzac and Dumas.

This constant backgrounding of drama in favour of ­theory can get a bit much, as can Marías’ style, which favours tremendously long sentences, hooked together by multiple commas, which pile clause upon clause, sometimes 20 or 30 of them without a full stop – though sometimes dashes crop up – to break their tumble down the page, a habit that can be rather hypnotic, but can also tell on the patience of the reader, confuse her, send her scanning back, looking for the start of the point, or simply yearning for a semi-colon, to provide a little extra space, to permit her mind to catch its breath… But neither the defiantly cerebral cast of Marías’ prose, nor this demanding prose style, prevent The Infatuations from gripping the attention. Its protagonist intrigues from the start, when we don’t know whether she’s an innocent chronicler of other’s deeds, or a malign influence thereon; and its discussions on literature, love and responsibility offer a degree of exercise for the brain not commonly found in tales of lust and murder.

Smart, thoughtful, morally challenging and consistently surprising in its tense twists, this is a sleek atmospheric work – one that gives the lie to its persistent contention that fiction and “the idiotic world of publishing” have nothing much to tell us about our lives. But then, Marías may have specific axes to grind: he runs his own small press, which is named Reino de Redonda in tribute to his further surprising sideline: being king of the Caribbean micro-nation of Redonda. And there’s something you don’t get to say about many novelists. Marías, it seems, is no more predictable a figure than the characters he creates.

HANNA McGILL

The Scotsman, 24 February 2013

THE INFATUATIONS

THE INFATUATIONS
JAVIER MARÍAS
Translation: Margaret Jull Costa
Hamish Hamilton
Hardback: 07 Mar 2013

The Infatuations by Javier Marías: Javier Marías’s new book, translated by Marguerite Jull Costa, is his 14th novel to be published in English. It was awarded Spain’s National Novel Prize last October, but Marías turned it down out of an aversion to receiving public money. It’s the story of a woman’s obsession with an apparently happy couple who inexplicably disappear. It’s his first novel to be narrated from a woman’s perspective, so it will be interesting to see how Marias manages to accommodate his penchant “for detailed descriptions of ladies crossing and uncrossing their legs”. (Mark)

The Millions, January 7, 2013

Javier Marías: a life in writing

When Javier Marías was a student of English Philology in Madrid in the 1970s he says it was with a sense of “awe and reverence” that he would buy copies of “the then grey-spined Modern Classics Penguin. The authors ranged from Conrad to James, Faulkner to Joyce, Thomas Mann to Ford Madox Ford, Woolf to Camus. Not even Nabokov was allowed to be there.” Last year Marías himself became one of just a handful of living writers to join that same list. “I must assume, therefore, that these are much less demanding times than the 1970s,” he explains modestly. “But, still, I feel very honoured, even if I can’t help thinking I must be a fraud.”

Far from being a fraud, it is difficult to think of many other living writers who are such an obvious fit for the list. In brute commercial terms, as was noted at the time, you could say his inclusion is not a bad hedge bet from his new publisher Penguin in the event of his winning the Nobel prize, something he is regularly tipped to do. In purely literary terms there is an even more compelling case. Few writers have sustained such an engagement with the classic (Anglophone) canon. As a translator he has rendered into Spanish work by Hardy, Yeats, Conrad, Nabokov, Faulkner, Updike, Salinger and many others. As a novelist, he has threaded his work with traces of these writers, and is explicitly underpinned by an empathy with Shakespeare and Sterne, as well as Cervantes and Proust.

“I’ve never had a literary project and feel I have been improvising all my career,” he recently claimed. “But I do recognise certain recurring themes: treason, secrecy, the impossibility of knowing things, or people, or yourself, for sure. 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.”

This flair for improvisation has seen him selling millions of books that have been translated into more than 40 languages. His 12th novel, The Infatuations, is published in English next month, and work such as All Souls, A Heart So White, and, more recently, his monumental Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, have received almost universal critical acclaim. And he has not only been garlanded with prizes. Among his other titles he is King of Redonda, a real, if uninhabited, lump of Caribbean rock, the monarchy of which has been passed down through a line of writers.

“I’ve taken my responsibilities lightly,” he smiles, “but I do follow the tradition of an intellectual nobility.” He funds a literary prize and awards dukedoms to the winners, which so far have included among others Alice Munro, AS Byatt, William Boyd and Umberto Eco. “JM Coetzee was the first winner, and I was delighted that he accepted and joined in with the playfulness of it. Maybe it is time that I should start thinking about an heir. I inherited through an abdication, so I shall have to find another writer, as it is not passed on by blood but by letters.”

Marías has never visited Redonda and lives in a book-packed apartment overlooking one of Madrid’s oldest squares where he works on an electric typewriter, doesn’t have internet and is equally old-fashioned in his prodigious cigarette consumption. He has a long-term partner, but she lives in Barcelona. “And that is usually my lot. Either my girlfriends have been married at a time when there was no divorce in Spain, or they lived somewhere else or there was something else in the way.”

The Infatuations, featuring a rare Marías female narrator, is, among other things, a cool-eyed examination of love; in fact “Los enamoramientos”, the Spanish title, could also be translated as ”The Crushes”. Maria has breakfast in the same café every morning, where she observes a married couple with the same routine. Some time after the couple stop coming to the café Maria learns that the husband has been brutally murdered, and she becomes embroiled in the life of the widow and the emotional ramifications of the husband’s death.

“Loving and falling in love have a very good reputation,” he says. “That may be justified sometimes, but sometimes it is the opposite. I have seen very generous, kind and noble people behave very badly because they are in love. Equally there is this idea of destiny. People remember how they met and wondered what would have happened if they hadn’t gone to that bar or that dinner. But we are in fact very limited in our choices of partner by location, class, history and who is willing to accept our advances. How many times are we not the first choice? Or even the second, or the third?”

The book has sold more than 160,000 copies in Spain and was awarded the national narrative award, which Marías declined because the €20,000 prize was funded by the state. He has been criticised as a novelist for not engaging directly in Spain’s turbulent political life – although in fact the civil war and Franco’s rule have been dark presences in his books – but he has shown no reticence about engaging in the day-to-day as a newspaper columnist for the last 18 years.

“As a columnist I write as citizen and maybe have too many opinions” – he has published a whole book of just his football articles – “but writing as a novelist is different. I don’t like the journalistic kind of novel which is now rather fashionable. If a book or film takes a good subject from the everyday press – say domestic murders in Spain, which are a historic disgrace – everyone will applaud, but it is easy applause. Who will say it is bad? People say the novel is a way of imparting knowledge. Well, maybe. But for me it is more a way of imparting recognition of things that you didn’t know you knew. You say ‘yes’. It feels true even though it might be uncomfortable. You find this in Proust, who is one of the cruellest authors in the history of literature. He says terrible things, but in such a way that you know that you have experienced those thoughts too.”

Marías was born in Madrid in 1951, the fourth of five sons. Three of his brothers – the eldest died before he was born – went on to have careers in the arts. Their father was Julián Marías, a leading philosopher whose republican activities had seen him briefly imprisoned following the Spanish civil war, an episode Javier drew on in Your Face Tomorrow. Their mother, Dolores Franco, was a translator and an editor of an anthology of Spanish literature before starting a family. As a child Marías was taken for several trips to America where his father was teaching, having been blacklisted at home. Back in Madrid, his early writing came directly out of his reading; he created his own musketeer and Just William stories when he had finished all the books. “Richmal Crompton had been very popular in Spain since my parents’ time.”

The family home was full of books, art and elevating conversation. But Marías’s introduction to professional writing was facilitated by an uncle who was a maker of soft porn and horror films. During the six weeks the 17-year-old Marías stayed at his uncle’s Parisian apartment he not only watched 85 films but also broke the back of a debut novel, Los dominios del lobo (“The Dominions of the Wolf”) that was published in 1971 when he was only 20.

“It was a sort of a tribute and parody of American films of the 1940s and 50s. A youthful work, but not the usual autobiographical story of most young writers. And also not deadly serious in the way young people often are. As such, I’m actually not ashamed of it.”

He says the dominant trend in Spain at the time was social realism. “Franco was still alive. The idea was that writers, as far as censorship would allow, must try to raise the consciousness of the people about the terrible situation. I thought it was well meant, but had nothing to do with literature. My generation knew that a novel couldn’t end the dictatorship, and so as writers we did as we wanted.”

In fact over the next decade he published only another two novels as his career as a translator came to the fore, most notably with his 1979 version of Tristram Shandy, which won the (not state-funded) national translation prize. He categorises a translator as both a “privileged reader and a privileged writer. If you’re capable of rewriting in a different language something by Conrad or Sterne then you learn a lot. I’ve not got involved with the creative writing industry, but if I ever had my own creative writing school I would only admit people who could translate, and I would make them do it over and over again.”

During his years translating he found that some writers helped the translator by being stylistically contagious. “There is a pace and a rhythm of prose that, if the translator catches it, you can surf the wave of cadence. I certainly felt it with Conrad and in a way with Sir Thomas Browne. But it is not essential to good writing. It was not there with Yeats’s prose, or Isak Dinesen’s or Thomas Hardy’s. I like to think that my prose has some cadence that can contaminate, in the good sense, and help a translator. And I  always want to help as much as I can because I remember being so annoyed that I couldn’t ask Conrad what the hell he meant.”

He says that what is now regarded as his own distinctive style – the long, digressive, almost musical sentences that loop around observation, reflection and supposition – took many years to achieve and wasn’t really in place until his 1986 novel about an opera singer, A Man of Feeling.  ”I had written four novels before then. The impatience of the publishing world today might mean that I wouldn’t have been given a chance to get that far. So many worthwhile writers must have been lost because of this impatience. The change has been brutal.”

His next novel, All Souls (1989), based closely on his experiences teaching at Oxford in the 1980s, was a success, but it wasn’t until A Heart So White in 1992 that he first became a fixture on the bestseller lists. After selling well in Spain it became a global hit after “the Pope of German critics”, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, recommended it on television. “He was known as a tough critic who had once, literally, ripped up a Günter Grass book. But he said some exaggerated things about my book and that it should be number one. Obediently, as sometimes Germans in their history have been, they went out and bought it.”

The book sold 1.3m copies in Germany and later won the Impac prize. Marías’s novel-writing technique – “which I know could be suicidal” – is to set out with only minimal planning (all his notes for the 1,200-page Your Face Tomorrow trilogy were scribbled on just four sheets of A5 paper; not all of them were used) and then not to redraft the book, “although I do go back to change a Tuesday to a Thursday and things like that”. It is a high-wire act that is sustained by what must be a remarkable memory as he shapes his story round complicated digressions and repetitions. “What Sterne said always struck me as true: ‘I progress as I digress.’ And you realise that what seemed anecdotal is actually part of the story. I like to use a system of echoes and resonances and characters that reappear not only within the same book, but from one book to another.”

He describes the current situation in Spain as “scary”, and lambasts the government for using the economic crisis to impose labour reforms, toughen abortion laws, cut education and culture spending, and privatise the health system. “Those opinions I stand by. It is not quite the same as a novelist. A novel is a more savage and wild thing in the sense that you can say anything, and your narrators or characters can say anything. Yet it still arrives at a kind of truth. It is like the theatre where you know the name of the playwright, but when the curtain rises the accepted convention is that the audience doesn’t take all the actions or opinions on the stage as the author’s. It is the same with a book. You turn from the cover to the biographical note, then maybe a dedication until you reach page one and the curtain rises. From that moment on the name on the cover doesn’t matter any more.”

NICHOLAS WROE

The Guardian, 22 February 2013

Lincoln, Argo, Capote and the intricacies of weaving fact into fiction

Surely a forthcoming prizewinner, The Infatuations by Javier Marías (Penguin) is ostensibly a murder mystery. The “facts” of the case are astoundingly simple: they could be found in a down-page crime report in any metropolitan newspaper. A “perfect” couple. The violent death of the husband. The slow revelation of the true killer, and his obsession.

Out of this fragment, Marías weaves an enthralling, many-layered story whose themes are not just murder, but love, memory, desire and the nature of obsession.

But The Infatuations is a story, narrated by a young woman who works in publishing. If there’s sleight-of-hand here, it’s the brilliant way in which Marías transforms a homicide into a literary and metaphysical meditation on existential questions.

ROBERT McCRUM

The Guardian, 19 February 2013

Javier Marías reads an extract from A Heart So White and talks about his books, writing and contemporary literature

Dos nuevos títulos en Penguin

DARK BACK OF TIME

WHEN I WAS MORTAL

Fecha de publicación: 31 de enero de 2013

También en eBook

Modern Classics Penguin

‘Gli innamoramenti’

Javier Marías. Gli innamoramenti

Nelle nostre mani non è mai la conclusione di nulla, e benché non possiamo ammetterlo siamo destinati a soggiacere alla “orribile forza del presente”. Cinismo e pietà, pessimismo e passioni si mescolano nella metafisica noir di uno dei più grandi scrittori viventi

“Sono entrambi convinti/che un sentimento improvviso li unì./ È bella una tale certezza/ ma l’incertezza è più bella.” L’incipit di Amore a prima vista di Wislawa Szymborska riassume dolcemente la mitopoiesi del “male d’amore”, feroce deus ex machina de Gli innamoramenti, il nuovo romanzo in cui Javier Marías riversa impetuosamente il suo sopraffino mestiere di scrittore. Romanzo atipico nello stile come lo fu la folgorante Trilogia sentimentale e poi via via tutti gli altri. Qui ancora di più perché narrato con voce di donna (dal nome forse non casuale: María).

Romanzo di pensieri che come tessere del domino s’incastrano a (ri)proporre una storia o una visione o un intreccio complesso, nelle sue infinite varianti. Gli innamoramenti sono il contagio della nostra specie. Si nutrono di desiderio, si potenziano nell’attesa. Non ancora amore, non sempre amore, quasi mai amore. Quasi sempre ossessione. Questioni di vita e di morte. Come frutto di un’unica voce chiara e suadente, ripetitiva e insistente, colta, distaccata e perfino melliflua, Gli innamoramenti cattura nella rete del suo stream of consciousness. Afferra, scuote e confonde i pensieri nel flusso e poi te li ripresenta rovesciati come spuma dopo una mareggiata.

Di se stessi i pensieri conservano il ritmo, a volte un umore, ma la risacca li ha mutati in qualcos’altro. E da lì la voce ricomincia, il pensiero sale sull’ottovolante, curva a gomito verso una digressione poi piomba nel sottosuolo come una talpa furiosa a scavare nelle oscure stanze del rimosso, a scandagliare il regno degli affetti ben oltre l’orlo di ciò che saremmo disposti a sopportare. Avvolgente, freddo, traslucido. Finché con violenza cozza col suo oggetto: la passione.

Suggerire l’indicibile con purezza stilistica e formale. Rendere l’incertezza e il dubbio letterariamente sublimi, anche se umanamente contigui all’abiezione. Javier Marías usa il diabolico trucco di far sembrare il suo romanzo frammento di vita vera, malgrado gli eventi siano niente più che sagome nebulose. Gli innamoramenti è una seduta psicanalitica osservata dietro uno specchio, in cui sembra di sentire l’ascesa dei pensieri allo strato della coscienza. Ben presto non importa più se le premesse di ciò che è accaduto appaiano vere o nemmeno verosimili.

Marías risveglia “l’umanità eterna che dorme nel profondo del nostro seno spirituale” (Miguel De Unamuno). La percezione di leggere un romanzo pian piano svanisce, finisci per chiederti se potresti pensare anche tu quei pensieri, a illuderti di averli forse pensati. Ci sono caduto mentre riempivo pagine di appunti che ora non mi serviranno a niente. Perché appunto era un romanzo. E perché niente è come sembra nella bolla vischiosa di ogni innamoramento, padrone che non si piega e tantomeno si spiega.

L’innamoramento, dice non dicendolo Marías, continuerà a manifestarsi imprevedibilmente come motore di tutto, flatus vitae da cui la vita stessa nella sua pienezza dipende. Non l’amore assoluto dei giovani, non l’amor materno o filiale o quello quotidiano dei vecchi, non l’amicizia fra due uomini che dura dall’infanzia. Quell’innamoramento dio oscuro che non conosce giustizia e ingiustizia, che approfitta di una falsa e momentanea invulnerabilità per piegare ogni morale alle proprie fantasie incorporative. Delittuoso incestuoso cinico e usurpatore.

E poi? Una volta raggiunto il suo scopo? Il prolungarsi altera tutto. Le implicazioni legate al passare del tempo sono vivisezionate nel romanzo come in un’autopsia il cui responso è il più tetro dai tempi di Leopardi: ciò che dura si sciupa e finisce per marcire, e “le uniche persone che non ci vengono meno sono quelle che ci sono strappate”. Gli interrogativi si moltiplicano con il procedere delle rivelazioni. La verità si fa sfuggente, e allora perché cercarla, che non sarà bella da guardare in faccia. Intanto il tempo continua il suo lavoro sporco e surrettizio, ci assicura che tutto va avanti come ieri, ci stordisce d’abitudini finché arriva un giorno strano, impensabile. E “niente è com’era sempre stato”.

Pericoloso come un suono che ti rapisce dalle ore normali, questo libro è un lungo sospiro a immaginarci capaci di ogni nefandezza. In nome dell’amore, o più probabilmente del suo servo momentaneo e folle, l’innamoramento. “Sì traviato è ‘l folle mi’ desio/ a seguitar costei che ‘n fuga è volta”: Francesco Petrarca fu l’arte di dire tutto in un verso, Javier Marías è il coraggio di dire anche i pensieri non detti. I pensieri impuri.

MICHELE LAURO

Panorama, 28 gennaio 2013

L’umano assoluto di Don Chisciotte

[…]

Davvero moltissimi sono gli spunti suggeriti da questa edizione e dal lavoro di Rico. Ma c’è una bizzarra possibilità di incontrare Rico, in questi giorni, in un altro libro, da poco uscito presso Einaudi, il bellissimo romanzo di Javier Marias, Gli innamoramenti: qui è Marías dà voce in prima persona ad un personaggio femminile, che si imbatte in Francisco Rico (proprio lui, col suo nome e cognome, con la sua sapienza, i suoi modi, il suo linguaggio di accademico atipico, poco formale), incontrandolo nel salotto di Luisa, vedova del personaggio intorno alla cui morte ruota la vicenda. E l’autore, tra l’inquieto interrogare su cui si sviluppa il romanzo, si diverte maliziosamente a dare una caricatura del grande studioso, della sua esclusiva passione per la letteratura del siglo de oro, della sua scarsa attenzione a tutto ciò che fuoriesce dal proprio universo.

Conosco di persona Rico, ben noto nel mondo universitario italiano, e non mi so decidere se la caricatura di Marías sia malevola o benevola: sono certo però che Gli innamoramenti sia un formidabile romanzo, uno di quelli che ancora stanno, così «da dopo» sulla scia di quel grande inizio che è Don Chisciotte, che sanno interrogare la contraddittorietà dell’esperienza nei termini del nostro presente; e forse proprio per questo non lo troviamo nelle classifiche, in mezzo a tanta narrativa vuota, trascritta da modelli di vita già fissati dall’apparenza mediatica.

Rispetto a questo orizzonte attuale, ci sarebbe qualche vantaggio ad avvicinarsi ancora e di più al Don Chisciotte: e davvero quella di Rico, a tutt’oggi la sola edizione italiana veramente completa, meriterebbe di sostare in permanenza su tanti tavoli, anche solo per occasioni casuali di lettura o rilettura di qualche capitolo (e non farà male, anche per il lettore poco esperto di spagnolo, qualche sguardo all’originale).

GIULIO FERRONI

L’Unità, 29 gennaio 2013

Edición portuguesa de ‘Los enamoramientos’

OS ENAMORAMENTOS
JAVIER MARÍAS
Tradução: Pedro Tamen
Editora Objectiva, outubro 2012

Entrevistas y críticas italianas

[Foto. Ferdinando Scianna]

“Amore. Nome comune di cosa. Astratto, molto astratto”
MARCO CICALA
Il Venerdi. Supplemento de La Repubblica

“Io sono il contrario esatto del mio io da scrittore”
PAOLO VALENTINI
Pubblico giornale

“Amico Shakespeare, una sorgente di fertilità”
MARIO BAUDINO
TTL. Supplemento de La Stampa

Ogni mattina in un caffè osservando la coppia perfetta
ANGELA BIANCHINI
TTL. La Stampa

Nella nebbia dell’incertezza
NORBERT VON PRELLWITZ
Alias. Supplemento de Il Manifesto

Marías: di cosa è capace l’amore

 

In un caffè del centro di Madrid la giovane editor María osserva ogni mattina Luisa e Miguel che fanno colazione. Non sa nulla di loro, ma quando l’uomo viene assassinato María si trova suo malgrado proiettata nell’intrico di persone, frequentazioni e segreti legati alla coppia. Ed è proprio questa improvvisa intromissione nella vita altrui che mette in moto Gli innamoramenti di Javier Marías, appena pubblicato da Einaudi nella traduzione di Glauco Felici. Autore di alcuni importanti romanzi come Tutte le anime e Domani nella battaglia pensa a me, lo scrittore spagnolo porta in questo libro un mondo dove sentimenti e debolezze dell’uomo hanno un ruolo di primo piano. Per parlarne di persona, Javier Marías si presenta all’intervista con i suoi sessant’anni ben portati, completo blu e gentilezza molto ciarliera.

Dopo aver sempre scelto il punto di vista maschile ora la voce narrante del suo nuovo romanzo Gli innamoramenti è una donna, María Dolz. Perché?

«Sono abituato a raccontare in prima persona dal 1986 ormai, da L’uomo sentimentale, mi ci trovo mio agio. E questa storia non si poteva raccontare dal punto di vista maschile, sarebbe stata poco credibile la vicenda che accade alla protagonista María Dolz. Poi però c’è un’altra ragione per la voce narrante femminile. La donna che osserva ogni giorno una coppia sconosciuta in un bar, e poi scopre dopo settimane dalla scomparsa dell’uomo che questi è stato ucciso in modo gratuito e inesplicabile, è una donna vera, una mia amica che ha davvero vissuto quella situazione. In qualche modo ho voluto portare la sua voce nel mio romanzo. E comunque, alla fine penso che scrivere significhi osservare e raccontare. Un uomo e una donna non lo fanno in modo così diverso».

Come già nel suo romanzo più famoso, Domani nella battaglia pensa a me, e anche In un cuore così bianco, la storia di Gli Innamoramenti prende le mosse da una morte improvvisa nelle prime righe…

«Si tratta di tre morti diverse. Una è una morte accidentale, l’altra un suicidio, la terza un omicidio. In questo caso mi serviva per raccontare la storia di una donna che si innamora di un uomo che sarà causa della sua disgrazia. È questo il vero nucleo del romanzo, anche se improvviso molto nella scrittura, e alla fine spero sempre che tutte le cose che ho scritto si incastrino bene tra di loro».

In questo suo ultimo romanzo, spesso i personaggi pensano pensieri di altri personaggi, gli attribuiscono sentimenti che provano per sé stessi. Come mai ha usato questa tecnica letteraria così particolare?

«Volevo che i personaggi facessero ciò che fanno, o almeno dovrebbero fare sempre, i romanzieri: immedesimarsi nella testa di qualcun altro. È per questo che alla fine i narratori dei miei libri si assomigliano tra loro. Assomigliano a me. Sono tutti dubitativi, riflessivi, pensano sempre cosa avrebbe potuto succedere se… D’altronde, accadeva già a Flaubert, quando diceva Emma Bovary sono io ».

In Gli innamoramenti c’è tutta la sua scrittura torrenziale, ipnotica, radicalmente lontana dalla scrittura americana, molto cinematografica, che va per la maggiore oggi. Da dove nasce?

«In effetti non amo la letteratura americana contemporanea, sebbene in Spagna e credo anche qui in Italia, sia oggetto di una vera e propria devozione da parte della critica. La mia scrittura nasce dalle mie letture, dagli autori che amo di più: Henry James, Conrad, Proust, Shakespeare ovviamente. È una tradizione letteraria quasi perduta, quella che potremmo chiamare del pensiero letterario , che non significa riflettere sulla letteratura o i libri, ma pensare letterariamente sulle cose del mondo. Il pensiero letterario è diverso da quello filosofico o scientifico, è una forma a sé che ha il vantaggio di non dover dimostrare le sue affermazioni. Può essere contradditoria, ma deve riuscire a impressionare il lettore con un’affermazione fulminante, che appena uno la legge pensa: sì, è davvero così».

Nel romanzo c’è un’efficace descrizione degli scrittori. «Sono gente strana, la maggior parte. Si alzano come sono andati a dormire, pensando alle loro cose immaginarie che tuttavia li tengono impegnati per così tanto tempo». È così anche lei?

«Cerco di allontanarmi dalla macchina da scrivere che ancora uso e fare una vita normale, incontrare gli amici, vedermi una partita di calcio. Ma è vero che mentre si scrive un romanzo, qualsiasi cosa si faccia, nel sottofondo della mente anche se non in modo ossessivo, c’è sempre il romanzo che pulsa. E poi, come dice in altro passo del romanzo la protagonista María, che lavora in una casa editrice, pensare che uno la mattina si alzi e si metta a scrivere senza neanche sapere che cosa verrà fuori dal suo scrivere, e nemmeno se quel romanzo sarà letto o pubblicato, è indubbiamente un po’ folle. Sotto questo punto di vista, sono consapevole di essere uno scrittore fortunato. Ho pubblicato il primo libro a vent’anni».

Perché, poco più di un mese fa, ha rifiutato il prestigioso Premio Nazionale della Narrativa Spagnola proprio per Gli innamoramenti?

«Sono contrario alle politiche culturali del mio paese, e da molti anni ho deciso di non avere nulla a che fare con le istituzioni spagnole. E non dipende dal fatto che oggi al governo ci sia il Partito Popolare di Rajoy, quanto più, ad esempio, che nel budget del Ministero della Cultura di quest’anno non ci sia neanche un euro per le acquisizioni di libri da parte delle biblioteche pubbliche».

Gli anni successivi alla dittatura di Franco hanno partorito una «nazionale» di scrittori spagnoli che può contare su di lei, Enrique Vila- Matas, Javier Cercas, più «l’oriundo» scomparso Roberto Bolaño e altri, che è probabilmente la migliore d’Europa. Pensa possa nascere un fenomeno del genere anche dalla crisi economica spagnola di questi giorni?

«Questa nazionale comprende scrittori abbastanza diversi tra loro. Ad esempio non sento vicino a me la letteratura che fa Cercas, anche se ho più di un legame con quella di Vila-Matas. E poi penso che forse le difficoltà dell’economia, gli accidenti della storia, non abbiano molto a che fare con la qualità letteraria di una generazione. Ma vedremo in futuro cosà verrà fuori da questa Spagna di oggi. Un paese triste, che nessuno negli anni 80, durante l’esplosione creativa post franchista, sarebbe riuscito a immaginare. Se l’anno scorso l’elezione di Rajoy alla guida del governo per molti era stata una mossa, magari disperata, per cambiare, combattere la ferocia della crisi economica, oggi, a distanza di un anno, in Spagna c’è solo rassegnazione».

SILVIO BERNELLI TORINO

L’Unità, 4 dicembre 2012

Javier Marías e la legge del desiderio

Presentación en Italia

Le sigarette di Javier Marías stanno distese una accanto all’altra, trattenute dieci a destra e dieci a sinistra da un elastico piatto, ordinate nei due lati di un portasigarette laccato di rosso, bello, antico. Sono sigarette tedesche molto leggere fabbricate dalla ditta Reemtsma. Estrae una sigaretta dal suo letto d’argento, la fuma. Non si può fare a meno di pensare, ogni volta che ne sfila una, al gesto preliminare, forse mattutino, di certo quotidiano: quello di toglierle dal pacchetto e allinearle lì sotto l’elastico, con metodo. Al tabaccaio che deve averne una riserva solo per lui, nella rivendita sotto casa nel cuore di Madrid.

Le sue Reemtsma, don Javier, buona giornata. Lascia immaginare, il portasigarette rosso, una libreria di volumi altrettanto ordinati in una casa docile alle abitudini del suo proprietario. Niente animali domestici, niente computer. Niente telefoni cellulari, niente auto nel garage. Solo una macchina da scrivere, un fax. I volumi in inglese nella parete dei libri inglesi, la collezione dei soldatini di piombo allineata davanti. Molti di Crimea, “i più belli”. L’acqua di colonia nel bagno. La buona musica, accanto alla tv lo scaffale dei film. L’uomo che uccise Liberty Wallance tra tutti il preferito.

Nessun intruso. Nessuna donna. E però è con un lampo di ironia che dice “è stato per caso che non mi sono mai propriamente sposato”. Propriamente nel senso che non c’è stata la certificazione, un accidente del destino: “Una volta una mia morosa era già sposata e a quel tempo non c’era il divorzio, in Spagna. Un’altra volta lei era americana e c’era la distanza, anzi due: le americane sono state due. Una volta era italiana, ed era lei ad essere incerta sul mio conto”. Gli occhi già lunghi si allungano nel sorriso. E’ un elenco che parla di treni troppo lenti, di disincontri e contrattempi. Nel suo italiano perfetto e letterario il termine “morosa” dice qualcosa del suo amore italiano, è stata certo lei a consegnargli il vocabolo perché  -dice infatti- “l’unico modo per imparare una lingua senza studiarla è avere un amore”. L’italiano l’ha imparato così.

Gli innamoramenti (Einaudi), s’intitola il suo ultimo romanzo. Un uso vertiginoso della lingua, un’ipnosi ad andamento lento. Un’anatomia del sentimento amoroso implacabile: come vedere un film al rallenty, con un fotogramma che si insinua nell’altro. È una donna che guarda. Dalla finestra sul cortile, osserva e racconta.

“Ma davvero dunque vuole parlare d’amore, di me e dell’amore?”, domanda e sfila un’altra sigaretta dal suo letto.

Davvero. Potrebbe mettere in ordine gerarchico gli amori della sua vita? Amori di ogni genere: persone e cose.
“Persone più di ogni cosa, senza dubbio. Persone, e certo donne al primo posto. Poi le persone in generale. Mio padre, mio fratello. Le persone che abbiamo amato, quelle rispetto alle quali abbiamo avuto la sensazione di non poter vivere senza. Poi si vive senza, certo. Ma dopo. Al secondo posto un tempo avrei messo la lettura, oggi non più. Ricordo di aver sentito mio padre dire: più divento vecchio meno leggo. Allora non capivo, ora sì. Leggo meno anche io, dopo aver letto così tanto. Poi il cinema, certamente. Ci sono film che non smetterei mai di rivedere. Liberty Wallance, Sentieri selvaggi. Poi il calcio, anche se sempre di meno a causa di questo Mourinho: una figura detestabile, se ne andrà presto spero. Poi l’amicizia, che come diceva Oscar Wilde è più tragica dell’amore perché dura più tempo. Certo è che la ricompensa che ti dà l’amore è più forte”.

L’amore, o l’innamoramento? Quest’ultimo, lei scrive, produce debolezza: ho un debole, si dice. Rende vulnerabili.
“L’innamoramento è una condizione che non tutte le lingue certificano. In italiano e in spagnolo sì, c’è una parola per dirlo, ma in altri idiomi servono perifrasi. Cadere, essere in. Come fosse un transito o un accidente. E’ certo molto faticoso, quanto inevitabile, innamorarsi. Prevede un grado di audacia e di insensatezza che con l’età, direi più con l’esperienza, si tende ad evitare. Questo perché ci si impigrisce. Si scansa la fatica. Tuttavia io stesso vedo con certezza che le uniche stagioni della vita che abbiano qualche interesse, a posteriori, sono quelle: le storie d’amore molto appassionate, complicate, intense, quelle che portano con sé grandi sofferenze e momenti stupendi. Quello è l’apice dell’esistenza, senza dubbio”.

Perché dice “a posteriori”? C’è un’età per innamorarsi?
“No, non direi. E’ più o meno sempre lo stesso, dai 7 anni in poi. Solo che purtroppo col tempo si diventa più prudenti e, credendo di preservarsi, si evita la pena. Con la fatica e con la pena anche la meraviglia, va da sé”.

A lei quante volte è successo?
“Quante volte sono stato innamorato? Difficile dirlo, capita di credere di esserlo, durante, e poi non lo si era o al contrario capita di ostinarsi a pensare che no, non lo si è, e invece bisogna infine arrendersi. Diciamo quattro comunque: quattro volte, almeno. Sono state e sono tuttora sempre relazioni a distanza, senza vera convivenza. Per cause di forza maggiore, dico a me stesso, però poi in verità chissà se volendo non avrei potuto… E’ probabile che mi trovi meglio così. Che la chiave del desiderio sia la distanza. In questo senso la raccomando. Con le donne che ho amato ho conservato quasi sempre una grandissima amicizia, anche questo non è consueto. Alcune sono diventate amiche tra loro”.

E questo non la spaventa?
“No  – ride -  no, no. Non temo possano farmi del male, neppure se in coalizione. Le donne che ho amato hanno avuto tutte tre caratteristiche: ridevano molto, erano buone persone ed erano molto intelligenti. Non necessariamente in quest’ordine, ma sempre tutte e tre le cose. Persone molto interessanti, persone che restano”.

È la prima volta, in questo romanzo, che assume un punto di vista femminile.
“Sì, sono abituato a scrivere in prima persona e qui lo sguardo doveva essere quello di una donna: solo una donna può osservare in quel modo la felicità di una coppia. È così che inizia la storia, una donna che guarda una coppia. Le prime trenta pagine sono il racconto di una vicenda reale. Volevo raccontare di una donna che resta con un uomo che le ha causato una grande disgrazia. Una donna che infligge a quell’uomo la punizione di restargli accanto. Poi, invece, il racconto è andato altrove”.

Sembra più interessato al tema della morte che a quello dell’amore, il racconto.
“È possibile. O comunque ugualmente interessato. L’idea che si possa fare a meno di qualcuno che ci appare indispensabile, e amare oltre, andare oltre. Prendo in prestito un romanzo di Balzac, per dirlo. Ma anche I tre moschettieri, il titolo viene da lì. Mi incanta Dumas. Certo Shakespeare. Certo Cervantes. La letteratura, vede, è fatta da individui. La letteratura sono uomini. Cervantes è spagnolo, eppure è il meno spagnolo degli scrittori: è Cervantes. Rileggendo, che è quello che ormai faccio, trovo nei grandi scrittori di ogni tempo e di ogni luogo i medesimi cardini. Proust lo dice con ferocia: capita che a uno non importi più niente della persona per la quale viveva. Balzac con serietà, Shakespeare con il consueto mistero. Cos’è il tempo. Hereafter, cos’è. In definitiva, penso adesso a quest’altezza della vita, si tratta di presenza e di assenza. Di amore e di morte, solo questo. Con l’ironia che serve a dire quel che non si può davvero indicare. Noi spagnoli abbiamo qualche difficoltà, ci manca la vostra grazia italiana. La risata che incanta e che innamora. La risata che ci rende deboli e ci appassiona, che capisce e che dimentica senza negare. Innamorarsi è questo. Una magnifica vulnerabilità del corpo, una speciale capienza dell’anima. Ricordo di una volta in cui presi un aereo dall’America per venire proprio in Italia, insensatamente, sapientemente, per passare una notte a convincere una donna del mio amore per lei, e lei del suo per me. Ricordo che mi trovai alle sei di mattina per strada, c’era un altro che arrivava e non potevo occupare quel posto. Ricordo me stesso con la valigia, per strada, all’alba. Non è possibile descrivere quella pienezza, quella assoluta inevitabile assurdità. Eppure, ancora oggi, la memoria di quel momento non mi abbandona”.

CONCITA DE GREGORIO

La Repubblica,10 dicembre 2012

Presentación de ‘Beleszerelmesedések’ en Budapest

El pasado 4 de diciembre, en la sede del Instituto Cervantes en Budapest, se presentó la edición búlgara de Los enamoramientos.

Javier Marías escribió este texto para la ocasión:

No son muchos mis libros traducidos a esa más misteriosa de las lenguas, el húngaro. Si mal no recuerdo, sólo tres hasta ahora: Corazón tan blanco (que ahora recupera la editorial Libri), quizás la más conocida de mis novelas; Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí, una de mis preferidas; y, extrañamente, la primera que publiqué, a los diecinueve años, Los dominios del lobo, que no ha solido llamar la atención de mis editores extranjeros. Aunque sólo sea por deferencia hacia aquella obra tan juvenil, de la que no me avergüenzo y a la que tengo especial afecto, me siento muy agradecido a Hungría y a mis hasta ahora escasos lectores.

Nunca he visitado su país, pero se da la circunstancia de que unos grandes amigos míos ingleses, Nicholas Clapton y Eric Southworth, y otros grandes amigos españoles, Ángel Romero, Sol Moreno y su hija Alejandra Romero, pasan parte del año, desde hace bastantes, en Budapest. A través de sus relatos y de su entusiasmo por esa capital, me resulta más familiar que otras que sí he pisado alguna vez. Y no hace falta decir que siento enorme admiración por algunos músicos, escritores… y futbolistas húngaros. Uno de los ídolos de mi infancia fue Puskas, que jugó maravillosamente en mi equipo de siempre, el Real Madrid. Pero también otros que jugaban en equipos rivales: Kubala, Kocsis, Czibor… Forman parte de mis recuerdos más antiguos, y recuerdo bien sus rostros en las colecciones de cromos.

Es por tanto para mí un gran placer y un honor ver publicada mi más reciente novela, Los enamoramientos, en Hungría. Se trata de una novela sobre eso, sobre el proceso y el estado de enamoramiento, que a menudo se tiene por algo positivo y deseable, pero que también puede llevar a lo peor. Hay personas que mejoran y se tornan más generosas bajo ese estado, pero también las he visto que se convierten en mezquinas y maquinadoras, que pierden toda nobleza y generosidad precisamente porque se han enamorado, o así lo han creído durante un tiempo. Pero Los enamoramientos habla también de otras cosas: de los muertos y de nuestra relación con ellos; de cómo nos permitimos añorar a los que queríamos, en la seguridad de que no van a volver, y de cómo, si volvieran, tal vez su regreso sería una gran catástrofe para nosotros; habla de la impunidad, que es una de las características de nuestra época, y de cómo la mayoría de nosotros consideramos que la justicia no es asunto nuestro, o sólo en el caso de que nos sintamos perjudicados personalmente. También de la imposibilidad de saber nunca nada a ciencia cierta, ni siquiera de lo que hemos vivido. Nos encontramos siempre con zonas de sombra, que son las que la literatura intenta iluminar. Con esto quiero decir algo muy modesto, y tomo una cita de Faulkner que recuerdo vagamente y que no he sido capaz de reencontrar: vino a decir que lo único que la literatura consigue es lo mismo que una cerilla que se enciende en mitad de la noche, en el campo. Sólo nos sirve para ver mejor cuánta oscuridad hay alrededor.

Espero que Los enamoramientos pueda mostrar eso una vez más, y suscitar entre los lectores húngaros algún interés. Muchas gracias a todos los participantes en esta velada y saludos cordiales,

Javier Marías

Edición italiana de ‘Los enamoramientos’

GLI INNAMORAMENTI
JAVIER MARÍAS
Traducción de Glauco Felici
Einaudi, 2012

Javier Marías presentará su novela en Italia:

En Turín, el 3 de diciembre, a las 21horas, en Circolo dei lettori (via Bogino, 99).
Conversará con Michela Murgia, y la actriz Isabella Ragonese leerá fragmentos de Gli innamoramenti.
El evento será transmitido en directo por Circolo dei lettori.

En Roma, el 4 de diciembre, a las 21 horas, en la Sala Risonanze del Auditorium Parco della Musica (viale Pietro de Coubertin, 30).
Será entrevistado por Concita De Gregorio e Michele De Mieri.