The entry below is by Lori Feathers, co-founder of in Dallas, TX.

by Javier Mar铆as, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (Spain, Knopf)

Chad糖心传媒檚 Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 38%

Chad糖心传媒檚 Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: 6%

In this dispiriting era of fake 糖心传媒渘ews糖心传媒� it feels ironic to praise Javier Mar铆as糖心传媒檚 Thus Bad Begins, a novel centered around the idea that it is better to have been deceived and never know it than to learn that you are the victim of a deception.

Set in Madrid in 1980, Thus Bad Begins is narrated by Juan, twenty-three and the only child of absented diplomats who secure a job for him as personal assistant to Eduardo Muriel, a respected Spanish filmmaker. Most days Juan works at the Muriel糖心传媒檚 home where it quickly becomes apparent that Eduardo deeply resents Beatriz, his wife. As Juan糖心传媒檚 curiosity about the reasons for Eduardo糖心传媒檚 animosity intensifies so too does his pity and desire for Beatriz. He begins eavesdropping on the couple糖心传媒檚 conversations to discover what lies behind Eduardo糖心传媒檚 inability to reciprocate his wife糖心传媒檚 affection. At the same time, Eduardo tasks Juan to uncover a different secret糖心传媒攐ne related to a family friend糖心传媒檚 rumored blackmail and political exploitation. In uncovering truths about the Muriel family and their circle Juan is confronted with moral ambiguities and for the first time his conviction in the infallible demarcation between wronged and wrongdoer is compromised.

A master storyteller, Mar铆as braids Juan糖心传媒檚 and Eduardo糖心传媒檚 narratives into a taut loop in which Eduardo糖心传媒檚 loves, hopes, heartbreaks, and disillusionments intersect and redouble Juan糖心传媒檚. Yet it is the brilliance of Mar铆as糖心传媒檚 writing and Margaret Jull Costa糖心传媒檚 translation that makes this novel truly exceptional. And it is why Thus Bad Begins deserves this year糖心传媒檚 Best Translated Book Award. Mar铆as may be our only living author worthy to be called a successor to Henry James. His prose digs deeper than his character糖心传媒檚 impressions, placing us inside Juan糖心传媒檚 mind as his thoughts are formed and reformed by experience and emotion. This is writing that is nuanced and introspective yet somehow retains an ample lightness and natural feeling so that it never risks collapsing under its own weight. Mar铆as糖心传媒檚 sentences demand to be reread and savored.

For the title of his novel Mar铆as took a quote from Shakespeare糖心传媒檚 Hamlet, 糖心传媒淭hus bad begins and worse remains behind.糖心传媒� It is an admonition to leave the ugly truths about the past, in the past; to not seek the truth because once known it can never be unknown. And it is the knowing that irrevocably changes everything.

by Javier Marias, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (Knopf)

Thus Bad Begins by Javier Mar铆as and translated by Margaret Jull Costa is probably my favorite book of the year. Anyone who has read a novel by Mar铆as will see all the familiar hallmarks: circular, philosophical writing that hits a theme, retreats and then returns, over and over, almost obsessively, to try and “figure it out.” The themes themselves are also characteristic to Mar铆as’s body of work: history, morality, secrets, betrayal, how much can we ever know another person and when is it dangerous to know too much? Through all of this lies an unspoken sense of danger and, of course, the writing. The writing.

The themes that figure in Thus Bad Begins are also prevalent in Mar铆as’s masterful trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow. The Franco regime is, if not in the forefront, always present, to remind the reader that the past is never quite through with us. The novel takes place in 1980 and focuses on the Muriels, an unhappy couple living in Madrid. Eduardo, the husband, is a B-movie filmmaker and the story is told by his then-young assistant, Juan. The unhappiness of the Muriel marriage is one of the great unknowns of the novel, for Juan has firsthand access to the family and witnesses a strange and abusive relationship between Eduardo and his wife Beatriz. Eduardo is somehow punishing Beatriz and she not only accepts the abuse but behaves in a way that appears she糖心传媒檚 deserving. Juan糖心传媒檚 youth gives him the advantage of seeming innocence, of being easily ignored and yet, in one brief passage Mar铆as describes that:

Someone only has to notice you—cast an indolent glance in your direction—and there糖心传媒檚 no withdrawing, even if you hide away or stay very still and quiet and take no initiative or do anything. Even if you try to erase yourself, you have been spotted, like a distant shape on the ocean that you can糖心传媒檛 ignore, that you must either avoid or approach.

Soon the young narrator is tasked by Juan with an indelicate favor, to befriend a close associate, a prestigious doctor and find out if certain, unscrupulous rumors about the doctor are true. Juan糖心传媒檚 innocence, and his curiosity about the state of the Muriel marriage, lead him into a Madrid just waking up from fascist rule. Besides a wonderful lesson in contemporary Spanish history, Thus Bad Begins takes the reader into the psychology of civil war: how people (and sides) who have wronged one another—often neighbors and friends—are suddenly expected to forgive each other, or at the very least, remain silent, in the face of a new government. Reading this now, the book has an almost immediate relevance.

Thus Bad Begins contains strands of similar DNA, found in earlier novels, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me and A Heart So White. But a reader going into a Javier Mar铆as novel knows what to expect. There is eavesdropping. There is tailing, or following. There are conversations overheard. There is a sensual and palpable sense of danger. Yet Mar铆as uses these tropes to his advantage, telling a sophisticated story, with grand eloquence, about universal truths. One always feels they are in the hands of a master when reading a book by Mar铆as. The translation by Margaret Jull Costa is graceful and natural and I couldn糖心传媒檛 recommend this wonderful book any more highly. Additionally, it糖心传媒檚 a great starting-point for anyone who hasn糖心传媒檛 had the pleasure of reading Javier Mar铆as before. They will see a Spain awakening from dictatorship and may, in different ways, see a not-so-distant future for America.

Esteemed translator Margaret Jull Costa has five books in contention for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award: by Leopoldo Alas (New York Review Books), by L煤cio Cardoso (Open Letter), by Rafael Chirbes (New Directions), by Javier Mar铆as (Knopf), and by Enrique Vila-Matas (New Directions). Jull Costa translates from both Spanish and Portuguese and has rendered some of each language糖心传媒檚 most well-regarded authors, including Nobel laureate Jos茅 Saramago, the singular (and multitudinous!) Fernando Pessoa, E莽a de Queir贸s, Luisa Valenzuela, and Bernardo Atxaga, amongst many others. As a working translator for three decades (her first novel-in-translation was published in 1987), Jull Costa has won a number of awards in recognition of her work and was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2014.

Despite Jull Costa糖心传媒檚 prodigious output, in the first nine years of the award, she has only once made the shortlist—in 2015, for Medardo Fraile糖心传媒檚 evocative short story collection, Things Look Different in the Light (Pushkin Press). With five strong works under consideration for the forthcoming prize, will 2017 be the year Jull Costa finally adds a Best Translated Book Award to her many accolades? In looking more closely at three of these books, it糖心传媒檚 evident that her quality translations ought to have her squarely in the conversation.

Spanish novelist Rafael Chirbes passed away in August 2015, leaving behind some ten novels (On the Edge and the long out-of-print Mimoun being, as yet, his only two translated into English). is a dark, tense, and foreboding tale set in the wake of the global recession that robbed so many of so much. Easily one of the year糖心传媒檚 finest and most important works, Chirbes糖心传媒檚 novel stands out as a marvel of what fiction is capable of doing (and, oh, that inescapable cover!). Valerie Miles糖心传媒檚 excellent essay, entitled “The Life and Times of he Great Rafael Chirbes,” was used as the book糖心传媒檚 afterword and offers an incomparable glimpse of both the author and On the Edge itself (her piece also appeared on ). Below is my review of On the Edge (which originally appeared on Three Percent in December):

Let’s not deceive ourselves, man is nothing very special. In fact, there are so many of us that our governments don’t know what to do with us at all. Six billion humans on the planet and only six or seven thousand Bengal tigers: tell me糖心传媒攚ho needs protecting most? Yes, you decide who needs most care. A dying African, Chinaman, or Scotsman or a beautiful tiger killed by a hunter. A tiger with its pelt of matchless colours and its flashing eyes is far more beautiful than a varicose-veined old git like me. What a difference in the way it carries itself. How elegant the one and how clumsy the other. Look how they move. Put them next to each other in a cage in the zoo. The children gather round the old man’s cage and laugh as they watch him delousing himself or crouching down to defecate; outside the tiger’s cage, though, they open their eyes wide with admiration. The sleight of hand that made man the centre of the universe no longer convinces.

Devastating, desolate, and disquieting, Rafael Chirbes’s On the Edge (En la orilla) ought to rank as one of the decade’s finest novels. First published in its original Spanish in 2013, On the Edge was awarded both Spain’s National Prize for Literature and the Critics Prize the following year. The Spanish novelist (who passed away [in August 2015] at the age of 66) is the author of nine published novels糖心传媒攚ith a tenth due out posthumously. While billed as his English language debut, On the Edge was actually preceded in translation by Mimoun, Chirbes’s first novel, published some 22 years ago by Serpent’s Tail (and out of print since).

Set in late 2010, following the economic crisis that ravaged the Spanish economy (as well as many others around the world), On the Edge offers an unflinching glimpse of a nation despoiled and reeling. An unemployment rate of 20% (and rising), poverty, prostitution, xenophoboia, Islamophobia, immigration fears, human trafficking, violence, corruption, and environmental decay are the real-life milieu upon which Chirbes situates his unforgiving tale. Septuagenarian Esteban, tasked with end-of-life care for his terminally ill father and burdened with the stresses of his recently bankrupted carpentry workshop (and impending legal charges resulting therefrom), recounts his life, as well as his myriad failures, disappointments, and betrayals, through an unrelenting series of recollections and dirge-like soliloquies.

Taking life is easy, anyone can do that. They do it every day all over the world. Just read the newspaper and you’ll see. Even you could do it, take someone’s life I mean, obviously, you’d have to improve your aim a little (and then he did smile teasingly, the corners of his lively grey eyes etched with a web of delicate lines). Mankind may have constructed vast buildings, destroyed whole mountains, built canals and bridges, but we’ve never yet succeeded in opening the eyes of a child who has just died. Sometimes it’s the biggest, heaviest things that are easiest to move. Huge stones in the back of a truck, vans laden with heavy metals. And yet everything that’s inside you糖心传媒攚hat you think, what you want糖心传媒攁ll of which apparently weighs nothing糖心传媒攏o strong man can life that onto his shoulder and move it somewhere else. No truck can transport it. Loving someone you despise or don’t really care for is a lot harder than flooring him with a punch. Men hit each other out of a sense of powerlessness. They think that by using force they can get what they can’t get by using tenderness or intelligence.

With shifting narratives and a chorus of other voices (including those of Esteban’s equally-ravished employees, business partners, barmates, and his father’s one-time palliative nurse), On the Edge teems with fear, frustration, anxiety, and despair. Esteban, challenged (and nearly defeated) not only by the plundering economic state, but also by decades of personal degradation (failed romance, compromised loyalties, allegiances upended, and the legacy of his father’s generations’ attitudes following the war), is forced to confront perdition糖心传媒攆amilial, social, financial, physical, emotional, and even spiritual.

Chirbes, perhaps like a detached reporter chronicling horrors and atrocities espied from the front lines, infuses an abundance of feeling into characters and setting糖心传媒攄espite each being startlingly paralyzed by an unyielding torpor. With gifted prose and a confident style, Chirbes deftly (re)creates a world teetering on ruin and irreconcilability (however hopeful certain characters remain). Like the fetid, rancid lagoon which figures so prominently into the story, On the Edge brilliantly captures the collapse of a system once-thriving and supportive, but left in wreckage resulting from avarice, disregard, and myopia.

Rafael Chirbes, called “the best writer of the twenty-first century in Spain” by the Spanish newspaper ABC, tears asunder whatever illusions may have endured after the global economic collapse. Without didacticism or a moralizing tone, Chirbes stands amidst the debris and destruction, and, with an unflinching gaze, attests to and confirms the harrowing aftermath wrought in the wake of international recession and crises. A remarkable portrait of one man’s struggle to make sense of an encompassing personal, economic, and social decay, On the Edge_breathes life into an otherwise asphyxiating scene. Chirbes’s _On the Edge may lack in redemption (and propelling plot) what it makes up for in cautionary storytelling, but pillaged lives and economies both have never seemed so imaginatively conceived nor richly executed. Even the barrenest of wastelands may lay forlorn and neglected, but, if nothing else, Chirbes’s incomparable novel assures that great art may one day rise from even the most polluted locale.

Of course times have changed, Francisco. Life is constantly changing, it is change. It has no other purpose but to change and to keep changing, the Greeks knew this and I imagine even their ancestors knew it too, you never bathe twice in the same stream, you don’t even bathe the same body, today there’s a pimple that didn’t exist yesterday, nor did this varicose vein which, for long hours, has been making its way to the surface, or this ulcer in my groin or on the sole of my foot, and which my hyperglycemia won’t allow to heal; they are all lying, those utopians who say that this troubled life of avarice and lust will be succeeded by a peaceful world in which we will all be brothers, and where, as in the golden age Don Quijote described, we will, in a spirit of fraternal love, dine on a shared meal of acorns. There is no heavenly peace possible beneath the sheltering sky, only a permanent state of war in which everyone is pitched against everyone and everything against everything. The problem is that with so much change, everything somehow ends up pretty much the same.

Javier Mar铆as糖心传媒檚 reputation as a writer of high-quality literary fiction surely precedes him and if the Swedish Academy sees fit to recognize his impressive body of work (Your Face Tomorrow [translated by Jull Costa] alone ought to qualify him), a Nobel Prize would be a deserved coda to an already illustrious authorial career. his newest novel to be translated into English, is certainly not Mar铆as finest outing (which is hardly a slight, perhaps like saying Blonde on Blonde isn糖心传媒檛 this year糖心传媒檚 Nobel laureate糖心传媒檚 most accomplished album)—yet is still possessed of all the characteristic trademarks that have made him, or, more precisely, his fiction, consistently amongst the best in translation. Mar铆as糖心传媒檚 The Infatuations (Knopf, also translated by Jull Costa) was longlisted for the 2014 BTBA. Some thoughts on Thus Bad Begins:

Indeed, freedom is the first thing that fearful citizens are prepared to give up. So much so that they often ask to lose it, ask for it to be taken away, banished from their sight, which is why they not only applaud the very person intending to take it from them, they even vote for him.

With over a dozen of his books available in English translation, Javier Mar铆as’s stateside renown seems to grow deservedly with each new release. His most recent novel, Thus Bad Begins (As铆 empieza lo malo)糖心传媒攏amed best book of the year by Spain’s El Pa铆s in 2014糖心传媒攊s a domestic drama set in 1980, immediately following Franco’s regime. A brutal, loveless, spiteful, and often cruel marriage is metaphor for a distrusting populace struggling to move beyond the authoritarianism and betrayals of decades past. While Mar铆as’s characters reveal slowly the motivations for their actions, his story (incorporating the best elements of a convincing mystery) builds toward a gripping conclusion糖心传媒攍eaving devastated individuals and a tormented legacy in its wake.

Offering stark insight into the erosive qualities of small deceptions and minor treacheries, Mar铆as, as always, deftly navigates realms psychological, political, and philosophical. Thus Bad Begins isn’t Mar铆as’s strongest outing, but, that said, it is still, nonetheless, an exceptional effort (especially given that he has penned such consistently tremendous works). If written by another author, this book may well be considered the peak of said progenitor’s output, but given the Spaniard’s seemingly limitless ability to compose first-rate fiction, Thus Bad Begins pales slightly when compared to some of his other works. All the same, Thus Bad Begins invariably impresses, adding yet another resplendent feather in the cap of a (hopefully) future nobel laureate.

_“In fact, anything you’re told, anything you didn’t personally witness, is pure rumour, however wrapped up in oaths it comes, all swearing the story to be true. And we can’t spend our lives listening to rumours, still less acting in accordance with their many fluctuations. When you give that up, when you give up trying to know what you cannot know, perhaps, to paraphrase Shakespeare, perhaps that is when bad begins, but, on the other hand, worse remains behind.”

The Hamlet line from which the title is taken is wonderfully ambiguous and well befitting a novel of such emotional subterfuge. Is “worse” left behind or still yet to come?

Like far too many (most?) authors in translations, Enrique Vila-Matas has yet to enjoy the English-speaking audience he deserves—despite being championed by the likes of his friend Paul Auster. The Spanish writer has published over three dozen books, with Vampire in Love being his eighth rendered into English. A collection of short stories spanning his career, Vampire in Love offers a glimpse of Vila-Matas that hadn糖心传媒檛 been apparent in his mostly meta-fictional novels (Bartleby & Co. [translated by Jonathan Dunne], Never Any End to Paris, and Dublineqsue are some of his best). Twice shortlisted for the BTBA (in 2008 for Montano糖心传媒檚 Malady [translated by Jonathan Dunne] and in 2012 for Never Any End to Paris [translated by Anne McLean]) and included on the longlist for another (in 2013 for Dublinesque [translated by Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean]), Vila-Matas糖心传媒檚 books make for an always fascinating, engaging outing (even if one doesn糖心传媒檛 quite know what to expect beforehand, much like his prolific Argentine compatriot, C茅sar Aira). Vampire in Love is as good a place as any to start reading Vila-Matas. While short story collections do not sometimes garner the acclaim of their lengthier brethren, Vampire in Love can surely hold it糖心传媒檚 own against other contenders for this year糖心传媒檚 Best Translated Book Award:

The first collection of Enrique Vila-Matas’s short stories to appear in English translation, Vampire in Love features 19 stories from throughout the Spanish author’s estimable career. Most noteworthy (and quite surprising to this reader) is that save for a couple selections, nearly all of the stories forego the metafictional, self-referential, and literary milieu well familiar to readers of his previously translated works. The stories which compose Vampire in Love reveal an almost entirely different side to Vila-Matas’s fiction—many dealing with death, life’s hardships, and the mystery of the uncertain.

With oft-remarkable prose, wit, and more than a little playfulness, Vila-Matas’s short fiction reveals an artisan as comfortable (and as skillful) in brevity as he is in longer form. Vampire in Love ably demonstrates the wide variety of storytelling hues available on Vila-Matas’s literary palette. The standout stories in Vampire in Love include “Rosa Schwarzer Comes Back to Life,” “The Hour of the Tired and Weary,” “They Say I Should Say Who I Am,” “Greetings from Dante,” “The Boy on the Swing,” and the titular tale.

I remember糖心传媒攑robably because it seemed to foreshadow something that would affect us later on糖心传媒攖he long speech he made that day about how we human beings are all carriers of poisons and inner devils that can undermine our most marvelous achievements.

Thus Bad Begins聽by Javier Mar铆as
translated from the Spanish聽by Margaret Jull Costa
464 pgs. | pb |9781101911914 | $16.95

Reviewed by Kristel Thornell

Following The Infatuations, Javier Mar铆as糖心传媒檚 latest novel seems, like those that have preceded it, an experiment to test fiction糖心传媒檚 capacity to mesmerize with sombre-sexy atmospheres and ruminative elongated sentences stretched across windowless walls of paragraphs. Thus Bad Begins offers his customary ethical tangles and astute mulling over human behavior. At its most fluid, the reader drifts through the familiar density and detours in something like an intrigued torpor.

The focal point is the uneasy marriage of Eduardo Muriel and Beatriz Noguera. Juan de Vere, the narrator, is looking back on the period when, in his first job as an assistant to Eduardo, a well-known film director, he lived in the former maid糖心传媒檚 quarters of the couple糖心传媒檚 apartment. He was drawn to them, they relied on him, and this configuration made him a privileged voyeur. Provoked by rambling conversations with Eduardo and the titillating episodes of spying and eavesdropping Mar铆as luxuriates in, de Vere wrestled to understand their union that was marred by unkindness and physical rejection on the part of Eduardo. This puzzling lack of intimacy appeared to stem from a perceived betrayal. Furthermore, Eduardo had entrusted de Vere with the mission of getting close to the shady, lecherous Van Vechten, family doctor and friend, to evaluate whether he could have behaved in an 糖心传媒渋ndecent manner糖心传媒� toward women. To say more of the plot might spoil its teasingly deferred revelations, and in Mar铆as seductive teasing is much of the point.

This is one of his most overtly 糖心传媒淪panish糖心传媒� books, its 糖心传媒渢enuous . . . story糖心传媒� of a marriage set insistently within the frame of Madrid circa 1980. This was the time of the Movida, a countercultural movement and scene that emerged energetically in the capital in the wake of Franco糖心传媒檚 rule of almost forty years糖心传媒攖hough it had been brewing and starting to manifest even before the dictator糖心传媒檚 death in 1975. The city was heady with 糖心传媒減ermissiveness and freedoms,糖心传媒� vigorous nightlife (糖心传媒渘o one slept in those years,糖心传媒� an impression you might still have there today), supposed sexual liberation, and the playful anarchic energy of artists such as Pedro Almod贸var. However, as Mar铆as emphasizes, shadows lingered. Crimes and suspicions were being silenced, personal histories rewritten, cleansed of collusion with the old repressive regime. The new democracy was accompanied by a political decision (糖心传媒渢he pact of forgetting糖心传媒�) reflecting a controversial but broadly upheld general conviction that it was better to avoid seeking retribution for wrongs perpetrated under the regime, as this would have caused chaos. Legal divorce was impending but not yet an option, and this is stressed, with the implications for both genders empathically considered. The novel feels both soaked with patriarchy and糖心传媒攁t least intermittently糖心传媒攃oncerned with its particular oppression of women.

Mar铆as糖心传媒檚 fiction has invoked Shakespeare on several occasions and Thus Bad Begins lifts its title from Hamlet. The extended quote from Act III, scene iv, 糖心传媒淭hus bad begins and worse remains behind糖心传媒� is interpreted for de Vere by Muriel as describing the need to renounce at knowing what cannot really be known and thereby move on. (He seems to take the line against the common reading, to mean that the worst is in the past糖心传媒攔ather than yet in store.) We are left wondering about the implications of Muriel糖心传媒檚 philosophy both for history and personal relationships. Mar铆as returns repeatedly to the phrase, a technique he favors for building cumulative resonance and suggesting shifting shades of meaning. He is engagingly preoccupied with the rhythmic and chameleonic properties of language.

Musing on Hitchcock糖心传媒檚 films, de Vere reflects that only a gaze is required to produce suspense; watching itself is dramatic. Perhaps, but especially when the watching is piquantly colored with mystery, desire and death. Mar铆as is as exquisitely conscious of this as Hitchcock was, yet plentiful doses of all three don糖心传媒檛 prove as consistently absorbing here as they did in novels such as Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. Mar铆as糖心传媒檚 prose often has a hypothetical aura, a sense of the exercise of modeling a possible reality. This is of course inherent to fiction, and can effectively be latent or more explicit. While in Thus Bad Begins Mar铆as brings his usual virtuosic meticulousness to the exercise, I found my awareness of it a little distancing, the protracted conjecture and penchant for aphorisms sometimes cumbersome and emotionally flat. The use of _Hamlet_糖心传媒攖hough the works do both brood on hard-to-credit mortality via characters enmeshed in their own psychological webs糖心传媒攕eemed a somewhat mechanical device for injecting passion.

This said, emotional distance or a certain flatness of affect is frequently apposite and subtly explored in Mar铆as糖心传媒檚 novels, which are very impressively substantial with ideas and moody mood. Alienation snakes through them, accompaniment to the recurring perception that reality is unreal. More broadly, he is fascinated by the potential for art and life to intersect, and the impossible task of cleanly demarcating the two. And always emerging persuasively from his prose is the haunting notion that consciousness is a roundabout, cryptic story we tell ourselves.

This is going to follow the format I’m planning on using for all the rest of the authors in this collection: a snippet from their interview followed by a bit of the piece they chose as “their best work.”

And once again, if you order the book now, from the Open Letter site, and use the code “FORESTS,” you can get it for only $15. That’s like $.02 a page. Not even shitting around.

The reason for choosing this last fragment, which is from Negra espalda del tiempo, is because out of all my work, it is the passage that has made me feel the most moral doubts. I have asked myself 糖心传媒渟hould I write this, should I put this into somebody else糖心传媒檚 mind? I have the bad luck that it has come into my mind, but should I put this into somebody else糖心传媒檚 mind and make him or her feel as bad as I am feeling now?糖心传媒� It糖心传媒檚 not that I thought of suppressing it, of course not, not so much as that, but I thought that this is a 糖心传媒�putada糖心传媒� to make somebody who might not ever think this at all in his lifetime, to make him think about it, about the idea that nothing ever passes, nothing ever goes away totally. When children get hurt or are frightened or have a nightmare, one of the things a mother says to her child is 糖心传媒�ya pas贸, ya pas贸,糖心传媒� it糖心传媒檚 over, it糖心传媒檚 finished. You糖心传媒檝e had a really bad time, but now, in the present, you aren糖心传媒檛 having that bad time any more. And those words, 糖心传媒渋t糖心传媒檚 over糖心传媒� are very consoling, very healing, as if the present were the thing that counts; it is a consolation to think that that the bad thing or the worst possible thing is over. In this paragraph the idea is that no, it isn糖心传媒檛 like that, things aren糖心传媒檛 always over. Things that happened are always happening, they are still happening and they shall always happen. There is an echo of Macbeth here: 糖心传媒渋t seems as if our yesterdays were all under the earth, trying to surface.糖心传媒� I think the fragment is not bad and it has some force, and it is convincing in a way because generally the idea would be no, it糖心传媒檚 true that when things are over, things are better. Or you can bear what has happened because it is already past, and the past is always more bearable than the present. So to put in somebody else糖心传媒檚 mind the idea that no, watch out, because it糖心传媒檚 not like that, is not a very nice thing to do to potential readers.

In my case the writer I have most in mind is undeniably obvious and explicit in many of my books: Shakespeare. I have taken many titles from him for my works: Ma帽ana en la batalla piensa en m铆, Coraz贸n tan blanco, Cuando fui mortal, and La negra espalda del tiempo, which is not exactly a quote, but it comes from what he says in The Tempest about the abysm, and of course some fragments of works by him are also mentioned openly in my books, fragments from Richard III and Macbeth, and of course The Tempest and from Henry IV and Henry V.

And of course Cervantes, although in the case of Cervantes he comes to me directly in the Spanish language, but also indirectly in the English language because I did translate Tristram Shandy about 30 years ago, and it was a hard task and a long one, and Sterne was so influenced by Cervantes in that novel that in a way I would say that perhaps it is much more Cervantine than any Spanish novel of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. And of course by translating that book when I was young I learned so much about writing and about the use of time in the novel, that I also have a rather permanent dialogue as it were with Sterne himself and with Cervantes as well. Of course there are many others, the authors I have translated into Spanish, because translation is one of the best possible exercises for a writer. If you know two languages and you can translate, I think that糖心传媒檚 the best way to learn how to write. If I had a creative writing school, which I would not, but if I did, I would only have students who speak at least two languages and make them translate. Because you happen to be not only a privileged reader, but a privileged writer if you can renounce your own style, if you have one, and adopt someone else糖心传媒檚糖心传媒攕omeone who is much better than you, always if you are translating classics at least糖心传媒攁nd if you can rewrite that in your own language in an acceptable way, let alone if it is in a very good way, you are sharpening your instruments and your writing will improve tremendously. I translated poetry by Nabokov and Faulkner, John Ashbery, Wallace Stevens, Stevenson, Auden, Thomas Browne, Isak Dinesen, Yeats.

Of course translating well is not enough, you must have some ability for invention and some talent and a few other things, but as far as the instrument goes, that is the best possible school. Therefore, those writers I just mentioned influenced me because I did translate them, they are always very much on my mind, and I have adopted in my own writing sometimes solutions that I have found for them in Spanish. Sometimes in translation you cannot always have an absolute equivalent, but you can add something with which you compensate for what you miss. And sometimes I have even used small things; I remember having used something from Nabokov, in one of his poems he talks about the 糖心传媒渕ellow moon糖心传媒�; which I translated as 糖心传媒�la luna pulposa.糖心传媒� Whenever I have used that expression in Spanish, I realize that I am in conversation with my Nabokov. So I have many authors in mind. Funnily enough, there are more poets who I have more conversations with when writing, and that is something that has not been pointed out very often. When critics talk about evident influences, sometimes I think, 糖心传媒渂ut I have never read that author,糖心传媒� but they always link you with other novelists, they never think of poets and I think that one of my strongest influences can be found in the poets, which is why in Tu rostro ma帽ana there are quotations from Eliot, Rilke, Machado, and Ashbery.

The woman watches the streetlamps while trying to protect her hair from the wind with a kerchief, an old-fashioned image not often seen any more, maybe that糖心传媒檚 why she糖心传媒檚 not very skilled at it and, not managing to tie the kerchief in place, she gives up, her hair flying in the wind like a banner. She has left the night behind, and her bed, and she thinks with some uneasiness about the young man still asleep there, he糖心传媒檚 spent too many mornings there since he stayed on without ever saying he was staying, coming and going while she糖心传媒檚 at work, leaving and returning whenever he feels like it with no explanations, as if he糖心传媒檇 rented out a room and didn糖心传媒檛 live with anyone, neither asking nor telling; but at night when he comes to bed in the darkness, far too late, he wakes her up like a hungry animal糖心传媒攍ike a child who can糖心传媒檛 bear to wait糖心传媒攁nd tears off her nightgown and gets her sheets sweaty, taking up her time for rest, robbing her of her sleep to keep it for himself. The woman stays awake almost all night, thinking about what糖心传媒檚 happened in the darkness and wondering if this was the last time, she leaves in the morning weary of her thoughts, fearful that when she comes back after all the hours in the world outside he糖心传媒檒l still be there, and fearful, too, that he糖心传媒檒l be gone; she fears both things equally and hasn糖心传媒檛 even tried to tell him to stay or go because it also frightens her to think that he might listen to her, or that he might not, if she were to say one thing or the other, one thing and the other, if she dared. And she doesn糖心传媒檛 know what to do so she doesn糖心传媒檛 do anything, she just waits for the bus, chilled, watching the streetlamps hold out against the rising light of the sun as if it had nothing to do with them, during this time when their two territories coexist and do not exclude each other though they do not intermingle either, just as the real does not mix with the fictitious, and in fiction it can never be said, 糖心传媒淚t糖心传媒檚 over now, there, there, it糖心传媒檚 all over,糖心传媒� not even as consolation or subterfuge, because nothing has really happened, silly, and in the territory that is not truth糖心传媒檚 everything goes on happening forever and ever and there the light is not put out now or later, and perhaps it is never put out.

(Excerpt translated by Esther Allen)

I could take a year off of work just to read, and at the end of that year, my “to read” bookshelves would still be overflowing and I’d still feel like I didn’t get to all the things that I wanted.

I only mention this because my copy of Mar铆as’s The Infatuations arrived yesterday and made me want to set aside everything else. (Except for the fact that that “everything else” is editing Juan Jos茅 Saer’s La Grande, which may very well be the best book I’ve read since reading Saer’s Scars.) But, I also still have the Mar铆as trilogy to get to. And a stack of 12-14 books that I want to review for Three Percent. And I now have cable and all of the La Liga, Premiere League, Serie A, and Ligue 1 games to watch. And.

Anyway, Jeremy Garber — who is a used book buyer for a large independent bookstore and has written for The Oregonian, the Oregon Historical Quarterly, and on Powells.com—wrote this fantastic review of The Infatuations. Jeremy’s reviews are always really fantastic, and I love his technique of inserting a ton of quotes from the book itself.

Here’s the opening:

“What happened is the least of it. 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 and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.”

Being that there are so many ways in which one might consider a book’s overall effect (to say nothing of how certain elements may appeal to one reader over another), it can be rather arduous to convey what it is about a particular work that makes it resonate as it does. To some, prose is paramount. to others, believable characters and their development, with whom a reader can identify or at least empathize. Faithful dialogue, compelling plot, philosophical asides, broad scope, cross-cultural relevance, clever construction, unique narrative stylings, memorable voice, a timeless quality—all these and more are reasons often given when discussing what it is about a work of fiction that makes it so distinguished or outstanding. The one commonality shared by all the world’s great novels, however, be they past or present, is their remarkable ability to stay with us long after we’ve set the story aside. So it is with Javier Mar铆as’s latest novel, The Infatuations (Los enamoramientos).

Published to wide acclaim in his native spain in 2011, the disputed king of Redonda’s most recent offering is a murder mystery par excellence. no mere formulaic thriller, Mar铆as’s tale is one of perception, memory, grief, love, death, complicity, circumstance, doubt, chance, delusion, the multiplicity of motivation, and, of course, the nature of infatuation. Set within the capital city of Madrid and using a violent (and seemingly senseless) murder as its catalyst, the story follows Mar铆a Dolz, a publishing house employee who entangles herself, however inadvertently at the onset, in the heinous crime’s aftermath.

Click here to read the entire review.

“What happened is the least of it. 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 and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.”

Being that there are so many ways in which one might consider a book’s overall effect (to say nothing of how certain elements may appeal to one reader over another), it can be rather arduous to convey what it is about a particular work that makes it resonate as it does. To some, prose is paramount. to others, believable characters and their development, with whom a reader can identify or at least empathize. Faithful dialogue, compelling plot, philosophical asides, broad scope, cross-cultural relevance, clever construction, unique narrative stylings, memorable voice, a timeless quality—all these and more are reasons often given when discussing what it is about a work of fiction that makes it so distinguished or outstanding. The one commonality shared by all the world’s great novels, however, be they past or present, is their remarkable ability to stay with us long after we’ve set the story aside. So it is with Javier Mar铆as’s latest novel, The Infatuations (Los enamoramientos).

Published to wide acclaim in his native spain in 2011, the disputed king of Redonda’s most recent offering is a murder mystery par excellence. no mere formulaic thriller, Mar铆as’s tale is one of perception, memory, grief, love, death, complicity, circumstance, doubt, chance, delusion, the multiplicity of motivation, and, of course, the nature of infatuation. Set within the capital city of Madrid and using a violent (and seemingly senseless) murder as its catalyst, the story follows Mar铆a Dolz, a publishing house employee who entangles herself, however inadvertently at the onset, in the heinous crime’s aftermath.

All this information was published over a period of two days, the two days following the murder. Then the item vanished from the press completely, as tends to happen with all news nowadays: people don’t want to know why something happened, only what happened, and to know that the world is full of reckless acts, of dangers, threats and bad luck that only brush past us, but touch and kill our careless fellow human beings, or perhaps they were simply not among the chosen. We live quite happily with a thousand unresolved mysteries that occupy our minds for ten minutes in the morning and are then forgotten without leaving so much as a tremor of grief, not a trace. We don’t want to go too deeply into anything or linger too long over any event or story, we need to have our attention shifted from one thing to another, to be given a constantly renewed supply of other people’s misfortunes, as if, after each one, we thought: “How dreadful. But what’s next? What other horrors have we avoided? We need to feel that we, by contrast, are survivors, immortals, so feed us some new atrocities, we’ve worn out yesterday’s already.

Once morbid curiosity, fascination, and, perhaps, schadenfreude no longer fuel our fertile imaginations, a murder (nothing more) becomes as disposable as any of the myriad news stories that we’ve somehow indulged as being momentarily relevant to our lives. Mar铆as works this pervasive and perverse social peculiarity to great effect—intriguing us enough to concern ourselves with the fate of his characters (with ever the freedom to simply turn or walk away), yet forever eroding the space around them from which we can watch safely from the periphery. It’s a deliriously intoxicating technique, one evinced by our daily obsession with celebrity scandal, political malfeasance, far-off disaster, or nearby crimes of passion. These truncated news stories and soundbites, in reality, often have not the slightest thing to do with our own lives, but end up somehow consuming us (however briefly) all the same—as if they were somehow vested with the weight of our own personal stake. Mar铆a is unable to turn away and neither are we.

Whereas so many whodunnits content themselves with little more than revealing the perpetrator and their hackneyed impulses, The Infatuations seeks to explore and confront a much broader purview. with perceptive observations and often tender insights into thought, reason, emotion, judgment, and the murky fringes of reality, Mar铆as draws us into an almost inescapable role of accomplice and witness. He is able to do this so effectively by extracting the reader from the mystery of the murder itself (with which so few of us can identify) and repositioning one within the more familiar confines of love lost, relationships torn asunder, and the inevitable self-doubt which follows.

We tend to hope that, of the people and habits we cherish, no one will die and none will end, not realizing that the only thing that maintains those habits intact is their sudden withdrawal, with no possible alteration or evolution, before they can can abandon us or we abandon them. Anything that lasts goes bad and putrefies, it bores us, turns against us, saturates and wearies us. How many people who once seemed vital to us are left by the wayside, how many relationships wear thin, become diluted for no apparent reason or certainly none of any weight. The only people who do not fail or let us down are those who are snatched from us, the only ones we don’t drop are those who abruptly disappear and so have no time to cause us pain or disappointment. When that happens, we despair momentarily, because we believe we could have continued with them for much longer, with no foreseeable expiry date. That’s a mistake, albeit understandable. continuity changes everything, and something we thought wonderful yesterday would have become a torment tomorrow.

Is the author manipulating us? Are we willing participants? Are we rendered prostrate simply because the story evokes the universal feeling of unrequited desire and heartbreak? What about the abhorrent murder? Is all grief transmutable and therefore inexorable? Are we failing to see beyond all that is shown?

I would never know more than what he told me, and so i would never know anything for sure; yes, it’s ridiculous, isn’t it, that after all these centuries of practice, after so many incredible advances and inventions, we still have no way of knowing when someone is lying; naturally, this both benefits and prejudices all of us equally, and may be our one remaining redoubt of freedom.

Mar铆as’s thirteenth novel (and the tenth to be translated into english), achingly beautiful and seemingly effortless like so much of his writing, could only have been carefully constructed by one possessed of a compassion and discernment alien to lesser writers. The Infatuations is not a flawless outing, but a remarkable and impressive one nonetheless. Mar铆as’s exploration of doubt, truth, life, love, and violence does not answer any of the age-old questions of morality and mortality, but leaves us with the sense that there is much veracity and wisdom to be found within the shadows and gradations. A master of contemporary fiction (and regularly mentioned as a perennial candidate for world literature’s highest honor), Mar铆as is among the finest european writers at work today.

The passing of time exacerbates and intensifies any storm, even though there wasn’t the tiniest cloud on the horizon at the beginning. We cannot know what time will do to us with its fine, indistinguishable layers upon layers, we cannot know what it might make of us. it advances stealthily, day by day and hour by hour and step by poisoned step, never drawing attention to its surreptitious labors, so respectful and considerate that it never once gives us a sudden prod or a nasty fright. Each morning, it turns up with its soothing, invariable face and tells us exactly the opposite of what is actually happening: that everything is fine and nothing has changed, that everything is just as it was yesterday—the balance of power—that nothing has been gained and nothing lost, that our face is the same, as is our hair and our shape, that the person who hated us continues to hate us and the person who loved us continues to love us. And yet quite the opposite is true, but time conceals this from us with is treacherous minutes and sly seconds, until a strange, unthinkable day arrives, when nothing is as it always was . . .

There isn糖心传媒檛 much in this issue of Five Dials. Sometimes 糖心传媒� as long-time readers know 糖心传媒� we give over an entire issue to a single writer. The bar is high. Last time we relinquished control, the issue was placed in the capable hands of Orhan Pamuk. This issue features a single essay by one of our favourite writers, Javier Mar铆as, whose latest novel, The Infatuations, is currently being translated by the incomparable Margaret Jull Costa. [. . .]

At some point, years ago, Mar铆as read The Leopard and, unlike some of us who
simply wandered down streets in Camden, he wrote an essay on the particular genius of the novel, and the way the book seems heavier than most, weighted with the wisdom of an entire life. I envy any of you Five Dials readers who know nothing of Mar铆as or Lampedusa. From this humble starting point, your journey will hopefully include the following stops on its itinerary: a page from now you糖心传媒檒l get to the Mar铆as essay, which will inevitably lead you towards The Leopard (as well as Mar铆as糖心传媒檚 own work), and perhaps The Leopard will lead you to your own dark streets, standing in front of a row of houses, wearing a too-thin coat, feeling the weight of its lessons, aware that it is so much more than a story of crumbling Sicilian aristocracy.

And from the opening of the essay:

There is no such thing as the indispensable book or author, and the world would be exactly the same if Kafka, Proust, Faulkner, Mann, Nabokov and Borges had never existed. It might not be quite the same if none of them had existed, but the non-existence of just one of them would certainly not have affected the whole. That is why it is so tempting 糖心传媒� an easy temptation if you like 糖心传媒� to think that the representative twentieth-century novel must be the one that very nearly didn糖心传媒檛 exist, the one that nobody would have missed (Kafka, after all, did not leave just the one work, and as soon as it was known that there were others, as well as Metamorphosis, any reader was then at liberty to desire or even yearn to read them), the one novel that, in its day, was seen by many almost as an excrescence or an intrusion, as antiquated and completely out of step with the predominant 糖心传媒榯rends糖心传媒�, both in its country of origin, Italy, and in the rest of the world. A superfluous work, anachronistic, one that neither 糖心传媒榓dded to糖心传媒� nor 糖心传媒榤oved things on糖心传媒�, as if the history of literature were something that progressed and was, in that respect, akin to science, whose discoveries are left behind or eliminated as they are overtaken or revealed to be incomplete, inadequate or inexact. But literature functions in quite the opposite way: nothing that one adds to it erases or cancels out what came before; rather, new books sit alongside earlier books and they coexist. 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. The older work still has to 糖心传媒榖reathe糖心传媒�, despite the time that has elapsed since its creation or appearance; and some works 糖心传媒� the majority 糖心传媒� are erased or cancelled out, but this happens of its own accord, not because something else comes along to take their place or to supplant or eject them; rather, they languish and die because of their own lack of spirit or 糖心传媒� more precisely 糖心传媒� because they aspired to being 糖心传媒榤odern糖心传媒� or 糖心传媒榦riginal糖心传媒�, an aspiration that leads inevitably to an early senescence or, as others might say, they become 糖心传媒榙ated糖心传媒�. 糖心传媒業t糖心传媒檚 very much of its time,糖心传媒� we tell ourselves when we read these books in a different, later age, because, given the unstoppable and ever-accelerating speed with which the world moves, 糖心传媒榠n a different age糖心传媒� can sometimes mean a mere decade later. This is the case even with stories written by some of the great modern authors, such as Kafka, Faulkner, Borges on occasions and Joyce almost always. They can sometimes seem slightly old-fashioned or, if you prefer, dated, precisely because they were so innovative, bold, confident, original and ambitious.

The same cannot be said of Isak Dinesen or of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa糖心传媒檚 The Leopard. The latter is not in any way an old-fashioned nineteenth-century novel as some critics said at the time, misled perhaps by the century in which the action takes place. It is, without a doubt, a contemporary novel of the kind written by the authors mentioned above, and its author was fully aware of the new techniques and 糖心传媒榓dvances糖心传媒� in the genre, if you can call them that, and was even modest enough to abandon one possibility 糖心传媒� that of describing a single day in the life of Prince Fabrizio di Salina 糖心传媒� saying: 糖心传媒業 don糖心传媒檛 know how to do a _Ulysses._糖心传媒� But he did know, for example, how to make masterly use of ellipsis, telling a story in fragmentary fashion, unemphatically, even withholding information and leaving unexplained what the reader need only glimpse or intuit, setting up illuminating connections between disparate and apparently secondary or merely anecdotal elements, adroitly bringing together what the characters say and do with what they think (all of which is much more common in the twentieth-century novel than in the novel of the nineteenth century), and, above all, he observes, reflects, suggests and qualifies.

Check it all out

Yet despite all the excitement, somehow I got through my three months at N.D. without reading a single one of Marias’s many books. It was my summer of Bolano, I suppose糖心传媒攎y infatuation with 2666 would give no place whatsoever to another international titan anytime soon. So here I am, two years later, finally reading Marias’s latest collection to appear in English, While the Women are Sleeping, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and published over a year ago. (I admit, I’m generally behind the times.) But if I happen to feel a bit anxious about so belatedly joining the Marias conversation on the basis of a single little collection, there’s a line from Marias’s introductory remarks to the last story in the book, 糖心传媒淲hat the Butler Said,糖心传媒� that knowingly sets my anxieties at ease: 糖心传媒淭he books we don’t read are full of warnings; we will either never read them or they will arrive too late.糖心传媒� The word 糖心传媒渨arnings糖心传媒� here doesn’t quite work out of its proper context, but I’ll take it here to mean 糖心传媒渢hings we desperately want and need to know before we die . . .糖心传媒� It might seem to be a remark that should make me more, not less, anxious. But this is a book that probes the dusty corners of whatever we imagine death might be and makes it a symphony of enticing enigmas, where ghosts go on writing love letters, or pursue an education, or persevere in their desire to resign糖心传媒攆rom friendship, employment, or the weird project of being alive糖心传媒攚hich, in the worlds that Marias sketches in these stories, is at times quite indistinguishable from being dead.

Though the book is not all ghost stories, it does include several, featuring narrators or protagonists enmeshed in their own strange dilemmas of love and selfhood which are complicated by the sudden incursions of a spirit from beyond the grave. 糖心传媒淥ne Night of Love糖心传媒� has its protagonist, who complains of his wife’s lack of interest in lovemaking, discover love letters addressed to his late father from a woman who claims that she is already dead as she writes. The narrator then receives a letter from his dead father’s dead lover, importuning him to exhume his father’s body and cremate it, in order that his spirit will be released and can join her. As the narrator quibbles with himself over whether to hide the letters from his wife, her sexual interest in him mysteriously starts to grow. Another story, 糖心传媒淎 Kind of Nostalgia Perhaps,糖心传媒� tells of a young girl who, out of charity, reads to a lonely old woman every day, and before long they are visited by a bullet-ridden ghost who turns out to be the Mexican insurrectionist Emiliano Zapata, coming just to listen quietly to the girl read.

I’m finding it difficult fun to paraphrase a Marias story, they’re so gently off-beat and beautifully constructed. And Marias is bursting with affection for his very human, very living protagonists, as boring and morally repugnant as they might be, which might make my descriptions a little less morally ambiguous than the stories actually are糖心传媒攁nd challengingly, illuminatingly so, if you’ll pardon all the adverbs. 糖心传媒淭he Resignation Letter of Senor de Santiesteban,糖心传媒� my personal favorite, tells of Derek Lilburn, an Englishman 糖心传媒渙f little imagination, ordinary tastes, and an irrelevant past,糖心传媒� who begins a new teaching job in Madrid on a short-term professional exchange program. He arrives at his new school, where he is given the simple task of locking up the school every Friday night. The first night he is to perform this chore, he is warned to pay no heed to Senor Santiesteban, the ghost who, every single night, bursts out of the school office, takes seven steps over to the hallway bulletin board, tacks up a letter of resignation addressed only to a 糖心传媒淒ear Friend,糖心传媒� takes eight steps back into the office, and falls still. Oddly, this ghost is not to be seen, only heard. And no one knows who he was in life, or what he is resigning from, or why: the letter, identical every night, is enigmatically reticent of circumstantial details. Lilburn makes it his personal mission to solve the puzzle, despite the warnings of his superior, Mr. Bayo, who has been down the investigational road and found that it only leads one to admit in frustration that the mystery is unsolvable. The bored and boring Lilburn is undeterred, and shares every tiny discovery with the wearily patient Mr. Bayo, until, finally outdoing his superior, Lilburn finds a way to truly know the ghost糖心传媒攂y becoming him, in a strange way that has nothing to do with death.

The private contemplation of death by the living preoccupies many of the stories in this book, but not all of them: see 糖心传媒淎n Epigram of Fealty,糖心传媒� which tells of a rare book dealer in London who is harangued by a beggar claiming to be John Gawsworth, King of Redonda; or 糖心传媒淕ualta,糖心传媒� a brief tale narrating one man’s descent into total ruination after meeting his doppelg盲nger at a business dinner. The title story, which is the first and longest in the collection, sets the stage for meditating on the imagination’s encounter with death, but it features nothing of the supernatural either. Told from a voyeur’s perspective, the story is strongly reminiscent of Lolita: it depicts an overweight middle-aged man, Viana, who has subscribed his life to his passionate desire for In猫s, the daughter of his close friends, whom he meets when she is only seven years old. Now she is twenty-three and they have been living together for five years, to the ruin of his friendship with her parents. He videotapes her body with microscopic attention every day 糖心传媒渂ecause she is going to die,糖心传媒� he says, and he wants to have a visual record of her last day on Earth. The narrator watches this videotaping take place on the beach, and then meeting Viana one night beside the hotel pool, he listens to the fat man’s tale. My next thought as I read is that Marias owes much to Nabokov’s sense of narrative play as well糖心传媒攆rom the first image in the story of the narrator spying on his fellow sunbathers on the beach through his wife’s straw sunhat, this playful seriousness continues through the story’s final lines:

Both were sleeping, that’s why they didn’t wake up or come out onto the balcony, Luisa hadn’t died in my absence, however long that had been糖心传媒擨’d forgotten my watch. Instinctively, I glanced up toward the rooms, toward my balcony, toward all the balconies, and on one of them, I saw a figure wrapped in a sheet toga and heard it call to me twice, saying my name, as mothers say their children糖心传媒檚 names. I stood up. On In猫s’s balcony, though, whichever it was, there was no one.

The texture of the collection as a whole may seem uneven, but this is hardly a detractor. The ten stories here are dated across a period of more than 30 years, the earliest being 糖心传媒淭he Life and Death of Marcelino Iturriaga,糖心传媒� written (according to the Author’s Note) in 1965, when Marias was just fourteen years old (糖心传媒渂e kind, please,糖心传媒� he beseeches his readers). The story is narrated by a man on his deathbed who continues to be able to see and hear but is unable to move or speak, 糖心传媒渁live and well糖心传媒� mentally even as his body has ceased to function. A certain lack of maturity in the writing comes across at times with a coarse brashness, a mix of youthful courage and naivete in the tone that can be highly entertaining:

At six o’clock on the evening of the 22nd, when the fever intensified, I tried to get out of bed, but fell back against the pillow, dead. . . . I couldn’t speak or move or open my eyes, even though I could see and hear everything going on around me. My mother-in-law said:

糖心传媒淗e’s dead.糖心传媒�

糖心传媒淢ay he rest in peace,糖心传媒� chorused the others.

Certainly it is the weakest story in the collection, so one wonders why Marias chose to include it. My guess is that it is at the very least to demonstrate that certain themes and meditations that set the writer to work in youth may keep him busy many years later. By including this story along with the much more mature 糖心传媒淎 Kind of Nostalgia Perhaps糖心传媒� (dated 1998), with 糖心传媒淭he Resignation Letter of Senor de Santiestaban糖心传媒� (1975) and other stories from the mid-80s falling in between, the book offers us a glimpse of a long range of Marias’s life in writing.

The final and perhaps greatest pleasure in the book, however, is found in rereading and discovering that the work is not quite what you thought it was糖心传媒攊t’s not the stories only, it’s the soft surprises that burst from Marias’s delicate prose (via Margaret Jull Costa’s rendering in the way that I like best in a translation: she gives the feeling that what you’re reading is decidedly not English, though you can’t point to exactly why it feels that way, as her English at the same time feels perfectly natural糖心传媒擟hris Andrews’s translation of Cesar Aira’s Ghosts is another example of English prose that dexterously retains some flavor of the original Spanish). As I’ve gone back over the book in composing this review, in order to describe these ghosts and enigmatic perusals of death, this is the kind of thing I find糖心传媒攖he most careful, disquieting attention to a curious scene:

The young man took some time to reappear糖心传媒攑erhaps ghosts go into mourning, for who else has more reason to or perhaps they are still wary, perhaps words can still wound them糖心传媒攂ut he did finally return, attracted perhaps by the new material, and he continued to listen with the same close attention, not standing up this time, leaning on the chairback, but comfortably installed in the now vacant armchair, his hat dangling from his hand, and sometimes with his legs crossed and holding a lit cigar, like the patriarch he never, in his numbered days, had the chance to become. (from 糖心传媒淎 Kind of Nostalgia Perhaps糖心传媒�)

Everyone probably already is, but I’ll say it anyway: Read Marias, read him again, and read him again.