Marías doing his thing - “I’ve seen one glaring error already.”

No, I was wrong when I wrote that I that I did not know how The Infatuations was a Javier Marías novel until one of the characters started talking about Balzac on page 131.  I mean, aside from the words “Javier Marías“ on the cover.  This is just a metaphor.

No, it was on page 76, when the narrator first meets her future lover Javier, who is accompanied by, who else, Professor Francisco Rico.  “I knew Professor Rico’s face well, he often appears on television and in the press, with his wide, expressive mouth, immaculate bald head, which he carries off with great aplomb, his rather large glasses,” and so on.  Later she says he “Was wearing a charming Nazi-green jacket” with a “melon-green” tie.  The Professor is pompous, vulgar, and loud; he takes over the next twenty pages of the book.

“Who else,” I say, because I have read the chapter about Professor Rico, Cervantes expert, “laboriously disdainful, insolent in his vanity and congenial in spite of himself,” that runs from pages 47 to 62 in the Marías novel – for the sake of argument – Dark Back of Time (1998), which chapter is entirely about the appearance of Professor Rico in various Marías novels, in disguise or, as he actually wants, as himself:

“I’ve decided I don’t want to appear in this little novel of yours as Professor del Diestro or what-have-you or anything else.  If I’m in it, I want to be in it as myself.”

At first I didn’t understand.  “Yourself?  What do you mean?”

The professor grew impatient.  “Myself, Francisco Rico, under my own name.  I want Francisco Rico to appear, not a fictional entity who acts like him or parodies him.”  (DBoT, 57, tr. Esther Allen)

Marías argues that a fictional Rico is not actually Rico, but the professor is not dissuaded.  Marías uses “real places and institutions,” no?

“Yes, there’s the United Nations and the Prado, and…”

“Well, there you have it,” he said.

“Have what?”

“There you have it: I want to be like the Prado.”

Rico ultimately buys his fictional appearance with an unspecified favor.  And here he is again, fourteen years later, like the Prado.  After this one scene, Rico never appears again.

His last words worry me. He sees an edition of Don Quixote on the shelf, not his edition (“How can anyone possibly own this edition when they could have mine?”).  Taking it down,

[h]e opened the book at random, cast a quick, disdainful eye over the page and stabbed at one particular line with his index finger.  “I’ve seen one glaring error already.”  Then he closed the book as if there were no point in looking any further.  “I’ll write an article about it.” (99)

If this were a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, I know what this would mean.  Somewhere in the novel there is a deliberate error that if discovered and corrected by the reader will upend the meaning of the text.  At least one clue is provided right here – “glaring,” or maybe “article.”

Nabokov never did this as far as I know.  Has anyone?  This would be a great trick.  I do not know what Marías means by it.  The incident itself is so intrusive – glaring – that is what worries me.  Someone should write an article about it.

As a little bonus, the protagonist of the Marías novella Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico appears later in The Infatuations.  I have not read that one.  Someone else will have to explain the joke.

If I were to write more about The Infatuations, I would work on the Balzac business.  And Dumas, too, Marías also pulls in the most horrific parts of The Three Musketeers.  And I would write about the narrator and her deep hatred of the publishing industry in which she works (“back to the idiotic world of publishing” she says at the novel’s close, p. 336).

But I think I will move to something else.

The Infatuations by Javier Marías - a musical instrument that does not transmit meanings

A couple of days of notes on the newest Javier Marías novel, The Infatuations (2011), translated with panache by Margaret Jull Costa.  Marías has his narrator, a woman who works in publishing, describe his own novel:

He had a marked tendency to discourse and expound and digress, as I have noticed to be the case with many of the writers I meet at the publishing house, as if it weren’t enough for them to fill pages and pages with their thoughts and stories, which, with few exceptions, are either absurd, pretentious, gruesome or pathetic.  (131)

So Marías is still working in the style he adopted* for the Your Face Tomorrow novel or novels back in 2002.  I would not mind if he knocked it off.  Excess is cheaper than restraint.

He, and she, then says how he (just he) would like me to take the novel:

… I didn’t mind his digressions…  I couldn’t take my eyes off him and delighted in his grave, somehow inward-turned voice and the often arbitrary syntactic leaps he made, the whole effect seeming sometimes not to emanate from a human being, but from a musical instrument that does not transmit meanings, perhaps a piano played with great agility.

Now this is actually the narrator describing the way her boyfriend talks, but anyone who talks or speaks or writes this way when telling a story – “arbitrary syntactic leaps” – is awfully inward-turned herself.  I enjoy the voice Marías uses here quite a bit, his piano attack, to extend his metaphor – why else would I read his book – but I share his doubts about meaning.

The boyfriend rephrases the concern further on in the book:

But Díaz-Varela was in no mood to discuss Balzac, he wanted to continue his story to the end.  “What happened is the least of it,” he had said when he spoke to me about Colonel Chabert.  “It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten.”  (276)

Truer words was never spoke.  Marías here justifies my usual practice of ignoring the plot of the novel in favor of the memorable parts, like the discussion of Balzac.  No mood to discuss Balzac!

About a third of the way in, Marías begins a long** summary and exegesis of Balzac’s 1832 novella Colonel Chabert, one of his best works, I think.  The boyfriend, Javier, is doing the exegeting while the girlfriend, María, the narrator, asks questions.  I know, Javier and María, very funny.

Mookse Trevor says that at this point he “had a devil of a time getting through about thirty pages of it,” so fair warning, although it was exactly at this point (p. 131, after the quotation up above) that I began to find the novel interesting.  A man María knows by sight is murdered by a madman; she meets the wife; through the wife she meets and begins an affair with Javier.  So little in 130 pages, but see above: discourse, expound, digress. 

The matter includes the narrator’s insight on, for example, the strange ways people are connected or the process of mourning, as on page 74, where the narrator imagines the debris, once meaningless and now poignant, left behind by the murdered man, “the novel with the page turned down, which will remain unread, but also the medicines that suddenly have become utterly superfluous and that will soon have to be thrown away,” in other words the kind of thing that has appeared in a thousand novels and that I have read a dozen times myself.  The legitimate stuff of fiction, certainly, but when, I wondered, is The Infatuations going to turn into a Javier Marías novel?

Then: thirty pages on Balzac.  Finally.

That will give me something to write about tomorrow.  Or I will just catalogue some of the novel’s best jokes.

*  I am guessing.  The novel previous, Dark Back of Time (1998), is not written this way, nor is All Souls (1989), nor, for that matter are the newspaper pieces in Written Lives (1992).  I originally found Marías attractive for his lightly Nabokovian precision.  He seems to have come to distrust the idea of precision in language.

**  Long is relative.  In Your Face Tomorrow, the Balzac discussion would have lasted a hundred pages.

O, speak not of her! then I die with grief. - Marlowe, Rilke, and the quotable Your Face Tomorrow

Yesterday’s ragbag on Javier Marías’s gigantic so-called spy novel Your Face Tomorrow may well have been the most reader-unfriendly post I have ever inscribed on Wuthering Expectations.  It did not assume that you, dear kind gentle reader, had read the novel, but rather that you had read and retained my little series on the novel’s first volume written back in June, had followed the path to Caravanas de Recuerdos and bibliographing and that insightful piece at In lieu if a field guide, and then returned to me.

An alternative view: it was among my clearest, friendliest posts.  It signaled, quickly and clearly: do not just skim, but skip.  A real time saver.  You’re welcome!  My pleasure.  Today, more of the same.  You’re welcome!  Monday is a holiday, so I’ll see you on Tuesday.  Have a nice weekend.

A digression on Nabokov.  When I read Nabokov, I know that he is using images, adjectives, jokes, all of his tools, to create a complex system of correspondences that reach across the novel, connections that belong not to the first-person narrator, if there is one, but to the novelist, and the attentive reader.  The butterfly that appears near the end of the book should send us back to the butterfly in Chapter 2. The butterfly may not have any particular meaning of its own, but the scenes in which they appear will correspond in surprising and delightful ways.  That is how Nabokov works.

The Nabokovian Javier Marías is doing something similar in Your Face Tomorrow with his use of quotations.  I was hardly able to follow them all, the incessant stream of Shakespeare in particular.  I wonder what Marías is doing with Christopher Marlowe’s single greatest line, for example (Barabbas, the Jew of Malta, is being interrogated by a pair of monks, “two religious caterpillars”:

FRIAR BARNARDINE.  Thy daughter--
FRIAR JACOMO.  Ay, thy daughter--
BARABAS.  O, speak not of her! then I die with grief.
FRIAR BARNARDINE.  Remember that--
FRIAR JACOMO.  Ay, remember that--
BARABAS.  I must needs say that I have been a great usurer.
FRIAR BARNARDINE.  Thou hast committed--
BARABAS.  Fornication:  but that was in another country;
      And besides, the wench is dead.   (The Jew of Malta, Act IV)

Deza, the narrator, an expatriate, repeatedly uses the phrase “but that was in another country,” usually just that snippet.  It would be productive to follow that phrase around the novel.  But I cannot; I would have to  re-read.

I was quick enough to catch another one, Deza’s repetition of a fragment of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies.  Here is the relevant passage, two-thirds through the First Elegy, in Stephen Mitchell’s translation:

Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to give up customs one has barely had time to learn,
not to see roses and other promising Things
in terms of a human future; no longer to be
what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave
even one’s own first name behind, forgetting it
as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.
Strange to no longer desire one’s desires.  Strange
to see meanings that clung together once, floating away
 in every direction.  And being dead is hard work…*

Deza never quotes all of this, but rather a fragment, just three times, I think, one of the strange ways that the three volumes of the seven part single novel has some meaning.  The Rilke lines first appear, unattributed, on page 346 of the first volume, near the end of the enormous Monologue on Silence.  The elderly Peter Wheeler, the novel’s secret hero, is describing or lamenting the silence of death – “the only people who have no language and never speak or tell or say anything are the dead.”  When the lines return in volume 3, p. 518, we are hearing about the personal grief behind Wheeler’s earlier speech.  This last scene, the novel’s ethical climax, includes, or, really, is interrupted by, quotations from across the novel, some literary, some lines from within Your Face Tomorrow.  Some I recognized, not all.

The use of the Rilke line in volume 2 is more elliptical.  Deza’s father is telling a story about an atrocity from the Spanish Civil War that took place near the Andalucian city of Ronda.  Rilke “had stayed in Ronda for a couple of months twenty-four years before… there is a statue of him, of the poet, a very black, life-size one, in the garden of a hotel.”  The whole passage is unusually Sebaldian, a refugee from The Rings of Saturn.  I have visited Ronda, but did not know about the Rilke statue.  Deza’s fragment of the Duino Elegies is part of the story – “[i]t may have been there that he began to conceive these lines.”  Peter Wheeler is in fact mentioned, but I could not, initially, connect his story to the scene – I did not know his story. 

The details about Rilke, like the mention of Wheeler, seem like a non sequitur, but they tie Wheeler's tragedy into a different one and develop the parallel between Wheeler and Deza’s father and do who knows what else assuming I pursued the idea, which I had better not, because look how far my rambling has already taken me, and I have not even written anything about the hilarious Godfather joke on III.424.  I could just keep going.  But I won’t.

*  P. 155 of The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Vintage International.

Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction – notes on Your Face Tomorrow, Javier Marías’s great folly

“Folly,” as the voluble and persnickety narrator of Marias’s enormous, complex Your Face Tomorrow would surely tell me, is a word with multiple meanings.  I have the architectural definition in mind, primarily, but the metaphor of the folly house always suggests the other meanings, doesn’t it?  I love folly houses.  Who doesn't?

For a couple of days, notes, just notes.  Other readers can tell me if they are promising.  Please see the remarkable In lieu of a field guide for something rather more substantial, especially the section on the meaning of translation - that gets right to the heart of this book.  Thanks to the Memory Caravan for hosting the readalong.

*  A basic question – how is the narrator, Deza, narrating, and who is his audience?  Is he writing, speaking – surely not – or are we overhearing his thoughts, hearing his self-justifications, his own attempts to work through the events or ideas of the book.  I assume the latter, but wonder about the former.  I have pretty strong evidence that someone has written a book.

Finishing the entire novel answers a related question.  Deza’s story is entirely retrospective.  He knows all of the events of the story before he begins telling it.  Any oddities in the ways he tells the story or gaps are his choice.  Although: what does he learn while telling the story, even if he is only telling it to himself?

*  I suspect Your Face Tomorrow of containing puzzles and secrets, that it is akin to Pale Fire and The Good Soldier.  I also suspect that it is not like those books at all, but let me assume that it is.  I wonder if it is possible, for example, to fill in the narrator’s most significant gap.

Why is Deza’s wife unable to live with him?  The couple spends almost all of the book formally separated, with Deza in London and his wife and children in Madrid.  We learn that, after the events of the plot, with Deza back in Madrid, the couple has reconciled but live in separate apartments.  “’Promise me that we’ll always be like this, the way we are now, that we’ll never again live together,’” she tells him during one of their “best or most passionate or happiest moments.” (III.535)

Perhaps the answer is an accumulation of domestic banalities that are not worth the trouble of enumerating.  Or perhaps the problem is Deza’s unbearable, repetitive, pedantic, and unending flow of speech.  I am partly joking about that one.  The marriage and spy plot intersect in one significant long scene, and I detect hints, quite possibly false, of another answer.  I likely missed or forgot something more straightforward.

*  All of this is part of a larger question about the mental health of the narrator.  The novel’s events have been a shock to his system.  What are the lasting effects?  Deza uses the metaphor of poison, or, amusingly, of a Botox treatment.  His endless flow of thought or words is often broken by a strange list:

Why all that conflict and struggle, why did they fight instead of just looking and staying still, why were they unable to meet or to go on seeing each other, and why so much sleep, so many dreams, and why that scratch, my pain, my word, your fever, the dance, and all those doubts, all that torment? (II.278)

The sense of the sentence collapses.  It is like a mental short-circuit, that lapse into the (sleep, dreams, fever, etc.) list, a list which contains some but not all of the titles of the sections of the novel (Fever, Spear, Dance, Dream, Poison, Shadow, Farewell) and has other elements that could have been titles, although the items and order do vary.  Deza's questions become too difficult, or he gets too close to an ugly truth, and – buzz zap – these words pop out.  “Your fever” – who is “you”?

Look how long I have gone on.  I am as bad as Deza, except that I hit the carriage return button more often.  My title is from Stephen Mitchell’s translation of Rilke’s first Duino Elegy – more of that tomorrow.

Written Lives, the Javier Marías book that is most like a bag of potato chips or season of 30 Rock on DVD or whatever your metaphor for compulsively readable might be

Another bad idea – I got a million of ‘em! – is to write about a book I read five years ago and do not have in my possession.  A critic must be flexible.  The book is Written Lives by Javier Marías, published in Spanish in 1992, Englished by the heroic Margaret Jull Costa in 2006.  On the surface a collection of little biographies of famous writers, it is a stranger book than it appears, but still a good possibility for the skeptical reader, the one who suspects Marías of postmodern twaddle.

William Faulkner, Isak Dinesen, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Conrad, Emily Brontë, and so on, twenty-six total biographical sketches, each accompanied by a photograph of the individual – Marías, in an additional and somewhat dull essay discusses his collection of photographs of authors.  The pieces are idiosyncratic and incomplete, meaning that they cannot substitute for encyclopedia entries.  Marías stitches together whatever anecdotes or oddities or stray facts strike his fancy.  He is always interested in an author’s last words, for example, and bad habits, and hobbies:

Isak Dinesen claimed to have poor sight, yet she could spot a four-leaf clover in a field from a remarkable distance away, and could see the new moon when it was not yet visible.  When she saw it, she would curtsy to it three times, and, she claimed, you must never look at it through glass, because that spelled bad luck.  She played the piano and the flute, preferably Schubert on the first and Handel on the second, and in the evenings, she would often recite poems by her favourite poet, Heine, and sometimes by Goethe, whom she detested, but nevertheless recited.  She loathed Dostoyevsky… (20)

Marías, in Written Lives, has no interest at all in his subjects’ writing (or, really, he takes the value of the writing as given), but is fascinated by their reading:  “The author he hated most, though, was Dostoyevsky…  the mere mention of his name would provoke a furious outburst” (13) – this is Joseph Conrad.  “He read Don Quixote every year” (8)- that’s Faulkner.

The underlying concept of Written Lives is “to treat these well-known literary figures as if they were fictional characters, which may well be how all writers, whether famous or obscure, would secretly like to be treated” (1-2).  Here we have the germ, it seems, of Dark Back of Time, published six years later, in which Marías treats himself like a fictional character.

I am able to indulge in this post, these quotations, because of the generous excerpts available through Google books.  The entire Faulkner piece, all four pages of it, is available there, and should be a good guide for any curious reader.  Too bad the cruel, hilarious Thomas Mann essay is not online.

I have some doubts about the value of Written Lives, which at times seems like biography as gossip.  When I had it in my hands, though, it was too compulsively fun to stop reading.

Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear - the third book of five

The narrator of Your Face Tomorrow is obsessed with names – nicknames, fake names, his own name, all perfectly apt for the hero of a spy novel – but he did not always have a name himself, not in his earlier books.  Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear  is not the first book of a trilogy, it turns out, but the third book of five, or more likely the Xth book of N.

Marías skillfully avoids proper names for the first eleven pages of YFT:F&S before almost inadvertently slipping one in on page 14.  Then nothing for a few more pages; then a flurry of names on pages 18 and 19, where something odd happened:  I recognized the narrator, along with another character he mentioned.  I had met them before, in another novel, one that preceded YFT by thirteen years, the 1989 All Souls.  The spy novel’s many-named narrator is also the unnamed narrator of All Souls.

It was ten years ago that I read All Souls.  I can be precise because along with All Souls, in paperback, I purchased the English translation of Dark Back of Time (1998) in hardback soon after it came out in 2001.  An article in The Hudson Review had piqued my interest in Dark Back of Time, but its author had suggested that I read All Souls first, which I did, immediately, although Dark Back of Time for some reason was carted around the country unread until last week.  Dark Back of Time is narrated by a new character, or one new to me, “Javier Marías”:

I'm going to stop now and say no more for a while; I remember what I said long ago, in speaking of the narrator and author who have the same name here: I said I no longer know if there is one of us or two, at least while I am writing.  Now I know that of those two possible figures, one would have to be fictitious. (DBoT, 336)

Dark Back of Time is not a sequel to All Souls, but is about that novel, about its publication and reception and some strange real-life, so to speak, events caused by part of the plot of All Souls.  The latter, earlier book is a campus novel, sub-genre Oxford (“one of the cities in the world where least work gets done, where simply being is much more important than doing or even acting,” AS 4) with lots of amusingly odd customs and wacky professors.  What I remember best about the novel is its lengthy tour of Oxford used book shops – All Souls is a great classic in the all too rare “used book shopping” genre.  The fictional narrator becomes tangled up in the story of an obscure but real writer, John Gawsworth, which eventually leads (later, outside of the novel) to the real writer Javier Marías being declared King of Redonda, a title he still holds today.

Dark Back of Time is to some degree about how the fiction of All Souls intrudes on reality, how a fiction becomes real, but remains fiction, or even fictionalizes reality.  It begins with “real” Oxford professors searching for themselves in All Souls, which Marías insists is entirely the product of his imagination, all but the highly unlikely story of John Gawsworth, and then somehow shifts to the subject of bizarre deaths, buttressed by more book collecting.  The underlying idea is that everyone’s death, everyone’s life, is disquietingly unlikely.

 I refer the reader interested in the Kingdom of Redonda, or curious about how Alice Munro became the Duchess of Ontario, to the English Wikipedia page for Javier Marías, the Redonda section, which is, I have no doubt, packed with smoke, half-truths, jokes, and outright lies, just like Dark Back of Time.

Before I forget:  Dark Back of Time is translated by Esther Allen, while All Souls and the three chunks of Your Face Tomorrow are by the indefatigable Margaret Jull Costa.  Good, good translations.

Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear - the first book of three

Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear is the first book of a trilogy, and is presumably not meant to stand on its own, not entirely.  Or is it?  I have not read the other two books.  How would I know.  What I can do, what I can hardly resist doing, is wonder what will happen in the next two books.

No, stronger, stronger – this is what I should do, what I have to do, because I have 800 pages to read and only finite memory and concentration.  Where should I direct my attention; which parts of this book should I take with me, and which can I safely abandon?

If I turn to p. 282, for example, I find two lists of names.  The narrator has joined some sort of intelligence gathering operation and is examining its files.  The first list is of “some very famous entries: ‘Bacon, Francis’, ‘Blunt, Sir Anthony’, ‘Caine, Sir Michael (Maurice Joseph Micklewhite)’” and so forth, celebrities and politicians, presumably unrelated to the novel’s story, although a few have some thematic resonance, whether biographically like Blunt and John Le Carré, or through their stage names and pen names (the narrator is obsessed with names) like Michael Caine and John Le Carré.

But then there’s the second list, of nobodies, names that “meant nothing, being unknown to me: ‘Booth, Thomas’, ‘Dearlove, Richard’, ‘Marriott Roger (Alan Dobson)’” and many more.  If I were reading a Nabokov novel, this list would contain two traps, three snares, a private joke only understood by the author’s wife, and at least one clue that will be absolutely necessary 300 pages in the future.  I refer the skeptical reader to Lolita, I.11., Lolita’s class roster, “a poem I know already by heart.”  Does a Marías novel, or more importantly this Marías novel, work the same way?  One of the names is borrowed on the very next page, drafted as a pseudonym – perhaps Marías is done, then.  But: “I have an excellent memory for names,” the narrator warns me as he ends his list.  I don't!

A glance at the first few pages of the second volume tells me that the style and narrator continue as usual, without pause.  What, I wonder, do the breaks between books mean?  Perhaps the meaning is entirely commercial, one book for the price of three, with a handsome omnibus edition available in the near future.  Or the narrator may make a more subtle shift in his language or imagery or thematic interest.  Or he will just emit words until their accumulated weight crushes him.

Another glance, at the acknowledgements page of volume 2, lets me know that Rilke makes a return appearance.  I had better dogear page 346 of volume 1, with its quotation from the Duino Elegies.  I don’t know why I need it, but it seems I do.

It is just possible that something will happen in the second book.  It is a fine joke, a joke on the spy genre, how little happens in Fever and Spear.  There is, I admit, that frenetic action scene in which the narrator frantically searches the indices of a number of books, and what about the revelatory reading of an entry from Who’s Who?  I have a prediction about where this is all going, what the emphasis on talk and silence will get us, all based on the fact that Marías underlined a single sentence of his novel: “Amongst those arrested are several singularly beautiful foreign women.”  The underlining makes sense in context, but I am giving it an additional layer of meaning, treating it as a trick.  I am surely wrong; Marías surely has his own tricks, better ones.

It’s both a mystery and not a mystery - Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear

“One doesn’t know why or how or about what, but the fact is that they [us, you and me, everyone] spend the hours engaged in chit-chat, without once closing their mouths, even snatching the word from each other’s lips, all intent on monopolising it.  It’s both a mystery and not a mystery.”  (336)

That’s a sliver of Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear, the 2002 pseudo-spy novel (both a spy novel and not a spy novel) by Javier Marías.  The speaker, Peter Wheeler, is an eighty year-old Oxford professor and former spy; the narrator is a younger Spanish translator who suspiciously resembles, and more suspiciously differs from the novel’s author.  The quotation is somewhere in the middle of a seventy page near-monologue on the value of silence, spoken by a man who will not stop speaking, reported by a narrator if anything even wordier.

Marías, like Proust and Thomas Bernhard and W. G. Sebald, is known for long sentences, and Your Face Tomorrow seems particularly extreme in this regard, deliberately expanding each sentence with every conceivable qualifier and contradiction, unable to fix a single position for longer than a phrase or two, with the beginning of the above quotation (“why or how or what about”) only the simplest example, or anyway one of the simpler examples I could find in this onslaught of words, no wordier, to be sure, than any other novel of the same length (nothing but a tautology, that observation) and while “wordy” must be the most pointless imaginable description of a piece of prose, Marías is here employing a particularly wordy wordiness, so to speak, but only because conjunctions and other connectors replace punctuation – Your Face Tomorrow has more than its share of ands, buts, ors, and so on – which is really all there is to the trick, or the gimmick, or, more politely, technique, a frankly facile device, something any writer can mimic if he sets his mind to it; the question, then, is neither how nor about what but simply: why?

Your Face Tomorrow, this first volume, at least, is very much about wordiness, about words and their absence:

Keeping silent, erasing, suppressing, cancelling, and having, in the past remained silent too:  that is the world’s great unachievable ambition, which is why anything else, any substitute, falls short, and why it is pure childishness to withdraw what has been said and why retraction is so futile; and that is also why… (16)

Ellipses mine.  As you might guess, that sentence goes on for a while.  Similar passages, paraphrases, really, are on pages 5 and 8.  Repetition is another necessary technique for Marías, as are lists.

Wheeler’s monologue on silence, centered on a series of World War II posters (reproduced in the novel) of the “Loose Lips Sink Ships” genre, the genuine climax of this novel about words, is interrupted by an external shock and an inability to remember a particular word, possibly as the result of a previous stroke.  Wheeler seems to regard the phenomenon as a premonition of death.  His silence is echoed, metaphorically, by the story of a man who was silent under torture during the Spanish Civil War.  Words are life; silence is death.  Silence saves lives; words kill.

This is what everyone else is getting from the novel, yes?  Richard of Caravanos de Recuerdos has kindly organized a readalong opportunity.  I urge anyone interested to jump in.  Start with volume 2; why not?  Paradoxically you’re already at least two books behind if you start with volume 1.  I’ll write about that later this week.

Reading badly

That is the illusion of all writers, the belief that people open our books and read them from start to finish, holding their breath and barely pausing.  (from p. 366 of Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear, Javier Marías, 2002, tr. Margaret Julia Costa)

In context, this quotation is a bit of a joke.   The narrator of this Javier Marías novel is the one who barely pauses, who spills out words breathlessly, literally, I guess, since he is writing, but the speakers in the novel seem to have the same problem with digressions, qualifiers, and finding a place to end their flow of words.  I have trouble imagining the reader who reads this exhausting novel without pause, without many good long restorative pauses.

And then I have to consider that this novel is the first of a trilogy, the latter volumes of which may be much like this one in their discursiveness and sly concealments.   Many people are in fact reading it right now, as I type, possibly this very instant, as part of a Caravana de Recuerdos readalong opportunity.  The plan of many, and of me, too, is to read all three novels this summer, one each month, although they were published years apart from each other, in 2002, 2004 and 2007.  Perhaps a wiser reader would allow a little more space between the books.  Perhaps a more deliberate pace would allow me to be a better reader of Marías.

I say this not because I believe I read the Marías novel badly, although it is a tricky devil, but because I had actually planned to spend this week, or most of it, writing about a really substantial and brilliant book, Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1867).  Unlike, oh, I don’t know, Life in the Far West by George Frederick Ruxton, Ibsen’s long verse play is enormously complex and obviously worth attentive re-reading.  I am reading Ibsen’s book with great pleasure, but I am also reading it badly.

Confused, fragmented, distracted, jittery – that’s how I am reading it.  When I began Peer Gynt, it was so immediately rich and juicy that I had assumed that a series of posts would suggest themselves.  And they have, oh they have – a series of banal posts, any number of tedious and bad ideas.  I am not merely reading badly but thinking badly, although I suspect the one is the same as the other.

I am taking too long to finish Peer Gynt, I know that – it deserves a bit of breath-holding.  But then I look at The Frigate Pallada by Ivan Goncharov (1858), the author of Oblomov.  I have been reading this travel book about a Russian diplomatic expedition to Japan for three months, and am not half done.  It’s a wonderful book, but it feels entirely natural to slip into it now and again, to follow Goncharov’s account of a day or a week  and set it aside.  The events of the book covers a couple of years, so I will read about them faster than Goncharov lived them.  I feel that I am reading The Frigate Pallada fairly well; I am sure I am reading Peer Gynt badly.

Not that I have identified any sort of guideline – books in Category Alpha should be read with Technique Aleph.  Nonsense.  Books are full of surprises.  Peer Gynt surprises me on every page.  With luck a second reading will suggest an order to my thoughts, or perhaps another book, or another Ibsen play, will teach me to read it and think about it.

The danger of worrying about this issue at all is that it could very well mean the end of book blogs.  If I began to think too hard about what I have written here, for example -  where’s that Publish button?   Where’s that dang – oh, there it is.