The Recondite Rambles of Javier Marías

Near the end of an interview with the New York Times in 2019, the Spanish novelist Javier Marías was asked the formulaic but often illuminating question of what he was planning to read next. He replied, "To tell the truth, I never make any plans. Not in my reading, not in my writing, not in my life."

For someone who never made plans, Marías got an awful lot done during his years on this planet. He died a few weeks ago at the relatively young age of 70, of pneumonia. But no one who has read his work would imagine that death caught him unawares. Marías was not a morbid soul—quite the contrary—but his novels are steeped in questions that a philosopher might group under the heading "contingency." 

His narrators almost invariably assume the same curious and slightly bemused tone from one novel to the next, though there is no telling whether he's the same man. (Marías himself often questioned whether he himself was the same man from one day to the next.) These protagonists often ponder minor quirks of fate, wondering about people they see often but seldom met and musing more generally on the profound impact on people's lives of random and fortuitous events. Though Marías attests at the opening of one of his books that he has never confused life with fiction, it's reasonable to assume that such a focus of interest--or lack of focused interest--stems from two haunting aspects of his personal life: a brother who died at the age of three and a father who escaped the firing squad during the Franco era only because a witness called by the prosecution felt impelled to offer a favorable impression of his character. Both events occurred before Marías was born.

But pondering such issues is one thing; turning them into literature is something else again. Here Marías was undoubtedly inspired by his early work as a translator, and especially by his translations of  two English writers: Lawrence Sterne, whose work abounds in odd coincidences and willful, self-indulgent narrators, and Sir Thomas Browne, whose exploration of seemingly random arcana is undergirded by a rambling and wordy but nevertheless attractive style.

My own discovery of Marías was fortuitous enough to justify a slight digression. Many years ago I ran across a copy of A Heart So White in the used bookshop at Southdale Library, read the flap—"best Spanish novel of the last fifty years"—but let it go. Yet it wouldn't let me go, and a few weeks later I went back, hoping the book would still be on the shelf.

Once I'd read it, I knew I was likely to read more, and in the next few years I did. Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, All Souls, Your Face Tomorrow (three volumes). I found The Infatuations less compelling, perhaps because that ruminative, diffident "voice" was growing slightly monotonous or tired or overworked.    

This is probably a minority opinion. When the book came out in 2013, one reviewer described The Infatuations as an ideal introduction to Marías's work. "The Infatuations is mysterious and seductive; it's got deception, it's got love affairs, it's got murder—the book is the most sheerly addictive thing Marías has ever written. It hooks you from its very first lines."

Well, maybe so. I still have Marias's subsequent last novels, Thus Begins Bad and Berta Isle, waiting for me, unread, on the shelf. 

When I read of Marías's death, it occurred to me that it was time to crack open another of his books: Dark Back of Time. It consists of a series of meditations in roughly the same vein as Marias's novels, though the themes he wanders through here are closer to life. For example, he spends many pages musing on how a novel he wrote set in Oxford, All Souls, was received by the people he knew when he taught there for a few years early in his career. This gives rise to speculations about the relative "truth,"  value, and accessibility of an event, in comparison to the memory of the event, the words being used to record and preserve the event, and those words that a novelist uses as he or she concocts a imaginative series of events similar to those that actually took place.  

From here Marias moves on to spend many pages analyzing various reports of the career and death of a friend he made while at Oxford, an obscure English writer named John Gawlsworth along with one or two other minor writers. Near the end of the book Marias's attention turns to a miniscule island in the Caribbean named Redonda, of which he became king as a result of these friendships, but not before he enters into an extended meditation of the brother he never knew and the father he almost lost. His Spanish-Cuban grandmother, his mother, and various distant ancestors make an appearance. All in all, it's a heady witches brew of associations fully worthy of the Shakespearean title, "Dark Back of Time."

I am not the first writer nor will I be the last [he writes] whose life has been enriched or poisoned or only changed because of what he imagined or made up and wrote down and pub­lished. Unlike those of truly fictional novels, the elements of the story I am now embarking upon are entirely capricious, determined by chance, merely episodic and cumulative—all of them irrelevant by the elementary rule of criticism, none of them requiring any of the others—because in the end no author is guiding them, though I am relating them; they cor­respond to no blueprint, they are steered by no compass, most of them are external in origin and devoid of intention and therefore have no reason to make any kind of sense or to constitute an argument or plot or answer to some hidden harmony, and no lesson should be extracted from them (nor should any such thing be sought from real novels; above all, the novels themselves should not want it)—not even a story with its beginning and suspense and final silence. I don’t be­lieve this is a story, though, not knowing how it ends, I may be mistaken.

This might be the worst of Marias's books with which to begin an exploration of his career, but I relished every page, as if I had reconnected with an old friend, and didn't worry overmuch about following the plot.

 There was none. 

Botticelli Comes to Minneapolis

A remarkable exhibition has arrived in town containing first-class paintings from the Italian Renaissance paired with drawings and in some cases the classical sculptures that inspired them all.

Often such shows consist of one or two masterworks, around which a promotional campaign is built, surrounded by all sorts of mediocre stuff, but in this case, the level remains high from first to last. You'll still have to go to Florence to see Botticelli's Primavera or The Birth of Venus, but the exhibit contains fine works by not only Botticelli but also Piero del Pollaiuolo, Fra Fillipo Lippi, Fillipino Lippi, and other masters whose names I forget. And on a chilly Sunday morning in late October, wandering through five or six large rooms filled with colorful, lyrical paintings and appealing statues can be just the ticket.

Botticelli himself has long been a favorite among art-lovers, of course, offering feminine grace and beauty that we might refer to as "idealized" except for the fact that we sometimes meet up with such harmonious and appealing features in life. Botticelli's aesthetic is, in any case, very different from Raphael's cutesy perfection or Michelangelo's agonized and grotesque muscularity. And after spending two hours wandering the galleries, many viewers are likely to come to the same conclusion I did: among the many fine works of the period on display here, his are the best.

My favorite was Madonna and Child and the Young St John the Baptist (1495). The event being depicted doesn't move or even much interest me, but every aspect of the work is superb, from Jesus's toes resting on the finely rendered grass, to the tangle of Mary's garments, to the vegetation on the upper left. Though now that I think of it, Botticelli's much earlier Madonna in Glory with Cherubim (1470), also included in the show, offers us an appealingly homely Christ child, half-asleep, seemingly waving at the viewer as Mary carries him off for his afternoon nap. 

And half of the fun of viewing his Adoration of the Magi, front and center in the last room, is trying to identify Lorenzo, Giuliano, and Cosimo de Medici in the adoring crowd. Botticelli himself appears on the right-hand side of the scene, glancing over his shoulder at the viewer and looking quite a bit like the Suburbs' pianist Chan Poling.

The sculptures sitting here and there in every room offer a change of pace visually, and they also serve the purpose of allowing us to see firsthand where the inspiration for some of the anatomical details in the paintings came from. Scholars love this kind of thing; it allows them make causal connections between works of art upon which to develop chains of "influence," thus absolving them from the riskier task of making and defending personal judgments about the quality or even the character of the pieces.

In this show you'll be unlikely to come upon a bit of text like the one I hit upon last night by Lionello Venturi, which dates from 1937:

"Botticelli has neither the synthetic rigour nor the monumental grandeur and moral plentitude of Masaccio; not has he the infantile celestiality or resigned gentleness of Fra Angelico, not the theoretical heroism or chromatic creativeness of Piero della Francesco. Among the achievers of physical realism, the assertors of moral energy, Botticelli seems archaic, wavering between Jove and Christ, between Venus and the Magdalen."

At the very least, it would have been worthwhile, I think, to offer a panel or two speculating about possible connections between the paintings of Botticelli and the philosophy of his contemporary Marsilio Ficino. It would also have been nice to say a few words, accompanied by a schematic diorama, of the development of Italian art from the days of Giotto on to Fra Angelico, Piero de Francesco, and Botticelli and on further to the masters of the Venetian school, the high Renaissance, and the Mannerist era (Italian painting 1-001). It's a complex subject, to be sure, but we meet up with this pattern of development again and again in art history, and similar "phases" of development could easily be identified in the history of jazz, film, and even chess openings!    

In short, the exhibition is a feast for the eyes, less so for the historical intelligence hungry for a broader enlightenment. 

We returned home to a lunch of left-over squash risotto and a beet salad allegedly doused with truffle oil that we'd picked up at the new Alma Provisions shop on 46th and Colfax before the show. The salad was ho-hum. Our home-made risotto held its own after spending the night in the refrigerator.

But we were eager to keep the Renaissance mood alive, and a few hours later we returned to south Minneapolis—31st and Chicago, to be exact—to attend a concert of vocal music by John Dowland and Carlo Gesualdo performed by our local Consortium Carissimi. It was an ingenious coupling, in so far as the two composers are contemporaries, yet their styles have little in common. Dowland's ayres are rich enough, while retaining the openness and melodic simplicity of classic folk songs. (But maybe they sound like folk songs because we've heard them so often on the soundtracks of films about the Elizabethan era?) 

 Gesualdo's music is riddled with chromaticisms that soon begin to sound like mannerisms; such harmonic peculiarities don't return to the history of music until the late nineteenth century.

Aside from a few glitches on the lutes—and nobody but Bream can play the lute without glitches and squeaks—the consortium handled the material with expressiveness and aplomb. Clara Osowski's rich mezzo voice once again touched those shivery zones of emotion, as if we could see and feel sound itself, like the incoming sea, and countertenor Keith Wehmeir held his own alongside her in one dialog number.

All the Italian art and music veritably cried out for a pizza. Our frozen pizza of choice is Sabatasso's Gluten-Free Four Cheese Pizza, upon which we add chopped onions, black olives, and red bell peppers. The gluten-free element is irrelevant. They just happen to be very pleasantly chewy.

And considering the prevailing  mood, we could think of nothing better to watch, in the absence of Rossellini's long film, The Age of the Medici, than our four-DVD set of Kenneth Clark's Civilization, which first ran on television back when I was in high school.

But I'll save my analysis of that fine show for another time.

 

That Leaf Thing

A friend recently emailed me a photo of the spectacularly red tomato sauce he was making, with fresh basil leaves floating here and there in the middle of it. He added that he had heard that Hilary and I were up north "gazing at leaves."

Of course, there is almost always something worthwhile to be gazing at "up north" and in many other places: vistas, birds, landforms, lichens, clouds. An island of mature sumac can be stunning, not only for the color but also for the way it drapes itself handsomely across the hillside. An unexpected show of winterberry, or a spectacular toad trying to scale a rock shelf. Even the slant and intensity of light differs markedly from hour to hour, from day to day.  

On the other hand, at this time of year the birds are gone and the changing leaves do draw our attention. But it starts early—let's say in mid-September, when the sarsaparilla plants begin to turn in sizable numbers. Hilary and I were up on the North Shore hiking up the Caribou River in early morning light when we came upon this shady grove.

It's always exciting when the vibrant reds appear, especially when they arrive early and can display themselves against the still intense surrounding greens. Here's a view along the Namekagon River north of Trego in northern Wisconsin later in the month.

The next day we caught sight of some great flashes of red looking down on the St. Louis River from the north bank, flaming in stark contrast to the pale purple crown vetch right in front of us. 

And the following afternoon, hiking down to Wolf Creek Falls in Banning State Park, the variations in color were very fine.

We made a slight detour, traveling sections of the Old Military Road and the Old Ferry Road to reach Wild River State Park, where we watched a woman pull a half-decent  catfish out of the St. Croix and also admired the leaves.

The coup de grace was a trip to Itasca State Park with friends for a day of cycling and exploring. With the sunlight shining in across the lake from the west, the leaves along the road were remarkable. The green was gone, but the yellows and oranges were iridescent. 

  Yet there were plenty of other things to admire as well, for example, the light on a patch of lichen on a log, 

Or a family of trumpeter swans who had eaten every water lily in the bay.

The variations are endless. And welcome.