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.