Patria - Fernando Aramburu

In my desperate search for something to read over the last couple of months, I decided to read this widely acclaimed novel. Winner of all sorts of awards and, for me, very much in the mould of A Little Life - something so bad that it made me question the sanity of thousands of supposed intellectuals around the world. 

While I do understand that ETA caused a lot of problems to people in the Basque countries and all over Spain, the vision of the book feels excessively Manichean. Miren feels little more than a caricature from a 1950s B-movie. And while on critic wrote that this is War and Peace for our times, I think it's more like a very low calibre feuilleton (then again, I have never actually read War and Peace!). 

I unfortunately read this in translation, and the translator did a monumentally pathetic job: some  Spanish expression were translated literally, others more freely, the verbal tenses (already confusing in the original, I've been informed) were all over the place, and the whole prose was so incredibly stilted. 

Thus Bad Begins - Javier Marías

 

Marías came to do a talk at LSE shortly after Thus Bad Begins some seven years ago. I didn't feel the desperate urge to buy the book and get it signed at the end (instead opting for A Heart So White) and I'm happy to report that my hunch was correct. 

Perfectly flowing prose can only take you so far when the mysteries and secrets surrounding the characters are not particularly interesting (and the final revelations not excessively surprising). The fact that I read this book right after reading another underwhelming one with a much anticipated suicide at the centre (A Little Life) also didn't help. 

Or maybe I just prefer my own kind of Mediterranean fascists, as I often find Italian books discussing the prolonged influence of our regime on our current society much more interesting. 

Berta Isla - Javier Marias

  

Javier Marías is one of those authors who can get away with pretty much anything and, despite what most critics seem to think, I found Berta Isla to be quite a self-induldgent project. 

Marías remains - regardless of him pump and ego - one of the best writers in the world (one doesn't just lose talent after all!), but I found this novel to be, well, uninteresting. I can do with unlikeable and/or unrelatable characters. I mean, after all some of my favourite books are full of unlikeable and unrelatable characters. 

Then again, had I not just finished John Banville's The Untouchable, I would have probably had a lot ore time for Berta Isla.

The Infatuations – Javier Marías

A book that a very well-read colleague of mine gave me because she found it quite abominable and wanted to see if I thought it was just a matter of translation or not. Turns out, I thought it was quite abominable too.

This is now the third novel by Marías that I have read, and it’s by far the weakest of them. It begins like the other two (one of the central characters gets killed off in the first paragraph) and I have the feeling that the author put more effort into the first 20 lines than he did in the rest of the book.

The dialogues are just extremely long monologues, the supposedly deep reflections aren’t that deep, the decision to call the two main characters Javier and Maria is, well, a bit petty (something that one would expect from those writers that Marías spends his time dissing in this book), and even the idea of a random assisted suicide is something that Paul Auster has done so much better in In the Country of Last Things.

So yeah, glad I didn’t buy the book myself. 

A Heart so White – Javier Marías

For once a book that I bought at full price! Scary, I know – but Javier Marías was coming to give a lecture at the LSE and I really needed to give him something to sign (being the first in line for an autograph after the lecture, he actually even wrote a line about the book and its secrets on my copy – yay!).

Much like Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, A Heart so White is clearly written by a literally genius. And as it was also clear during the lecture, this is a genius who knows he is a genius, and makes no attempt to even pretend to hide it (which is actually fair enough, although Paul Preston – the greatest historian of modern Spain – did put up a really good fight with Marías when he disagreed with him from the podium).

Dare I say, I actually loved A Heart so White, despite the smugness of both his author and of a number of his characters, and although I hope that Marías doesn’t treat women in the same way as his characters do. And the secrets of the book, the twist of Juan’s father’s past, and for once even the philosophical reflections in the final chapter are respectively intriguing and, for once, surprising and deep (and I am saying “for once” because I am usually not surprised by big surprises, and tend to find pseudo-philosophical conclusions to be borderline unreadable). 

Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me – Javier Marías

This time a book that my dad tried to get me to read for years (and I’ve only done it now because, rather surprisingly, its author is coming to speak at the LSE – not a school known for its love for literature! – next week).

The novel is beautifully written, and the starting idea (the unexpected death of an almost stranger in the arms of the narrator) is a majestic literary device. The constant references and quotes are intriguing if a tad bit too high-brow (I didn’t get any of them, except perhaps the tailing of Luisa – the sister of his dead lover – through the streets of Madrid as maybe a reference to Hitchcock’s Vertigo).

But (there is always a but) after a while the book gets slightly too repetitive. Yes, life is weird and goes in circles, but there is no need to repeat the same sentences a number of times (the first time you do that it’s interesting, after a while it just grows old). Most of all, because of these constant circular references, I just didn’t find the surprising finale that surprising, which was a bit of a shame and left me rather unmoved (speaking of cultural references, The Big Bang Theory’s treatment of Schrödinger's cat is definitely more interesting, and also undoubtedly funnier!). 

Off Side – Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

I should have treated Carvalho like I’ve treated a number of other protagonists of crime/mystery series (Montalbano, Maigret, Guerrieri): talk about my favourite book of his, or talk about all of them as one.

I have already mentioned my love for Carvalho in my post on Tatuaje, but Off Side deserves an extra line, because the last pages of Bromuro’s life are some of the most touching ones I’ve ever read.

Tatuaje – Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

Ah, Pepe Carvalho! The secret agent every man wishes he could be: CIA-trained, communist-inspired and food-loving.

What makes him different from everyone else isn’t so much his professional skills (Maigret’s got them too), or the gourmet recipes Montalbán inserts in his novels (Camilleri – and his aptly named Commissario Montalbano – do an equally good, if not even better, job of that), or the intriguing plots he has to unravel.

What makes his stories so great is his entourage: Charo, the prostitute he loves (and from whom he is loved back), Biscuter, his side-kick, helper and chef, and Bromuro, the shoeshiner/informer who is terrified of the government’s apparent schemes to put bromide (bromuro in Spanish) in the Spanish waters to placate the population’s sexual drive.

This is the second book in which the figure of Pepe Carvalho appears, but it’s the first time we see his entourage, and because of this it gets the nod as my favourite Carvalho story.

I almost forgot a crucial part. Carvalho doesn’t use wood for his fireplace: he burns books, something that makes every reader cringe and probably simultaneously bow in admiration at the boldness of the gesture.