Child's play

Here children re-enact a moment from the Spanish Civil War.  Thoughts?

(Thanks to Kristin for the image)

Interview of obsession.

A recent interview on obsession involving one of my obsessions, Javier Marías.  The other interviewees were something of a chore to get through.  Follow the link HERE

We'll see you...at the movies

Roger Ebert 1942 - 2013

You'll be missed

halfway through JM

 

Halfway through The Infatuations (life always slows reading down), and these main thoughts are beginning to dominate. 

1.)   For the dead, the promises of the living made while the dead were alive are what matter, not the fulfillment of those promises.  What do the dead know of the world they have left behind?

2.)   A person’s existence can be reduced to its final act, if that act is absurd enough.  This was touched on in YFT as the Jayne Mansfield phenomenon.

3.)   Chance is not something that always exists, but is often nothing more than our failure to observe.  When we observe properly, we see things as inevitable. 

4.)   Those whom we still adore, and who are taken from us, are taken “a day too early,” and those we have come to despise or with whom we have become bored are taken “a day too late.”

5.)   This happens even though we have thought and proclaimed that it never could:

Now, back to it.

Beginning 'The Infatuations'

What’s it all about?  In short: the finality of death.

Beginning with the type of verbal ambiguity I’ve come to expect and love from his work, Javier Marías begins his new novel, The Infatuations, with this line: “The last time I saw Miguel Desvern or Deverne was also the last time his wife, Luisa, saw him...”  And so, we already have some confusion over who this Miguel is, and within the same sentence we have the stock woman’s name - “Luisa” - that readers of Marías will come to recognize at once.  Uncertainty and ambiguity are sure to ensue, and in fact they do in myriad ways.  Digressive paths lead to thoughts about what a murdered man (Miguel) might have thought as he was being stabbed, what people think when they have lost someone dear, or even lost an acquaintance or even someone unimportant in their life.  There’s even a digression on the tedious nature of writers to their publishing houses, including a complaint against a writer who still turns in his work off of a typewriter and a writer who is constantly in contention for the Nobel prize, or at least is said to be by his publicists (both self-deprecating nods to Marías himself).  Above all, there is the uncertainty of knowledge of any kind.  Even though there are explorations of thoughts on grief, love, and life, and even though the characters are surprisingly able to fathom the thoughts and motivations of others (as most Marías characters tend to do), everything is covered in uncertainty.

Except death.  Not only is death a finality, it is explored and defined in the first few pages of this novel in a manor that illustrates the terrible and unalterable state of death in the world of the living.  Our dead dear ones are gone and “we can no longer count on them, not even for the most petty thing.”  Again and again, this idea comes back.  It is a striking certainty in the uncertain world of Javier Marias.  It is so certain that I doubt it will be all that certain by the end of the novel.  Marías loves the idea of the ghost, and beyond the surface of murder mystery this is billed to be, I sense a ghost story of the most honest kind: one where people are haunted by the memories of the dead, which are far more powerful than the actual presences of the dead.  As to certainty, our narrator says it best: “being certain of anything goes against our nature.”

Certainly.

Marías in my hands

Well, I've gotten my copy of The Infatuations.  Let the reading and commentary begin this weekend.

'The Infatuations' reviewed in the Guardian

The following review appeared in The Guardian recently:

By David Annand

7:00AM GMT 14 Mar 2013

Writers of crime fiction find themselves in the middle of an arms race. To compete in this new world today’s thriller must be equipped with multiple conspiracies that reveal ultimately, and always, pan-institutional corruption going all the way up to the President/the Pope/God himself. Into this world of massacres and media manipulation, drone strikes and biological weapons steps Spanish novelist Javier Marías with a simple blade with which he pares back the form to its essence: a single death and the attempt at its cover up.

Every morning Maria Dolz takes her breakfast at the same café. Across from her always sits the “Perfect Couple”. She watches them admiringly until one morning they don’t turn up. He has been killed, knifed to death by a vagrant. When the woman eventually reappears Maria approaches her and is invited to her house, where she meets Javier Diaz-Varela, with whom she begins an affair that pulls her into the orbit of the murder.

Steeped in the literature of his continent – the complex morality of Balzac’s Colonel Chabert, Dumas’s The Three Musketeers and Shakespeare’s Macbeth are minutely dissected – Marías’s novel is also a riposte to the relentless pacing of genre fiction. For as well as paring down the form he has extended it, telescoping time in such a way that he can articulate the moral and ethical assumptions that inform our seemingly intuitive decisions. Whole chapters are devoted to thought processes a few seconds long, and the characters communicate in epic meditations on love, death and enamoramientos, an emotional state far more urgent than the translation “infatuation” suggests. Unsurprisingly, these almost Kundera-like mini-essays impact on the verisimilitude of the narrative, but this matters not for they are beautifully written, and impish in their moral ambiguity.

By contenting himself with a single death Marías is able to cut through the fat of the modern murder mystery so that we might see homicide for what it is: the worst of crimes but also something commonplace, a cliché. As the musketeer Athos says enigmatically of one of his own crimes: “It was a murder, nothing more.”

 Of course, here in the US we'll need to wait until August to read this, so if any of my international compadres get a chance to read this in the next few months, let me know what you think, but don't give me details.