A novel by Javier Marías, as his millions of readers know, is never what it purports to be. Spain’s most eminent novelist, Nobel laureate in waiting, translated into more than 40 languages, Marías likes to play with existential ideas. The Infatuations was ostensibly a murder mystery; Thus Bad Begins chronicled a loss of innocence. But the stories are always interwoven with deliberations on truth, morality, deceit and the impossibility of knowing one another, with side trips through literature and history. Marías’s closeness to Cervantes, Proust and, above all, Sterne is no secret. Shandyesque digressions are among the incidental pleasures faithful readers have come to expect.
Berta Isla is set largely in Madrid and Oxford — as are many Marías stories, most notably his great trilogy Your Face Tomorrow. We are again in the world of espionage, ambiguity and betrayal of various sorts. Two teenagers in late 1960s Madrid, Berta and Tomàs (or Tom — he’s half English) plan to marry after his graduation from Oxford.
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