The title comes from Hamlet but the spirit that hovers over the pages of Javier Marías’s new novel is — as ever — that of Proust. The visiting and revisiting of the past; the dwelling on the minutiae of memory; the attention to social hierarchy, the demands of lust and the force of cruelty — not to mention the labyrinthine sentences weighted with subordinate clauses… Marcel would breathe easily here.
Trying to encapsulate a novel by Marías in a few lines is as frustrating as attempting to ‘explain’ Velázquez’s ‘Las Meninas’ in one sentence. Both are minutely detailed — but what are we seeing? What are we being told? On one level Thus Bad Begins shows us an innocent young man being drawn into a cat’s cradle of marital warfare, betrayal, truth and lies. But it’s also a middle-aged man looking back at his young self with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.
Marías, Spain’s most celebrated novelist, generally considered Nobel laureate-in-
waiting, is best known for his dazzling 1,600-page trilogy Your Face Tomorrow, exploring his favoured themes of treachery, political chicanery, metaphysics and, by no means least, sex.
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