If there is one Spanish writer who deserved the Nobel Prize, it was Javier Marías who died on Sunday at the age of 70. He didn’t get it, but it was one of the favorites for years and that says a lot about his international reputation, which is perhaps even greater than his status in Spain. There he made many enemies with his razor-sharp, ruthless ideas about Spain, which he aired in his weekly column in El Pais.
The last time a Spaniard was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature was in 1989. That honor then went to Camilo José Cela, a writer who hardly represented anything outside of Spain. 1989 was also the year in which all souls appeared, the novel with which Marías, born in Madrid in 1951, broke through in Spain. That was almost twenty years after his debut novel Los dominios del lobo (The domains of the wolf1971), which originated in Paris.
There, the very young Marías saw about eighty American films from the thirties, forties and fifties in a short period of time. On that basis, he wrote a novel that had nothing to do with Spain except for the language. The story, the characters, the decor: everything was American through and through and that was a statement. Marías did not want to be a writer like Camilo José Cela, who had elevated the ‘typically Spanish’ (characters, language, habits) to a trademark.
Visiting Lecturer in Oxford
Marías continued to experiment with new forms for years, not only as a novelist but also as a translator (Lawrence Sterne, Thomas Browne, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Faulkner). This is how he sharpened his pen and developed his style, which in all souls found its final form. In it, Marías also told a story rooted in his own life for the first time: his two years as a guest lecturer at Oxford University.
No shortage of hilarious moments in all souls, but it’s not a typical campus novel. In long, symphonic sentences, Marías explores not so much the English university town as the thoughts of his alter ego, who needs a single visual impression or fragment of conversation to create a detailed picture of the world beyond.
Marías’ unnamed character not only sees the small pieces of reality that grab his attention in the smallest detail, he also sees an amazing amount in those details. He interprets, presupposes and fantasizes about it, to the point of obsessiveness.
That way of thinking and writing, described by Marías herself as ‘wandering with a compass’, would not change substantially after all souls. All of Marías’ ‘mature’ work embodies an intense way of looking at reality, which, thanks to the brilliant cadence of his long sentences, also becomes an intense way for the reader to experience reality.
Suicide of an aunt
For the narrator of his next novel A heart so white (1992) the drawn-out sentences and thoughts are a strategy to postpone an uncomfortable and confrontational truth: his father’s role in the suicide of an aunt of his. The novel’s opening words are deceptively categorical: “I didn’t want to know, but I found out…” It’s not that simple: the narrator doesn’t want to know what happened, even though his Curiosity and the things he discovers don’t exactly make life any easier.
In Germany, A heart so white – one of the titles that Marías borrowed from the work of Shakespeare – a million-dollar success after literature pope Marcel Reich-Ranicki praised the novel in his much-watched program The Literary Quartet. This success was effortlessly continued with Think of me on the battlefield tomorrow (1994), a kind of twin brother of A heart so white.
But with the ‘false novel’ The black back of time (1998) Marías suddenly made it a lot more difficult for his readers. This was compass wandering in a much more radical form: not, as in his “real” novels, on the basis of a plot (however flimsy), but on the basis of a meandering exploration of the boundaries of fact and fiction to as a result of the far-reaching autobiographical interpretations of all souls.
Also Your face tomorrow (three parts: 2002, 2004, 2007) picks up on all souls. Again the Spaniard who taught in Oxford and who has now returned to England after a failed marriage, this time to work for the British secret service. The novel opens with the ominous words ‘One should never tell anything’ and that seems ironic when you consider that Your face tomorrow about fifteen hundred pages. But in reality, this mantra-like injunction expresses a paradox that runs like a thread through Marías’ work: it is perhaps better to be silent and yet we speak.
Speak or be silent: Whether we do one or the other, both have far-reaching consequences for us and for our reality. That is what Marías’ novels show and feel time and again. Also back in The lovers (2011), in which he performs a female first-person narrator for the first time, in That’s how bad starts (2014), in Berta Isla (2017) and in his fist-thick swan song Tomas Nevinson (2021), a real spy novel but written in those long, minute, intoxicating sentences that Marías has the patent on.
The Dutch translation of Tomas Nevinson will be published later this month by Meulenhoff publishers.