[Deborah Eisenberg’s chronicling of American insanity.]
A scholar recently unearthed a copy of the censorship report on the novel and sent it to Marías. “It said, ‘This book is crap and certainly immoral,’ ” Marías told me, gleefully summarizing the verdict, “ ‘but it doesn’t say anything against the State or the Church,’ which is what they really cared about.” This is true in a literal sense, and yet the novel still managed to signal its contempt for the insular monoculture of Franco’s Spain, obsessed as it was with questions of national identity and belonging. More a collection of linked short stories than a full-fledged novel, it takes place entirely in a kind of hard-boiled America of the mind, fabricated from movies, books and popular music. Its content was less provocative than what it didn’t contain, and what that elision suggested: Not everything has to be about Franco.
By then, Marías also had ample firsthand experience of the actual America. His father, Julián Marías, a prominent philosopher and public intellectual, had spent the Civil War writing and broadcasting Republican propaganda; in 1939, a few weeks after the conflict ended, he was caught up in Franco’s systematic purge of the defeated opposition and escaped the firing squad only after a witness called by the prosecution ended up testifying on his behalf. His experience under the regime was formative for his son. Because Julián was barred from teaching at universities in Spain, he would periodically accept short-term academic posts abroad, including at multiple colleges in the States. Javier, his three brothers and their mother, Dolores, a translator, would follow. It was in New Haven, where his father was teaching at Yale for the academic year 1955-56, that he heard English spoken for the first time, a language that would play a decisive role in his life. After publishing his second novel, at age 22, Marías took a six-year hiatus from writing fiction and dedicated himself to various translation projects — that is, to rewriting the fiction of others. He credits this period, during which he rendered Laurence Sterne, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov and others into Spanish, as crucial in his artistic development. In the mid-1980s, he taught Spanish literature and translation theory at Oxford University, the setting for his sparkling academic satire “All Souls,” a book in which many of his former colleagues believed they recognized an unflattering reflection of themselves.
It has been noted before that Marías’s protagonists are often people who live vicariously through the words of others: there’s an opera singer (“The Man of Feeling,” 1986), a ghostwriter (“Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me,” 1994), an editor (“The Infatuations,” 2011). Juan, the narrator of “A Heart So White” — the book that made Marías a European celebrity in the ’90s — is a translator and interpreter. In one of the novel’s showstopping comic set pieces, he serves as mediator between two politicians who are recognizable as Felipe González, the prime minister of Spain, and his British counterpart, Margaret Thatcher, at a private meeting. By intentionally mistranslating parts of the dialogue (González’s question, “Would you like me to order you some tea?” becomes “Tell me, do the people in your country love you?”), Juan draws out the participants’ suppressed authoritarian longings. Europe’s favorable self-image notwithstanding, Marías often suggests, the continent has yet to fully free itself from fascism’s lingering embrace.
Marías’s latest novel, “Berta Isla,” tells the story of a marriage founded on a kind of private pact of forgetting. As a high school student in Madrid, the female protagonist meets and falls in love with Tomás Nevinson, the son of a Spanish mother and an English expatriate father. During his time as an undergraduate at Oxford University, Tomás is recruited by British intelligence, who believe his bilingualism would make him an excellent spy. He returns to Spain and marries Berta, but his work, which she agrees not to ask about, forces him into a double life. Secrets breed secrets, and soon their marriage has become a game of mutual deception. Spanning a period of more than three decades, from the early 1960s to the end of the Cold War and beyond, the book offers a disturbing examination of how history seeps into and contaminates our most intimate relationships. At one point, Berta finds herself angrily musing on popular enthusiasm for the Falklands War, in which she believes Tomás has become involved:
Politicians never dare to criticize the people, who are often base and cowardly and stupid. … They have become untouchable and have taken the place of once despotic, absolutist monarchs. Like them, they have the prerogative to be as fickle as they please and to go eternally unpunished, and they don’t have to answer for how they vote or who they elect or who they support or what they remain silent about or consent to or impose or acclaim.
Marías, to be sure, is not proposing a spurious moral equivalence between dictatorship and democracy. When I asked him what he felt when he learned Franco had died, he didn’t hesitate. “Joy,” he said. “Relief and great, great joy.” When it became clear that no one would be brought to justice, he also felt great anger. He wasn’t alone. One feature of post-transition Spain that was especially maddening to those who suffered under Franco was the way in which certain former supporters of the strongman began to reinvent themselves as lifelong liberals. Such brazen self-refashioning went largely unchallenged at a time when making accusations was seen as petty, vindictive or a threat to the delicate social order.