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arirang's review
3.0
Javier Marias is, justifably, best known in the English speaking world as a (quite magnificent) novelist, but in his native Spain he is also a prolific essayist and newspaper columnist.
His Spanish pieces have been collected into a number of collections from 1991-2013 (among others Pasiones Pasadas, Vida del Fantasma, Literatura y Fantasma, Mano de Sombra), but have only been sporadically translated into English. So this English-language collection, published in 2017, translated by his long-term collaborator Margaret Jull Costa and selected and edited by Alexis Grohmann, is to be welcomed.
Spanning such a long period (the earliest was written in 1988, and one piece was written in 2016) and wide variety of topics, the result isn't totally coherent, although Grohmann has done a good job of grouping pieces under broad themes.
The vast bulk of the pieces are 2-3 pages, with one a few longer than this: by far the longest piece, on Venice, has already been published in English earlier in 2017 as, the slightly disappointing as not terribly insightful, Venice: An Interior (my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2008953213).
Also published in 2017 was Marias contribution to The Cahiers Series, To Begin at the Beginning (my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2099294238). Again I was a little underwhelmed, and arguably the c20% of the essay here on writing rather remove the need to read that book, with many of the same themes repeated.
The one post 2011 piece here, Writing a Little More (2016) explains why 6 of Marias fictional works*, and indeed one of his essay collections, take their titles and concepts from Shakespeare:
There are so many ideas that he merely noted in passing, but left unexplored ... you feel tempted to go down them, to venture along paths he merely signalled ... the energy, the rhythm, the glow of his images and metaphors, all drive us on and create in is an illusion of intuition, revelation or even sudden wisdom. Then, when you emerge from the wave and look back, you realise that there is still much to explore, to develop, to puzzle over and think about. What further encouragement does an author need to write a little more?
* Those are the 5 novels A Heart so White (Macbeth), Tomorrow in the Battle(Richard III), Dark Back of Time (Tempest), Your Face Tomorrow (Henry IV part II), Thus Bad Begins (Hamlet), the story collection When I Was Mortal (Richard III), and [b:Seré amado cuando falte|4669028|Seré amado cuando falte|Javier Marías|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1480007949s/4669028.jpg|4719437]
(Coriolanus: 'I Shall Be Lov’d when I am Lack’d). See http://mookseandgripes.com/reviews/2017/07/26/javier-marias-thus-bad-begins/
Generally, there is little specific commentary on his own books, although he does, in one essay, comment on the auto-fiction nature of All Souls (not that he accepts that label - “another ridiculous concept currently in vogue) and in particular the issue he had with the character of the narrator, who was almost entirely based on himself but not actually him, an issue he ultimately resolved by having the narrator, looking back on the experiences in Oxford that he shared with the author, being (unlike Marias) married with children. The other issue raised by All Souls was the characters that were inspired, albeit much less closely based, on real-life characters from Oxford, often combinations of more than one-person: this was of course the focus of his magnificent meta-fictional ‘false novel’ Dark Back of Time.
His experience of Oxford leads him in another piece, “The Keys of Wisdom”, to hail the uniqueness of the Oxford method of inquisition of visiting scholars:
True these crucifixions were carried out with enormous delicacy, as if the pain would be lessened if the nails were hammered on very slowly and by someone wearing silk gloves ... in a litany if hesitant and extremely polite but poisonous questions (“I wonder if...” is the usual opening gambit) to which no one, however well prepared and composed they might be, will be capable of giving a satisfactory answer. Oxford, then, almost never states, it merely questions, and it does so to perfection.
Although he admits he is unable to comment as to whether this uniquness isn't, in reality, shared with Cambridge. He himself notes only the extreme superficial likeness of the two great Universities(*) which makes one suspect the existence of enormous underlying differences and notes that in contrast to the instinctive disdain for graduates from any other University in the world, [Oxford graduates] treat those who come from Cambridge with an exquisite respect tinged with deep-set loathing.
(* I can not resist but insert here the memorable moment in Blackadder when a German spy is unmasked:
In artistic terms, Marias argues for the opposite of pretension, proclaiming the merits genre fiction (notably spy thrillers) and of Hollywood movies and Westerns in particular:
Artistic prejudices are always the most difficult to root out. Critics - whose duty should be to see beyond the pretensions of artists and the public’s passing fancies - often allow themselves to be persuaded by the way authors present their work, by what they say they have achieved, or else are guided by whatever has been a wild success - usually in order to take the opposing view - and which had been damningly labelled ‘popular.’
Admirable sentiments, and perhaps a quote all Goodreads reviewers, myself particularly, should take to heart.
However, the resulting section of this book, focusing on Westerns, and from which indeed the collection takes its title (a quote from the made for TV movie Broken Trail) and cover picture, is perhaps the weakest of the book from my perspective, since the pieces don't really without knowledge of the films or actors concerned.
And having rejected artistic pretension, it has to be said, that, as in his novels, Marias writes from a very old-fashioned, educated upper middle-class, old-fashioned and almost fusty stance towards almost anything modern: “vulgar” is perhaps, to his mind, the greatest of insults.
The two main deliberate omissions from this English-language selection are Marias' extensive writing on politics and football, which feels rather a shame, particularly given the quality of the two pieces that are included. (Albeit one wonders if his pieces on smoking (see e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/opinion/smoking-and-fuming.html) have been deliberately omitted as out of step with UK/US attitudes.)
'No Narrative Shame' was written in 2006 as a sort of spin-off of Your Face Tomorrow, one of a number of reports, in the style of that book, on real-life figures. But it could well have been written in 2018:
Essentially the man is a bore ... even when he’s merely a guest he has to dominate ... Whenever he gets together with other heads of state, it’s obvious that. deep down, he feels like an intruder, and it’s precisely his jaunty, carefree manner that betrays his deep-seated insecurity ... this man is unscrupulous, but in the most real and radical sense of the world ... he has never rejected scruples for the simple reason that they are beyond his imagination and have never been part of his thinking, let alone his values.
The subject ... no, not who you are thinking, but Silvio Berlusconi.
(Although even this piece betrays a certain amount of snobbery as Marias is delighted to reveal that Berlusconi started as a cruise ship entertainer (shades of John Prescott) and reminds Marias of an old-style caretaker or porter ... the kind who kowtow to the owners and to the wealthier tenants, but treat delivery men and servants like dirt).
And the one piece on football included is essentially Marias' take on the 'only as good as your last game' cliche, which he endorses. He reveals that he temporarily, but quite seriously, fell out with his Barcelona based publisher, and also vowed never to again set foot in Tenerife, after the dramatic finale of the 1991-2 La Liga. He observes that while a writer, an architect or a musician can rest a little after having written a great novel, designed a marvellous building or made an unforgettable record ... some have been deemed to be good right up to their death, thanks to one estimable work written fifty years before, in sport generally and football in particular, having been the best yesterday doesn’t count today, let alone tomorrow. Past joy is as nothing compared to present anxiety.
Overall, this was certainly a significant improvement on Jose Saramago's, another great southern European peer of Marias, rather embarrasing Notebooks.
And Marias completists aside (i.e. me - this is my 18th Marias book) this is best read in place of not just Venice: An Interior, which it subsumes, but also the Cahiers Series To Begin at the Beginning.
However, this still feels like something to fill the time while one waits for Berta Isla, which seems to be garnening critical acclaim (https://www.themodernnovelblog.com/2017/09/30/javier-marias-berta-isla/), to make its way into English.
His Spanish pieces have been collected into a number of collections from 1991-2013 (among others Pasiones Pasadas, Vida del Fantasma, Literatura y Fantasma, Mano de Sombra), but have only been sporadically translated into English. So this English-language collection, published in 2017, translated by his long-term collaborator Margaret Jull Costa and selected and edited by Alexis Grohmann, is to be welcomed.
Spanning such a long period (the earliest was written in 1988, and one piece was written in 2016) and wide variety of topics, the result isn't totally coherent, although Grohmann has done a good job of grouping pieces under broad themes.
The vast bulk of the pieces are 2-3 pages, with one a few longer than this: by far the longest piece, on Venice, has already been published in English earlier in 2017 as, the slightly disappointing as not terribly insightful, Venice: An Interior (my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2008953213).
Also published in 2017 was Marias contribution to The Cahiers Series, To Begin at the Beginning (my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2099294238). Again I was a little underwhelmed, and arguably the c20% of the essay here on writing rather remove the need to read that book, with many of the same themes repeated.
The one post 2011 piece here, Writing a Little More (2016) explains why 6 of Marias fictional works*, and indeed one of his essay collections, take their titles and concepts from Shakespeare:
There are so many ideas that he merely noted in passing, but left unexplored ... you feel tempted to go down them, to venture along paths he merely signalled ... the energy, the rhythm, the glow of his images and metaphors, all drive us on and create in is an illusion of intuition, revelation or even sudden wisdom. Then, when you emerge from the wave and look back, you realise that there is still much to explore, to develop, to puzzle over and think about. What further encouragement does an author need to write a little more?
* Those are the 5 novels A Heart so White (Macbeth), Tomorrow in the Battle(Richard III), Dark Back of Time (Tempest), Your Face Tomorrow (Henry IV part II), Thus Bad Begins (Hamlet), the story collection When I Was Mortal (Richard III), and [b:Seré amado cuando falte|4669028|Seré amado cuando falte|Javier Marías|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1480007949s/4669028.jpg|4719437]
(Coriolanus: 'I Shall Be Lov’d when I am Lack’d). See http://mookseandgripes.com/reviews/2017/07/26/javier-marias-thus-bad-begins/
Generally, there is little specific commentary on his own books, although he does, in one essay, comment on the auto-fiction nature of All Souls (not that he accepts that label - “another ridiculous concept currently in vogue) and in particular the issue he had with the character of the narrator, who was almost entirely based on himself but not actually him, an issue he ultimately resolved by having the narrator, looking back on the experiences in Oxford that he shared with the author, being (unlike Marias) married with children. The other issue raised by All Souls was the characters that were inspired, albeit much less closely based, on real-life characters from Oxford, often combinations of more than one-person: this was of course the focus of his magnificent meta-fictional ‘false novel’ Dark Back of Time.
His experience of Oxford leads him in another piece, “The Keys of Wisdom”, to hail the uniqueness of the Oxford method of inquisition of visiting scholars:
True these crucifixions were carried out with enormous delicacy, as if the pain would be lessened if the nails were hammered on very slowly and by someone wearing silk gloves ... in a litany if hesitant and extremely polite but poisonous questions (“I wonder if...” is the usual opening gambit) to which no one, however well prepared and composed they might be, will be capable of giving a satisfactory answer. Oxford, then, almost never states, it merely questions, and it does so to perfection.
Although he admits he is unable to comment as to whether this uniquness isn't, in reality, shared with Cambridge. He himself notes only the extreme superficial likeness of the two great Universities(*) which makes one suspect the existence of enormous underlying differences and notes that in contrast to the instinctive disdain for graduates from any other University in the world, [Oxford graduates] treat those who come from Cambridge with an exquisite respect tinged with deep-set loathing.
(* I can not resist but insert here the memorable moment in Blackadder when a German spy is unmasked:
Captain Blackadder: And then the final irrefutable proof. Remember you mentioned a clever boyfriend?Marias, in common with many leading non-English speaking authors, is also a prolific translator, and in “My favourite book” he comments that if a writer is really honest then their favourite book will be the one they themselves have written. Which gives him the wonderful pleasure of being able to hand his accolade to Tristram Shandy since he wrote it in Spanish, being responsible for an award winning translation.
Nurse Mary: Yes?
Blackadder: Well, I leapt on the opportunity to test you. I asked you whether he had been to one of the great universities, Oxford, Cambridge, Hull.
Mary: Well?
Blackadder: What you didn't spot is that only two of those are great universities.
Mary: You swine!
General Melchett: That's right. Oxford's a complete dump!)
In artistic terms, Marias argues for the opposite of pretension, proclaiming the merits genre fiction (notably spy thrillers) and of Hollywood movies and Westerns in particular:
Artistic prejudices are always the most difficult to root out. Critics - whose duty should be to see beyond the pretensions of artists and the public’s passing fancies - often allow themselves to be persuaded by the way authors present their work, by what they say they have achieved, or else are guided by whatever has been a wild success - usually in order to take the opposing view - and which had been damningly labelled ‘popular.’
Admirable sentiments, and perhaps a quote all Goodreads reviewers, myself particularly, should take to heart.
However, the resulting section of this book, focusing on Westerns, and from which indeed the collection takes its title (a quote from the made for TV movie Broken Trail) and cover picture, is perhaps the weakest of the book from my perspective, since the pieces don't really without knowledge of the films or actors concerned.
And having rejected artistic pretension, it has to be said, that, as in his novels, Marias writes from a very old-fashioned, educated upper middle-class, old-fashioned and almost fusty stance towards almost anything modern: “vulgar” is perhaps, to his mind, the greatest of insults.
The two main deliberate omissions from this English-language selection are Marias' extensive writing on politics and football, which feels rather a shame, particularly given the quality of the two pieces that are included. (Albeit one wonders if his pieces on smoking (see e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/opinion/smoking-and-fuming.html) have been deliberately omitted as out of step with UK/US attitudes.)
'No Narrative Shame' was written in 2006 as a sort of spin-off of Your Face Tomorrow, one of a number of reports, in the style of that book, on real-life figures. But it could well have been written in 2018:
Essentially the man is a bore ... even when he’s merely a guest he has to dominate ... Whenever he gets together with other heads of state, it’s obvious that. deep down, he feels like an intruder, and it’s precisely his jaunty, carefree manner that betrays his deep-seated insecurity ... this man is unscrupulous, but in the most real and radical sense of the world ... he has never rejected scruples for the simple reason that they are beyond his imagination and have never been part of his thinking, let alone his values.
The subject ... no, not who you are thinking, but Silvio Berlusconi.
(Although even this piece betrays a certain amount of snobbery as Marias is delighted to reveal that Berlusconi started as a cruise ship entertainer (shades of John Prescott) and reminds Marias of an old-style caretaker or porter ... the kind who kowtow to the owners and to the wealthier tenants, but treat delivery men and servants like dirt).
And the one piece on football included is essentially Marias' take on the 'only as good as your last game' cliche, which he endorses. He reveals that he temporarily, but quite seriously, fell out with his Barcelona based publisher, and also vowed never to again set foot in Tenerife, after the dramatic finale of the 1991-2 La Liga. He observes that while a writer, an architect or a musician can rest a little after having written a great novel, designed a marvellous building or made an unforgettable record ... some have been deemed to be good right up to their death, thanks to one estimable work written fifty years before, in sport generally and football in particular, having been the best yesterday doesn’t count today, let alone tomorrow. Past joy is as nothing compared to present anxiety.
Overall, this was certainly a significant improvement on Jose Saramago's, another great southern European peer of Marias, rather embarrasing Notebooks.
And Marias completists aside (i.e. me - this is my 18th Marias book) this is best read in place of not just Venice: An Interior, which it subsumes, but also the Cahiers Series To Begin at the Beginning.
However, this still feels like something to fill the time while one waits for Berta Isla, which seems to be garnening critical acclaim (https://www.themodernnovelblog.com/2017/09/30/javier-marias-berta-isla/), to make its way into English.
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