Voyage Along the Horizon, by Javier Marías

Yesterday evening, I finished Voyage Along the Horizon, which Javier Marías wrote between ages 19 and 21. With it done, I have now read every Javier Marías novel available in English. I believe George Eliot is the only other writer (at least among those with a significant output of work) by whom I have read every novel written. For Marías, this amounts to 13 books and 3500 pages of his writing (most of it translated by Margaret Jull Costa, whom I also developed an affection for through all this reading). I read my first book by Marías almost exactly 9 years ago, so I've averaged a little under 1.5 books by him per year since then. In the last couple years, I've found myself a little troubled by his books (their deep heteronormativity and reliance on old fashioned gender roles, the sexual jealousy, the, for lack of a better word, perviness) in a way that I don't think I was previously, but still: I love his writing. It feels like Marías writes the way I think.

With that out of the way (I probably ought to, but am not going to take the opportunity of finishing my last Marías novel to write a treatise on him), Voyage Along the Horizon was an odd way to finish. I read his final book last year, and that probably would have been a more appropriate last book to read, but instead I was left with Voyage Along the Horizon, his oldest book available in English -- published in 1973, a full 13 years before the next oldest book I've read (The Man of Feeling). There was barely a trace of the Marías I knew in Voyage Along the Horizon. At the most -- and this is an odd thing to say about a translated work -- there were words here and there that I associate with him. There was also a certain round-aboutness to the book. Often with Marías you might be two-thirds of the way into a book before you finally see where it's headed.

This edition of Voyage Along the Horizon was published in 2006 by Believer Books, an imprint associated with Believer magazine, which at the time was translating and publishing his regular columns from El País. At the back of the book there are "Eight Questions for Javier Marías," which he responded to for inclusion with the publication. I can't say they provided a whole lot of elucidation with regard to the text, but it was interesting to hear him reflect on his early influences. 

 Apart from that, I hardly know what to say. Voyage Along the Horizon is not a bad book, but I never would have read it (and it most likely never would have been translated into English) if it weren't by Javier Marías. It's totally unlike his other books in terms of setting (it's historical fiction, about a group of mostly English creative types on a cruise in the Mediterranean, which is eventually headed for Antarctica) and narrative style (it's a book within a book and lacks much of the internal monologue I usually associate with Marías). But, as a completist, I'm happy to have read it.

The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig

I started Stefan Zweig's 1942 memoir The World of Yesterday with 3 days left in 2024 and I thought I might finish it in time for the new year. I always read right up until evening on December 31, but I like to start the year with a clean slate so I try to pick books I can finish in time. Then on January 1, for the last several years, it has been my tradition to start the day and the year by reading a book by Javier Marías. I should have known better than to start a book that was nearly 500 pages long, though I guess it doesn't matter all that much. As it happened, I was feeling very unwell on January 1 this year and not up for reading at all. On the following days, I kept going with The World of Yesterday, and this morning I finished it. Later today or tomorrow I will start the last remaining Javier Marías novel that I have not read. The tradition was going to end anyway, and it's not that important to me in fact. As much as anything, it may just be a way to save myself too much decision-making first thing in the year.

In an unintended coincidence, the last book I read in 2023 was also a Stefan Zweig book. Maybe I have the beginnings of a new tradition.

As I wrote after reading Zweig'g Chess Story, I only became aware of Zweig in 2013. I remarked then about my surprise that I hadn't heard of him before, and after reading The World of Yesterday I only feel more surprised. If anything, Zweig is modest in his memoir but one does get a sense of his wide fame when reading it. I half joked to friends that I was reading a celebrity memoir, because the book is full of anecdotes about his meetings and friendships with other celebrities of the time, from Freud to Richard Strauss to Dalí to Gide to Rodin and so many others. Zweig traveled the world, both before World War I and between the wars, visiting the United States, Central and South America, and India, as well as the expected places in Europe. He led a remarkable life, which his memoir – even with his personal perspective – describes within the context of the history and events as they were happening around him. There is an almost incredible clarity to this book that is hard to imagine achieving without some distance. (I think he must have written it after leaving Europe for Brazil, though his life in Brazil is never mentioned, so perhaps that was the distance.)

I expected to learn more about his personal life, but while his friendships with celebrated authors, artists, and musicians are covered, his intimate relationships are almost completely left out. We learn only a little about his immediate family at the beginning and then hear briefly about the fate of his mother toward the end. We learn virtually nothing at all of his spouses and home life. Even more surprising, the book is very limited in its discussion of his work. While a few particular works are discussed in some detail, most that come up are mentioned only in passing, and many don't come up at all. At one point he alludes to his plans to write a novel – which I think must have been Beware of Pity – which got sidetracked when he developed an interest in Mary Stuart. And he references his biography of Marie Antoinette only briefly in the context of Mary Stuart. He mentions Burning Secret only in the context of the film adaptation of it being banned in Germany. Most of his other novels are not mentioned at all. One knows when reading the book that he is a prolific writer across many different forms, but the creation of those works play a small part in the memoir.

What The World of Yesterday does capture extremely well is exactly what its title promises: the life, the feeling, the experience of being in Europe at the turn of the 20th century, on the eve of World War I, in the wake of that war, the interwar period and in the last years before World War II. Zweig does incredible work at helping the reader understand what it was to live through all of it. I think I had hoped the book would also help me understand why he took his own life in 1942, shortly after finishing his memoir, but I can't say that it did – it only made me the more sad for his loss.

2024 in Books

I thought 2024 might have been my worst reading year in a decade, but with 24 books read I'm actually one book ahead of where I finished 2023. I had a good run over the summer and thought I might get back into the reading habit, but I fell off again in the fall. I could blame my failure to read more on any number of things – excessive scrolling and too much time spent on Spelling Bee are surely among the culprits – but one factor for which I feel less personal responsibility is that I had two longterm houseguests this year. I wasn't living alone for 8 months of last year, meaning there were people who I talked to in the mornings and who interrupted (even if they didn't intend to) my solitary reading time. I'm happy to have my space to myself again and I'm not expecting any longterm guests any time soon, so I hope I can get back to some of my old habits. 

The books I read last year, in the order in which I finished them, were:

• Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg
• Dark Back of Time, by Javier Marías
• Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
• Mockingbird, by Walter Tevis
• A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor
• What Have You Left Behind? by Bushra Al-Maqtari
• War, So Much War, by Mercè Rodoreda
• Our Lady of the Nile, by Scholastique Mukasonga
• Tomás Nevinson, by Javier Marías
• Translation State, by Ann Leckie
• Canción, by Eduardo Halfon
• Trust, by Hernan Diaz
• Tyrant Memory, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
• City of Laughter, by Temim Fruchter
• Vertigo, by W.G. Sebald
• The Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald
• The Emigrants, by W.G. Sebald
• Near to the Wild Heart, by Clarice Lispector
• Journey by Moonlight, by Antal Szerb
• The Third Tower: Journeys in Italy, by Antal Szerb
• Four Seasons in Rome, by Anthony Doerr
• On Lighthouses, by Jazmina Barrera
• Such Fine Boys, by Patrick Modiano
• The Word is Murder, by Anthony Horowitz

The stats: I read 7 books by women and another by a nonbinary author, meaning two thirds of the books I read were by cis men. Not great. Seventeen of the books I read last year were in translation, which I think is a high proportion, even for me. The countries, apart from the U.S., from which I read books were: Brazil, El Salvador, France, Germany (maybe needs an asterisk because it's Sebald, but maybe it doesn't), Guatemala, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Rwanda, Spain (note: one of the three books I read was written in Catalan), the U.K., and Yemen. Only Yemen is a country from which I hadn't previously read a book.

The most surprising stat in here to me is that this list includes six rereads. Two of them were for my book club: Family Lexicon and Near to the Wild Heart. Two of them were different translations than the versions I had read previously: Journey by Moonlight and, again, Near to the Wild Heart. I found myself wanting to reread beloved books this year – I considered even more rereads than I completed. There's also an unusually high proportion of non-fiction (nearly all of it memoir) in here: six books in total (and I'm not even counting Sebald). Both these stats are extra notable because in 2023 I had zero rereads and zero works of nonfiction in my read list. 

And now we are at the part of the post where I declare my favorite book of the year. Sometimes there is a clear winner; not this time. Journey By Moonlight was an easy favorite when I read it in 2019. I still loved it when I read it last year, but surprisingly (or not), it wasn't a stand-out. If anything, Szerb's memoir The Third Tower (also a reread) hit harder this time around. Senselessness, too, felt more powerful on rereading. 

I feel I should limit my favorites to books I had not read previously, and if forced to choose (which I am, by my own authority), I can narrow it down to three. A Time of Gifts was an enchanting book that captured a moment in time so vividly, and Leigh Fermor himself is such a compelling storyteller. Reading this book was simultaneously a joyful experience, and heartbreaking for the lost world it exposes. I read three Sebald books, which I've always thought were a loose trilogy, consecutively (though out of order, it turned out), and while I loved them all, The Rings of Saturn was the standout among them. The wide-ranging stories it told, the history and observations Sebald makes over the course of this unusual book come together so unexpectedly into a magical whole. It's a book that defies explanation, and it's wonderful. Finally, Anthony Doerr's Four Seasons in Rome so perfectly and beautifully captures Rome, one of my favorite places in the world. It was especially rewarding to read it before, during, and just after I paid a visit to the city, but I've since passed my copy on to my father who's never been to Rome and he is also loving the book. (My intention there was to make him want to visit Rome; I think it's working.) I'll make a closing observation about all three of these books: Two of them are straight memoir and a case could be made to describe the third that way as well. All of them are about journeys and history. As someone who has mostly stuck strictly to fiction, this makes me wonder if what I'm looking for from books may be shifting.