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.