Texas: The Great Theft, by Carmen Boullosa

It's been almost a month since I finished a book. I started three books in that space of time. One I read for just a day before deciding it wasn't what I was in the mood for. The second book I read for nearly two weeks. I found I wasn't much in the mood to read it either, but I actually set it aside because Texas: The Great Theft was my next book club book. This book, too, I wasn't often in the mood to read. I was lucky that our book club meeting got pushed back a week (it's this coming Tuesday) or I might not have finished it in time – or even at all for that matter. The truth is, it's not quite accurate to say that I wasn't "in the mood" to read these books individually; I wasn't in the mood for reading. The last month work has been overwhelming, and there's been other stuff going on keeping me preoccupied, and – from time to time – I've also wanted to get outside. I've been going for walks! Today it rained and I went a 5 mile walk yesterday, so it was a good day to stay home and read and cook and watch a movie and just do a lot of things I haven't been up for the last few weeks. 

Anyway, Texas. I think I would have loved this book if I had been in a different place – mentally – while reading it. I did sort of love it, but I kept losing the thread because I would read a few pages one day, then not read for a few days, then go back and read a few more. There are dozens of characters, many with very small parts, in Texas and I would forget who was who in the gaps in my reading. Texas is a fictionalized account of the Cortina Wars of 1859, when a band of militants led by Nepomuceno tried to retake the city of Brownsville from the relatively new US state of Texas. The book is written entirely in the present tense, which gives it the quality of a play-by-play narration. Most of the first 180 pages take place on a single day, when the events that set off the Cortina Wars took place. In fact, a good chunk of those 180 pages don't detail the events themselves, but how news of them passed from person to person and place to place. The latter 100 pages pick up 6 weeks later when the skirmishes really get underway. Reading Texas, I felt very uninformed about Texas history. I had faint memories from high school (or middle school?) history class, but no solid understanding of its history as an independent republic or its transition to statehood. 

There was some real beauty in the book. Boullosa has a way of going into the minds of characters (and animals, and even objects) and exposing the small detail that defines the character (or animal, or object), all in just a few sentences. This was my favorite things about the book. I wish I had read it at a time when I was able to give it more attention. 

In the Café of Lost Youth, by Patrick Modiano

In the 1956 Jean-Pierre Melville film "Bob le Flambeur," there's a scene of the early morning streets of Paris. Bob has been out all night and emerges into the daylight, confronted by the morning newspaper deliveries and the trucks spraying water to clean the streets. I've always loved that scene in the film, and when I imagine Paris, it's often that Paris that I imagine. That Paris is the world of In the Café of Lost Youth. (I almost wrote that Paris is the world of Modiano, but having only read three of his books, I don't feel I have quite the authority to speak on that.)

In the Café of Lost Youth is about a troubled young woman, nicknamed Louki. We learn about her in glimpses through the eyes of different narrators, a young man who has seen her at a café they both frequent, a private investigator her husband has hired to track her down, herself, and her lover. As a girl she started sneaking out in the night and walking the streets of Paris. Eventually, she never goes back home. She is probably still a teenager when she starts frequenting all-night cafés, drinking with older men. She develops a fascination with science fiction, and then perhaps with the occult. Even when we hear her own voice telling us her story, it's defined more by what it doesn't tell than what it does. She remains a mystery, to those who knew her, to the reader.

I'm sure I've said this every time I've written about a Modiano book, but the mood of his books goes right to my core. It's this beautiful nostalgia, with an interplay of present observations of a remote past. The books are as much about memory itself as they are about the events they describe in the past. (At least this book didn't mention the Place Malesherbes!) 

I kept coming back in my mind to "Bob le Flambeur" while reading In the Café of Lost Youth. It takes place in the same neighborhoods (I should say arrondissements). Cafés from the movie show up in the book. And Louki. I couldn't not imagine her as the teenage Isabelle Corey — Anne in the film. This book was written in 2007. Maybe Modiano was imagining her too. 

Such a Fun Age, by Kiley Reid

I don't spend much time with children. I never have. I'm an only child, so there were no other children in my home. I babysat a little bit as a teenager, once for an actual baby, which I remember as awful, and several times for a brother and sister who were 2 and 4 years old, which mostly went ok. When I was home the summer after my freshman year in college I babysat an older kid — he was maybe 10 — and I remember that being ... fine? While I enjoy seeing my friends' children, the time I spend with them is minimal. I'll do it when circumstances demand, but I have never been a person who wants to hold a baby. I'm not afraid of dropping them or hurting them or anything. Children, small children in particular, have just never really interested me. Reading books about parenting, or in the case of Such a Fun Age, about caring for a child leave me feeling a little like an alien.* 

This wasn't the only element of the book that was hard for me to connect to. I had this sense (one I've had before when reading contemporary novels) that I was looking in on contemporary culture from a real remove. Both the protagonist and her boss (the mom) have these tight groups of girlfriends, something that feels to me, from observation — this is maybe going to sound a bit weird — to be a feature of modern life for people younger than me. I do have women friends and some active group texts, but the tight-knit groups described in this book feel like something I only know about from social media. (The mom in the book is 12 years or so younger than I am now, and the protagonist another 7 years younger than her.) Or maybe if I were a mother myself I would have a group of mom friends — who knows. 

To be fair to Such a Fun Age — which I actually found engaging, smart, and nuanced — it's about a lot more than the problematic white mom. What it's really about is the protagonist, Emira, finding her own agency. She's surrounded by people — some of them older, richer, white people — who think they know better than her what's best for her, and no one is really paying attention to what Emira wants for herself. She doesn't seem to know herself, so in the end she still ends up acting at someone else's direction, but in this case it's one of her girlfriends, who does have her best interests in mind, and isn't acting out of some white guilt/white savior complex. But I guess what I'm saying is that she really doesn't find her own agency.

*The irony is not lost on me that when I read Death and the Dervish — my favorite book from last year — I was like, "Wow, I can really relate to this 18th century Bosnian dervish who is having an existential crisis," but books about white women who are my contemporaries and from my own social class leave me feeling bemused. (This isn't uniformly true: see, for instance Outline.)

The Radetsky March, by Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth is someone I feel I should have heard of earlier. He was a contemporary and a friend of other writers whose work I admire. Perhaps I had heard of him in passing, but not in a way that stuck. It was Daša Drndić's EEG that brought him to my attention and, on finishing it, I promptly ordered two of his books: The Radetzky March, his most celebrated novel, and The Hotel Years: Wanderings in Europe Between the Wars, a collection of his short works. The title of the latter jumped out at me, with the description from In the Night of Time of all the stateless Eastern Europeans in Paris hotels still fresh in my mind. 

The Radetzky March is the story of three generations of men over the last several decades of the Habsburg Monarchy, living at the cusp of modernity. The grandfather of the story, the eldest Trotta, is the son of Slovenian peasants, but he saves the life of the young Franz Josef I at the Battle of Solferino in 1859. For this, he's rewarded with a title and finds himself the recipient of the Emperor's favor, a fortune that passes down to his son and grandson. (The Emperor lived a long life.) Each generation of Trottas is alien to the one before it. The eldest Trotta becomes disillusioned with the military life, and moves to his in-laws' country estate to farm. He doesn't imagine his son a farmer, but he also refuses a military life for him. The second Trotta is groomed by his father for a life in civil service, eventually becoming a district leader in Moravia, where he lives a life of strict routine. His own son, the youngest Trotta, he decides will have the military career that he was denied by his father. He's not cut out for it, but like his father before him, he doesn't dare to disobey his father. But where the second Trotta seems to accept the life his father dictated for him with equanimity, the youngest seems destined for misery and feels it. The latter two Trottas dominate the book after the death of the eldest, and they inhabit a world that is crumbling around them. The signs are everywhere, but the father is mostly oblivious to them, and the son is stationed at a garrison in the eastern reaches of the empire, where he drinks his life away. 

While the story arc is rather grim, The Radetzky March is filled with beautiful, funny, and clear observations of life at the end of an era. The rush into modernity and the looming Great War are palpable. The description of the night the news of Franz Ferdinand's assassination arrived in the remote Ukrainian outpost where the youngest Trotta was stationed was stunning. The regiment has organized a festival to celebrate its 99th anniversary. A raging summer storm moves events indoors. The bands play and the guests dance while a few senior military officers discuss the rumored assassination in another room. Immediately on receipt of the news, nationalist and ethnic divisions rise up between the officers of the same military. Word gets out and the bands play a requiem as guests keep dancing. I do this chapter no justice in describing it; it's just incredible.

While part of me wishes I had known about Joseph Roth earlier, I'm very glad to have found him now. 

Unforgiving Years, by Victor Serge

Unforgiving Years follows a Soviet spy of the first generation -- someone who was part of and believed in the revolution -- in the period leading up to and during World War II. We first meet Daria in Paris in 1937 where she has been tasked with bringing back D., a friend and comrade who is about to slip away to America. Her failure gets her sent to remote Kazakhstan for four years, and it's on the day of her departure from there that the book picks her up again. Germany has invaded Russia and she's brought in as a translator to gather information from captured German soldiers. The descriptions of life in Leningrad in winter during the war was bleak. I got cold reading it. When the book begins again for the third time, we are in Berlin in the last weeks before and leading up to the Allied arrival there. Daria is working undercover as a Latvian nurse committed to Nazi cause. This was the longest section and the hardest to follow. In the confusion of the war's end, Daria decides not to go back to Russia and with her last false passport and last money boards a Swedish ship bound for New York. She looks for D. in Brooklyn and then Virginia and finally finds him in Mexico where he's been living quietly on a coffee plantation for close to a decade. But Stalin's reach is wide.

It always interests me when I find echoes of things I've read recently in unrelated books. I suppose proximity is the key. Similar themes and ideas and concepts must come up across tons of books, and only when I read them in close proximity do I notice the unexpected resonance. So, in Unforgiving Years, I was surprised to find a passage that contained echoes of Outline. (I was less surprised to find passages that reminded me of In the Night of Time, which I am still in the midst of reading. These two books inhabit the same world for a brief period in 1937 Paris. D. from Unforgiving Years and Ignacio Abel from In the Night of Time could have left for New York on the same boat from France.) Anyway, Outline...

Daria is a good operative, but she keeps a journal:

A curious document, this journal, whose carefully chosen words sketched out only the outer shapes [OUTLINES, hm??] of people, events, and ideas: a poem constructed of gaps cut from the lived material, because -- since it could be seized -- it could not contain a single name, a single recognizable face, a single unmistakable strand of the past.... 

The construction of this featureless record, similar to a thought puzzle in three dimensions turned entirely toward some undefinable fourth dimension, had furnished her with an exhilarating occupation.

This journal comes up a few times over the course of the book and what it described reminded me so much of Outline, a book defined by what's absent from it. 

Outline, by Rachel Cusk (again)

To accommodate me with my other reading obligations, my book club decided to read a book I had already read as our next book. We were scheduled to meet 2 days after my Women In Translation book club, for which I read EEG and I also had In the Night of Time looming over me when we were discussing our selection. But when I finished EEG with a week to spare, I knew I was going to reread Outline. Actually, I knew it when we chose it that I'd reread it. I loved Outline and even when I was reading it I had the sense I wanted to go back to it. I read Transit and Kudos, and the urge to go back only grew as time passed. In October, I talked with someone who was reading Outline for the first time and I couldn't help gushing, even as I felt I had lost some of the sense of awe I had while reading it, and really only remembered fragments -- though only six months had passed. Now, at not quite eleven months since I read it the first time, I've read it again and I'm able to look at it with some remove, almost to look at it as someone else -- someone to whom it was not awe-inspiring -- might see it. I read the mixed to negative reviews on Goodreads. I read this article in The Guardian, in which the author ponders why Rachel Cusk annoys her so much (and goes on to add that "It is only in England she is pilloried. Elsewhere, she is respected – Paris Review is publishing Outline in extracts. And the Poles love her, too."). My feelings about the book are unchanged, but it's been interesting to attempt to understand what people who don't like it are reading in it.

On this second reading (and probably on the first reading too) I recognized that I identify strongly with some of the themes in the book. I think the way they're presented -- as a series of conversations with other people and about other people, there are stories within stories -- particularly drew me in. The narrator has a sequence of interactions, in which she appears nearly completely passive. Yes people tell or confess these intimate parts of their lives, and the meaning or moral is often ambiguous (or absent). 

When I got to page 105, the bottom corner of the page was turned up and I instinctively flattened it out. But then as I turned to the next page, I wondered if I'd creased it myself as a placeholder. This wouldn't be my usual style -- I'm partial to using small scraps of paper to bookmark key passages or the occasional pencilled in brace, but folding a page is very out of character for me. However, I was traveling when I read Outline and maybe pencils and scraps of paper weren't close at hand. I could just imagine myself turning up the page corner at the bottom of the page, where it would be least offensive. In fact that page did contain a line that really resonated with me. The narrator is relating a conversation, and she says, "I replied that I wasn't sure it was possible, in marriage, to know what you actually were from what you had become through the other person." I had read it and been struck by it after flattening the turned up corner, and still didn't make the connection right away. It was only when I got to the next page that I wondered, "Was that a particular something I wanted to note?" I turned the page back and read it once more, and then folded the corner in again to save it, though I still couldn't remember or even quite imagine myself folding up the page corner. This itself started to take on a quality of ambiguity that felt like a perfect reflection of the book. Later, I found a second and then a third turned up page corner, at which point I became sure this had been my own doing.

Cusk comes back to this idea of losing the self in a relationship toward the very end of Outline, the second time through the mouth of another character. The bulk of this book and the conversations and stories within in could be said to be about the changing nature of the self in relation to others. The narrator's last interlocutor is sort of a mirror of the narrator. The book covers the space of a week during which the narrator has come to Athens to teach writing. Just as she is leaving, another English writer, Anne, arrives to take over the apartment where the narrator has stayed and to teach for the following week. They overlap for a few hours in the apartment. Anne relates the recent upheaval that has taken place in her life, which included the dissolution of her marriage, and then she describes a conversation she had with her neighbor on the plane to Athens. This too is part of the mirroring -- the first chapter includes a long conversation the narrator has with her neighbor on her flight to Athens. Anne's neighbor was a polyglot diplomat, whose life and experiences were completely opposite to her own. The more they talked, the more she saw herself in contrast to her neighbor, 

This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.

This excerpt could serve as a description of Outline and its narrator. We see very little into her life, but through the conversations she has with friends, strangers, and her students over the course of the book, we start to see an outline.

Seeing People Off, by Jana Beňová

I came upon Seeing People Off in a very roundabout way. Last month, I was reading Molly Young's newsletter, "Read Like the Wind" (I highly recommend this monthly newsletter! Scroll down to the newsletters under Vulture.) and she included a recommendation for a book called The Hare by Melanie Finn. In her review, she included this tidbit, "It is published by Two Dollar Radio, a small press out of Columbus, Ohio, which I think of as the Barry Bonds of small presses: They hit an astonishing number of home runs." I had never heard of the Two Dollar Radio, so I went over to their website to see what else they had to offer. I'm always keeping an eye out for authors from countries I haven't read, and I found they published two books by Jana Beňová, one of the most acclaimed writers from Slovakia. I've read a handful of Czech books (most published when it was part of the larger Czechoslovakia), but I'd never read a Slovak book. (Oddly enough, I've actually been to Slovakia, but I've never been to the Czech Republic.) So, in any case, I decided to order Seeing People Off  (and along with it I ordered Melanie Finn's book The Gloaming because at the time I was making these purchase The Hare had not yet been published, but I decided to try another book by the same author). 

Seeing People Off is a slim book -- 126 pages -- with little in the way of a plot, but it's quite entertaining. It follows four aimless young adults ("The Quartet" -- the book is subtitled, "A Manifest of the Quartet") in Bratislava as they drink too much and eat too little. Their social life centers on a cafe called the Hyena, where they spend much of their days. They take turns getting jobs, and the one who works provides a stipend for the others, who shop and write at the cafe and drink heavily. The book veers off here and there into surreal dream states, or brief glimpses into the past. 

Besides the cafe, the other main location in the novel is a large communist-era apartment complex in Petržalka, on the south side of the Danube from the historic center of Bratislava. This is where my having been there actually came in handy: I could picture it. In fact, I have taken pictures of it. Petržalka is on the far side of the bridge in the photo at right. Unsurprisingly, I never visited that part of the city when I was in Bratislava -- it's a dense residential area of large apartment blocks. According to Wikipedia, it's the most densely populated residential district in Central Europe, once known for its high crime rate. This remove from the city's historic center is another of the books themes: seeing the bridge, but never crossing it. One of the most hilarious moments in the book is when one member of the Quartet runs into an acquaintance in central Bratislava who tells her that he's being paid by the government to just walk around and hang out in Bratislava, to encourage tourism, to make it look as if Slovaks walk around and hang out in the old city. After this encounter, she looks around her and can't help wondering if everyone else is getting paid to live the life she's living.

It was a strange book, but I really enjoyed Seeing People Off. I wish I had read it -- or anything about Bratislava at all -- before I went there. I stopped there for a day and a night on my way from Vienna to Budapest, basically because it was right there and it felt like it would have been a shame not to. On arriving, I realized I didn't know the first thing about Bratislava. I had booked a place to stay, but beyond that hadn't really done any research. I also just hadn't really processed ahead of time that I would be going to a place where the language was completely foreign to me. I've studied 3 Romance languages plus German and Shona, and am used to fumbling by, even in languages I don't know, but I was completely unprepared for Slovak. That said, I'm glad I did go. As it happens, Bratislava is also the source of the banner image I use on this blog: It's a photo I took of a mosaic at the Bratislava train station.

EEG, by Daša Drndić

Two weeks ago, against my better judgment, I started a 640-page novel about the Spanish Civil War: In the Night of Time by Antonio Muñoz Molina. I say against my better judgment, because by 3 weeks from that day, I also had to read EEG, which was the next selection for my Women in Translation book club. I thought perhaps I could do it: If I could finish the Muñoz in just under two weeks, as long as I could start EEG by what is now yesterday, I figured I would be ok. But I didn't find myself exactly tearing through In the Night of Time, and I was also worried EEG might be slow, so last weekend I decided to pause the former and start the latter. I finished it today, so perhaps I could have waited another week to start, but I think I'm glad I didn't. I found the first hundred pages pretty slow going, and I read only small sections for a week, before I devoured the remaining 250 pages or so this weekend. The chill yesterday was particularly conducive to lying on the couch for hours with a book, wearing many layers under a blanket and two cats.* 

There's a moment in In the Night of Time that sent my mind racing, and it was unexpectedly echoed in EEG. The protagonist flees Spain, probably forever, carrying just a small suitcase. He crosses the border into France on foot and makes his way to Paris where he puts up at a hotel that is filled with the displaced people of Europe, mostly Eastern European Jews, until he can get his visa to travel to America. He isn't at ease until he's on his ship en route to New York, and even then he's conscious of his small suitcase, his few belongings which must make him suspect precisely because they are so few. This Paris of the 1930s is also in EEG. And luggage: so much luggage.

The directive of EEG seems to be: Remember. The book is virtually a catalogue of under-reported atrocities, mostly perpetrated by fascist regimes. It catalogues Jews slaughtered in the Baltic states (particularly Latvia), Jews deported from France to concentration camps, Muslims killed at Srebrenica. It also catalogues some smaller, more intimate stories: case histories of patients at a psychiatric hospital in Belgrade, the untimely death of chess masters. At one point, the book reproduces a literal catalogue: books taken from the Jews of Zagreb and Dubrovnik in 1941. And it catalogues the perpetrators of many of these atrocities, most unpunished.

When luggage first came up in EEG, I didn't make note of it. I remember a discussion of several suitcases of diminishing sizes, but I won't go back to find it just now. It may have come up several times before I made note of it. I remember a later discussion of a grey checkered Chinese suitcase, and also a Samsonite. But the first note I made to myself was not until page 279, and it wasn't really about luggage either. The narrator is in Paris (in modern day, not the 1930s), and happens upon a building -- formerly a furniture store -- with a memorial plaque acknowledging its use during the Vichy regime as a warehouse for the possessions stolen from Jews and an annex to the Drancy deportation camp. The narrator stops to read the plaque, and then continues on toward the Seine, "but it, that former furniture store for the working class, monumental and brilliant, dragged itself after me, panting." After reading that passage, I did have to go back and find an earlier reference. While much of the book concerns itself with events around WWII, there is a chapter on the massacre at Srebrenica. The narrator visits the Memorial Center at Srebrenica. 

On the way out of that victims' cemetery shackles snap round my ankles and I understand, from now on I must drag all this after me, all these Muslim gravestones, and one Christian cross (for Rudolf Hren), these tombs and the secret stories buried beneath them, the trees and grass, as though I were dragging after me the cover, the face of the earth.

The past, memory, history, knowledge are weight that must be carried, or pulled behind us. Elsewhere in EEG there is a cheap rolling suitcase, overstuffed, whose wheels give out so it is dragged across the pavement. There is a cardboard suitcase, stuffed with photographs and photographic equipment, never opened but moved again and again, over a period of 40 years, "as additionally heavy but useless baggage, I drag it after me on all my house moves. Everything in that suitcase must have rotted by now."

Most satisfyingly, at the very end, the narrator finally unpacks some luggage:

I opened my backpack, which I had been hauling with me for two and a half decades, and which had reached the end of the road. In the bottom rolled a few old mislaid trivialities, incidentals, trifles, trinkets that rang like bells, fading away.

I could say a lot more about various aspects of this book, but I'll stop here. I feel like I may need to go back and re-read the first hundred pages, which I found somewhat impenetrable. (Maybe if I do I'll find the first piece of luggage.)

*Today, thankfully, my apartment has warmed up, but I still put in a good 4 hours under a blanket and a cat -- with one less layer of clothing compared to yesterday, plus no hat. The chill of the last 3 days, however, has resulted in a shocking new milestone for me and my cat Bonnie. In the last 36 hours this cat -- who has traditionally kept herself always literally at arm's length from me, who I must reach out to pet on the other end of the couch, who runs away if I approach her on foot -- this cat has magically transformed into a lap cat. On Friday evening, I was reading EEG on the couch and my other cat, Little Hans, who usually likes to be as close to my face as possible, was sleeping at my feet instead, taking over Bonnie's usual side of the couch. Bonnie jumped onto the arm of the couch and saw her usual spot taken. I had my legs extended under a blanket and so I tentatively patted my lap to show Bonnie she could come there and -- to my complete amazement -- she did. She stayed for half an hour, left for ten minutes, then came back and stayed for another hour or more. I delayed my dinner until she removed herself voluntarily. Yesterday morning, when I resumed my reading after breakfast, she jumped on my lap immediately and we spent the bulk of the day that way, with breaks for meals and such. And today it happened again! Little Hans is my usual reading companion, but Bonnie kept me company for virtually the entirety of EEG. I look forward to seeing how this new state of affairs progresses.

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler

I hate reading e-books, but I had to read Parable of the Sower as an e-book because it was our latest book club selection and I didn't have time to order it and have it arrive in time to read it, and I couldn't really get myself to a bookstore. Also, I'm trying not to acquire too many new books; I'm out of bookshelf space at home and I already have so many books I haven't read. Fortunately, Parable of the Sower was available from the Brooklyn Public Library. Since we usually only have 3-4 weeks notice, my book club has forced me to read e-books quite a bit. I learned early on that the number of "pages" doesn't correlate in any way to paper books. Parable of the Sower was 264 "pages," which I estimated amounted to about a 400 page book. I ended up being a bit rushed to read toward the end because my library loan expired today and I couldn't renew it. This morning I had 80 "pages" left, and I wanted to go out walking with my camera, but I decided I better finish my book first. So, I sat down to it after breakfast ready to commit 2-3 hours, only to finish an hour later because the book actually ended on "page" 211. After the main text, the e-book included the first three chapters of Parable of the Talents and a biography of Octavia Butler (complete with some fantastic photos, including this one of her at age 3). Anyway, I suppose I could have figured out from the table of contents where the book actually ended (and I also suppose I could have had the same issue with a paper book that included extra material at the end, though I think I probably would have noticed in that case), but this is an illustration of one of the reasons I don't like e-books. I feel a little crazy for saying this, but to some extent as I was reading, it it wasn't clear to me that the climaxes were the climaxes and the end caught me totally off guard because I was expecting to read another 50-70 pages.

As you may have gathered from the previous paragraph, I found Parable of the Sower a tough read. I never wanted to sit down and read it; I dreaded what it had in store. This isn't to say it's not a good book; it is good. (In fact, I just texted my father to recommend it to him.) But it's hard. It describes a reality so bleak, with so little hope, where you know terrible things are going to happen to the protagonists. I found what hope the book did offer -- via Earthseed -- hard to connect to (though, to be fair, the same can be said for some of the book's own characters, so perhaps it's not meant to be fully articulated). I don't know for sure that I would have enjoyed the book more if I had read a paper edition and had a better sense of where in it I was, but I might have found it less stressful. The entire time I was reading it, I thought the worst was still ahead. 

Berta Isla, by Javier Marías

I think it must have been sometime during 2019 that I decided retroactively to make it something of a tradition to start each year reading a book by Javier Marías. In December of 2018, I had picked up two of his books, Thus Bad Begins and A Heart So White and I started 2019 with Thus Bad Begins. I read A Heart So White a couple months later, but I saved the other book of his I owned but had not read, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, for 2020. But I called this a retroactive decision, and that's because I had started 2018 with volume three of Your Face Tomorrow and I had started 2017 with volume one of Your Face Tomorrow and at not quite but almost the start of 2016 I had read The Infatuations. So, when I decided to make this a tradition, I had already been doing it for four years. I had some concerns that I might not be able to or want to do it again this year. I do still own two Marías books I haven't read (I bought them in December 2019, knowing I would soon be starting the one book I owned and had not read at the time), but one is stories and the other is slim and I knew the book I wanted to start 2020 with was his newest book, Berta Isla. So, one cold morning in early December, armed with a gift certificate I had received for my birthday six months prior, I headed out on foot for a five-mile walk with a stop at Greenlight Bookstore in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens. To my relief, they had a copy in stock.

I'm starting this post even as I have more than 200 pages left to read in Berta Isla. There was one thing I wanted to capture while it's fresh in my mind, so I'll come back to this in a few days when I've finished the book, but for now I want to talk briefly about Endeavour Morse. Marías is a master of intertextuality. His books frequently draw on Shakespeare and other works of literature, but more popular culture comes in as well: Ian Fleming's James Bond books have a role in the first of the Your Face Tomorrow books. (In fact, Henry V gets quite a lot of attention, and Bond gets a couple passing mentions in Berta Isla as well). So when a policeman named Morse* showed up to investigate a murder early on in Berta Isla it was only for a split second that I thought it could have been a made-up name, chosen at random. A moment later I reflected: this scene was taking place in Oxford circa 1972. The police officer, Morse, reveals he's a bachelor. He is described as perceptive and likely to fight back if his superiors try to hush up the case. This can't have been an accident. I'm more a fan of the TV series Endeavour than I am of the original Inspector Morse, which feels dated when you watch it today, and I've never read the books. Endeavour has not quite caught up to 1972, but still I tried to imagine Shaun Evans interviewing Tomás, the character in the book, about his relationship with the murdered woman. Is this what Morse would have asked; is that how Morse would have asked it, I wondered? I'm now 100 or more pages past Morse's appearance, and I don't think we'll be hearing from him again in the novel, but I picture him not giving up on this unsolved murder. Morse was never afraid of offending the powerful and I know he'll have his suspicions about what really happened in the cover-up.

And now I am resuming this post, some several days later having finished Berta Isla. One of things I find so delightful in reading Marías is the way all his books seem to operate in the same universe. Characters show up again and again, playing themselves, as it were. Peter Wheeler must be the most frequently appearing character. If I recall correctly, he's in A Heart So White, the Your Face Tomorrow books (where he plays a significant part, particularly in the first book), and even Thus Bad Begins, and he was back in Berta Isla. Bertram Tupra, who is central to the Your Face Tomorrow books, is central to Berta Isla as well. I also had the sense that Tomás Nevinson, a central character in Berta Isla (and soon to have his own book), was retroactively inserted into some of the events of Your Face Tomorrow. 

Many of Marías' books are about people spying upon one another, husbands upon (ex)wives and their new lovers, houseguests upon hosts, sons upon fathers, but Berta Isla is more properly a spy novel. Though, one told primarily from the point of the view of the spy's wife (the titular Berta Isla), who is perpetually in the dark about her husband's activities, location, and even whether he's alive. (Perhaps Tomás Nevinson (the name of Berta's husband) will be a true spy novel.) For me, centering real spies actually made the book less interesting. There are real spies -- some of the same ones -- in Your Face Tomorrow, but the narrator and central character is more a civilian who works with them and ends up adopting some of their tactics in his personal life -- to paint it with very broad strokes. That and Marías' other books are all about comparatively normal people who sort of test the limits of propriety. As I wrote after reading Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, "Several - perhaps all? - of Marías narrators are borderline creeps." Berta Isla would have to be the sole exception. It's exceptional among Marías' books in a couple other ways too: while the bulk of it is a first person narration by Berta, there are also big chunks that are told in the third person. It's also only the second book of his (the other being The Infatuations) I've read that's narrated by a woman. 

I did enjoy Berta Isla -- I devoured it in just a few sittings -- but it wasn't among my favorite of Marías' books. However, when I consider that Marías wrote several of my favorite books I've read in the last 5 years, I hardly think this counts much against it. 

* I will say that this Morse was, in fact, given a first name late in the book and that it was not Endeavour. However, it was an equally absurd name beginning with the letter E, and that it is mentioned more than once that by the 1990s he must certainly have reached the rank of Detective Inspector (we never actually meet him again), so I don't think this materially changes my premise that Morse is no accident.