There are two Spanish writers, both called Javier, whom I really enjoy reading, so no wonder that I decided to start with them for my self-imposed Spanish and Portuguese-language themed month of October.
Javier Cercas: Even the Darkest Night (Terra Alta 1), transl. Anne McLean, Maclehose Press, 2021.
I’ve appreciated Javier Cercas’ brand of ‘historically-tinged’ fiction since I first met him at Quais du Polar in Lyon and read him translated into French, and later a couple of his books translated into English. What do I mean by ‘historically-tinged’? He examines the impact of the Spanish Civil War and the many years of the Franco regime upon the present-day. He has done extensive research on that period, and his novels often blend fact and fiction, with perhaps the best-known one being Soldiers of Salamis.
So I was intrigued to hear that he had embarked upon a series of crime fiction novels set in Terra Alta, a sparsely-populated landlocked district in the south of the region of Catalonia in Spain. Even the Darkest Night is the first in a trilogy set in this region, featuring Melchor Marin, a young cop sent to this region from Barcelona to protect his identity after he foiled a terrorist attack. I suspected that there might be a historical component to the crime (and there is a bit), but it appears that Cercas is more concerned with showing us the less glamorous, more poverty-stricken regions of his country.
‘This is an inhospitable, very poor land. It always has been. A land people passed through and the only ones who stayed were the ones with no other choice, the ones with nowhere else to go. A land of losers. Nobody loves this region, that’s the truth, and the proof is that they only ever remember us in order to bomb us. What are we known for outside the region? For the Battle of the Ebro, the most ferocious battle that’s ever been waged in this country…’
Melchor has a troubled past and problems with anger management. The son of a Barcelona prostitute, he ended up in prison, where he was reformed after reading Les Miserables. He managed to get his slate wiped clean and join the police force upon his release from prison, and has been obsessed with finding his mother’s killer ever since. Over the past four years, he seems to have laid roots in Terra Alta, has married the local librarian and dotes on their daughter Cosette. When he gets called to investigate the grisly murder of the wealthy businessman Adell and his wife and maid in their country home, he feels that the investigation into their deaths is not quite adding up. Sure enough, it soon peters out for lack of proper evidence.
There is nothing new about cops with secrets and problematic pasts, but a crime writer would have drip-fed tiny bits of back story here and there, only as much as was necessary for driving the plot forwards and giving us an insight into the main character. You can tell that Cercas is not really a crime writer, however, as he seems to spend a considerable portion of the book in lengthy flashbacks, and the investigation becomes almost secondary. Nor are there any real clues for the reader about the true motives for the initial crimes, plus we encounter a rather unnecessary death which shocked me.
All in all, not the most satisfying book by this author whom I highly respect. I will probably read the next in the trilogy, though, if only to see if he has mastered the crime writing conventions a little better.
Javier Marias: All Souls, transl. Margaret Jull Costa, Harvill Press, 1999.
This also feels like a less typical effort by this author – perhaps the least complicated and most accessible of his novels, a good entry point to his work.
It is an often very funny depiction of the pretentiousness and pettiness of Oxford collegiate life, seen through the eyes of a young Spanish lecturer on a two-year visiting fellowship. During his stay he becomes the lover of Clare Bayes, an attractive academic married to a far duller, more senior academic. He also becomes protégé of two enigmatic old scholars (and possibly spies), Cromer-Blake and Toby Rylands, who later reappear in a more sinister capacity in the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy.
I have always been fond of Marias’ astute observations of individuals and social groups, and this book seems to have even more wickedly funny passages (the description of dinner at the High Table is hilarious) than usual – and perhaps less of the deeply troubling issues that make an appearance in his other works.
For the inhabitants of Oxford are not in the world and when they do sally forth into the world (to London, for example) that in itself is enough to have them gasping for air; their ears buzz, they lose their sense of balance, they stumble and have to come scurrying back to the town that makes their existence possible, that contains them, where they do not even exist in time.
In Oxford the only thing anyone is truly interested in is money, followed some way behind by information, which can always be useful as a means of acquiring money…Giving information about something is, moreover, the only way of not having to give out information about oneself… The more one knows and tells about other people, the greater one’s dispensation to not reveal anything about oneself. Consequently the whole of Oxford is fully and continuously engaged in concealing and suppressing itself whilst at the same time trying to winkle out as much information as possible about other people, and from here comes the tradition – true – and the myth – also true – of the high quality, great efficiency and virtuosity of the dons and teachers of Oxford and Cambridge when it comes to the dirtier work involved in spying… Oxonians have sharper ears, Cantabrigians fewer scruples.
Nevertheless, it is almost certainly not the way the Daily Mail blurb on the cover describes it: ‘probably the wittiest novels set in British academia since David Lodge’s Changing Places’, because Marias has never been interested purely in satire or a love story. His books are always about the slippery nature of memory, about how people constantly rewrite themselves into their own lives and the lives of others, about that longing for something indefinable yet more than what we have. It is also about displacement, about never quite fitting in, which I think Marias himself experienced (too ‘British’ for the Spanish, too Spanish for the English-speaking world). Here is an example of that wistfulness, in what Toby Rylands tells the narrator at some point:
I’ve always kept on learning. But that ignorance is still so vast that even today, at seventy, leading this quiet life, I still cherish the hope of being able to embrace everything and experience everything, the unknown and the known, yes, even things I’ve known before. There’s as intense a longing for the known as there is for the unknown because one just can’t accept that certain things won’t repeat themselves.
It is rather poignant that the author himself died at the age of seventy, no doubt harbouring a very similar sentiment.
A very enjoyable entry in my Marias reading, and I’m almost tempted to sneak in another one by him before the end of October, although I only have thick ones left to read and don’t want to carry them with me to Romania next week.
findingtimetowrite 