The Barnes & Noble Review
Americans can be proud that the person many consider Spain's greatest living novelist and a prospective Nobelist, Javier Marías, is much influenced by writers and films from the United States. Although he has translated a number of English- language authors, the novelists he considers most important for his work are Henry James and William Faulkner. Those influences were not readily apparent in The Infatuations, his previous translated novel that was widely and positively reviewed in English. But Thus Bad Begins improves upon that 2013 book by incorporating the baroque style of late James and the historical orientation of middle Faulkner.
A weekly journalist for El País, Marías surely knows the risks of these two unfashionable models, so he employs Hitchcockian plot devices (think Rear Window) and lightens the proceedings with a comic narrator, a bumbler out of Nabokov, another novelist Marías has translated and praised. Like the grandiose confabulator Kinbote of Pale Fire and the fumbling Humbert of Lolita, Marías's narrator, called "young De Vere" by other characters, has, in Humbert's words, a "fancy prose style" that attempts to cover up but unwittingly reveals his limitations as a person, his unreliability as an author, and ultimately the serious consequences of his moral obtuseness when the comic "bad" of the title becomes tragic "worse" by novel's end. The full Humbert quote is "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style."
I admit to having a soft spot for writers who employ this kind of narrator or focal character. The moralistic stalker in Poe's "Man of the Crowd," the imperceptive captain of Melville's "Benito Cereno," Jason Compson in The Sound and the Fury, the false innocent Papa Cue Ball in John Hawkes's Second Skin, and, most recently, the garrulous dupe in Norman Rush's Mortals are some of my favorites. They seem peculiarly American, feeling entitled to their viewpoint, confident in their understanding, optimistic, supposedly well meaning in their interpretations and actions — and dangerous to others. I enjoy how the creators of these men make fun of certain readers' nostalgia for nineteenth-century omniscience, for the passive assumption that fiction writers are earnest truth-tellers and not, fundamentally, elaborate liars like — how could I forget him? — that supposedly naïve, tale-telling hick Huckleberry Finn.
At 450 pages, Thus Bad Begins is certainly elaborate and sometimes over-elaborated as the twenty-three-year-old Juan De Vere struggles to see his acquaintances clearly, understand their complicated relationships, and push forward the investigation his employer asks him to perform as the new assistant of a fiftyish film director from Madrid named Eduardo Muriel. The year is 1980, and Muriel believes a physician friend, Jorge Van Vechten, has done something dishonorable with women in the past; he asks De Vere to entertain the much older man at nightclubs to see what can be learned, an intrigue that leads to some embarrassing moments when the old lecher is more successful with women than the junior informer. Because Muriel and his somewhat younger wife, Beatriz, are unhappy in their marriage (which De Vere learns by some humorous eavesdropping), the randy youth wrongly assumes Muriel believes Beatriz may be sleeping with the doctor. De Vere begins stalking Beatriz, follows her to a religious site, and climbs a tree to get a better view of an upstairs room (Marías is not above parodying the snooping first-person narrator). From the tree, De Vere sees something — that he believes is Beatriz and Van Vechten having sex. But after Van Vechten performs a life-saving favor for the Muriel family, Muriel refuses to hear what his assistant believes he has found. De Vere's discovery is not wasted, though, for it emboldens him to have sex with Beatriz when she is in psychological extremis.
De Vere's unexpected shift from loyal acolyte to live-in betrayer is plausible enough but may also be partly the result of Marías's method of composition, which is the strangest I've ever come across. In his Paris Review interview, Marías states that when he begins a novel he has only a very general plan and never alters the first pages (and succeeding pages) that he writes. To avoid being bored, Marías says he changes his plan as his narrator/protagonist develops and changes. Unlike other novelists, Marías does not backfill for consistency. This means some incongruities and even contradictions between early pages and middle pages, so the author may seem no more reliable in plotting than his narrator is in reporting. Accidents, coincidences, and digressions are allowed to control events as they do, Marías suggests, in life.
In the second half of Thus Bad Begins, however, the plotting becomes more pointed and conventional as De Vere turns his attention away from the present of Muriel's family to how they and others have been scarred by the past of Franco's dictatorship, which ended shortly before the novel begins. I won't name names, but De Vere discovers, sometimes by indirection and happenstance, that characters who seemed to be relatively neutral do-gooders, helping leftists despite positions in Franco's government, were blackmailing helpless women for sex. Ultimately what De Vere stumbles upon leads back to secrets in Muriel's family, and the political and personal merge — but with little credit for De Vere, who simultaneously advances upon and retreats from a history in which his own diplomat parents may have been complicit.
Although De Vere is telling this story some thirty or more years after the events, he claims to have an excellent memory that permits him to "quote" page-length paragraphs of others' discourse and to remember equally long passages of his internal monologues. But punctuating and sometimes puncturing his pompously assured style are "seems," "perhaps," "might have," "probably," and other Jamesian qualifiers. Here is our amateur detective analyzing nameplates outside a building to which he has followed Beatriz:
The name "221B BS" made me suspect it was a detective agency; I couldn't help associating that strange name with 221B Baker Street, where Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson lived and received their various intriguing commissions. It seemed more likely to me that Beatriz would be visiting them: unhappy people often insist on trying to uncover the full magnitude of their unhappiness, or choose to investigate other people's lives as a distraction from their own. She could have been visiting Gekoski or Meridianos, whatever they were, or Marius K and his journeys to the Middle East, or someone else, who had no plaque. However, I inclined towards Deverne Films, after all, they were in the same line of work as her husband and she would probably know them.
De Vere remembers all these irrelevant details but shows himself guilty of arbitrary literary associations, projection of his own emotional state, and a suspect "inclination" that may have resulted from finding letters in his name embedded in "Deverne." Of the dozen or so tenants in the building, De Vere rules out the one — Dr. Arranz — that Beatriz is visiting, an error that might well have shortened his investigation and the novel. De Vere's narcissistic personality and verbose style create a "mist" (his word) over the whole account. Marías has said the "filter" through which a story is told is crucial to him. Does Thus Bad Begins imply that De Vere intentionally creates this mist or filter because he feels guilty about taking advantage of an extremely vulnerable woman as several other characters have? Or does Marías imply that three decades after the end of Franco's regime and after the amnesty provisions of 1977, we can't be sure of how to distribute guilt for a past rife with turncoats and shrouded in secrets? Maybe by "we" I really mean "I." The novel includes historical characters — such as the movie producer Harry Alan Towers, the actor Herbert Lom, and the director Jess Franco, Marías's uncle. I sense that beyond these real people, Thus Bad Begins is a roman à clef and that readers in Spain familiar with the convoluted betrayals of their recent past know whom the novel implicates in its compendium of sins.
Marías says that the quality he most values in readers is "patience," a word that occurs frequently in the novel. Those who don't read James and Faulkner with pleasure may be impatient with Marías's slow-developing and unpredictably ramifying plots, but his barbed wit and Nabokovian puzzles entertain as Thus Bad Begins slouches forward, lurches sideways, and winds back upon itself. The title comes from Hamlet — "Thus bad begins and worse remains behind" — and points to a pattern of Shakesperian allusions and quotations worthy of the Russian gamemaster. Because De Vere shares his name with a man sometimes claimed to be the author of Shakespeare's plays, characters discuss artistic fraudulence and imposture in general.
Like Pale Fire, Thus Bad Begins is metafictional and metalinguistic, for De Vere continually comments on how life resembles fiction, whether written or cinematic, and shares his hyperconsciousness of words themselves, their roots and hidden connections. Some of Marías's wordplay, though, may have been lost in Costa's translation, for Thus Bad Begins has occasional odd diction and unidiomatic sentences perhaps more appropriate for the British than the American reader.
Much of Marías's earlier fiction turns upon secrets, as does The Infatuations. In that novel, the man who dies is named Deverne; De Vere, in the quoted passage above, sees the nameplate "Deverne Films." In this self-reference, Marías may suggest (it's always "suggest" or "imply" with Marías) that he considers The Infatuations more like a movie than, ironically, the movie-saturated Thus Bad Begins. The narrator of The Infatuations works for a publisher, but this new novel is a more bookish and more ambitious book because of its range and scale, its coiled stories of Franco's abuses, and its detailed portrait of a marriage undone by secrets and even unnecessary revelations.
Perhaps the success of The Infatuations has made Marías fearless, for Thus Bad Begins pushes his methods right up to the edge of excess that his earlier narrator notes when she describes a murderer: "He had a marked tendency to discourse and expound and digress . . . which, with few exceptions, are either absurd, pretentious, gruesome or pathetic." One of these methods is borrowing from writers he admires. Like Faulkner, Marías carries over characters from one novel to another. Along with Deverne, the pedantic Professor Francisco Rico and Dr. Vidal Secanell return in this new book. Like W. G. Sebald, Marías includes some photographs for his compulsive interpreter De Vere to analyze and project himself upon. The abstract discourse and self-referential qualities of Thus Bad Begins resemble the recent fiction of J. M. Coetzee, another writer Marías respects and a man who, like Marías, grew up under an oppressive dictatorship and distrusts all authority, including his own. With these and earlier comparisons, I don't mean to suggest that Thus Bad Begins is a pastiche of other novelists' work but to point out that Marías, like his narrator, who continually poses alternatives and possibilities, incorporates influences and allusions to show that any story can be told — filtered — in many different ways, as Marías may well have learned when he translated that encyclopedia of undecideds, Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Classic comedies end with a wedding, so De Vere describes his in the final pages Thus Bad Begins. He believes his marriage demonstrates what an upright character he is, but Marías undermines this belief when he reveals the shocking identity of De Vere's bride. A more serious backstabbing of the narrator by the author also occurs near the end when De Vere barely mentions a pregnant woman's suicide for which readers, who have been carefully investigating De Vere, may find him partly responsible. In Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H. Lawrence wrote that "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer." A man whose family and country were victimized by Franco, Marías didn't need to read American fiction to understand killing. But like the creators of those "innocent" American narrators I mentioned earlier, Marías knows that naïfs such as "young De Vere" are dangerous men.
Tom LeClair is the author of five novels, two critical books, and hundreds of essays and reviews in nationally circulated periodicals. He can be reached at thomas.leclair@uc.edu. Reviewer: Tom LeClair
The New York Times Book Review - Karan Mahajan
It is in Marías's portrayal of two completely different ways of being in the world—Eduardo's vengeful and intellectual stance, as compared with Beatriz's self-abnegating stoicism—that we see what a novelist can do best: relish opposing viewpoints and play them off against each other. The set pieces with these two characters have the tones of grand music. I could have read 500 pages about Eduardo and Beatriz sparring in a room…when Marías gets to the true source of Beatriz's pain—and Eduardo's hatred…the novel…suddenly explodes. I read the final pages in full thrall of Marías's novelistic power, every observation and overreaching universalizing thought falling into place as Eduardo reveals the underpinning of all that has come before, the falseness of how we have read this marriage. There is a betrayal at the heart of this novel that is as simple as it is heartbreaking—neither a straightforward affair, nor an act of aggression: just an instance of love and pity gone haywire. It made my hackles rise: the sense of how easily lives can get dislocated into a permanent sense of despair. I was reminded too that Marías is a master of a kind of suspense that is rare in the modern novel. He saves the best for the last.
Publishers Weekly - Audio
02/27/2017
Voice actor Fass raises to the challenge of reciting Marías’s latest novel, which is told from the perspective of Juan De Vere, a 23-year-old assistant to the Spanish film director Eduardo Muriel. The story is set in Spain in 1980, five years after the death of Franco—a period of the transition for Spain and its citizens. The damage of his dictatorship is very much present throughout, as De Vere becomes aware of the lasting effects of Franco’s regime and grapples with who did what to whom in the fascist era and who is to be forgiven and who punished, how and by whom. The title of the book is taken from Act III of Hamlet: “Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.” In keeping with the novel’s tone, Fass reads in a vocal range that is dreary, yet often seductive, and sometimes tense or jocular. The challenge to both reader and listener is intensified by Marías’s style of prose, which mirrors life’s complexity by beginning each sentence with a thought, then digressing from or contradicting or narrowing or expanding it. Conjunctions link long, breathless trains of thought together throughout. A Knopf hardcover. (Nov.)
Publishers Weekly
08/08/2016
Reviewed by Álvaro Enrigue Javier Marías has entered that rarefied space in which a writer becomes essential to society. He is a critical conscience who can express what philosophers and political scientists can’t. The subtle perfection with which he exposes trivial acts, in turn revealing silent, shady agreements that add grease to the political machinery of society, has injected new vigor into the otherwise antiquated Spanish realism. His work is a call for political responsibility in everyday civil life. Marías sets Thus Bad Begins in an aberrant moment in recent Spanish history: the years between the death of the dictator Francisco Franco in 1975 and the moment in 1981 when the country overcame the shadow of Catholic totalitarianism by finally ratifying a law that allowed divorce in 1981. Thanks to family connections, a recent graduate from college gets a position as the personal assistant of a mid-ranking film director. The job description includes script correction, entertaining guests, and keeping company with the director’s mentally abused wife. The novel takes off when the director asks the assistant to embark on a murky investigation to find out whether some ugly rumors about one of his friends are true. The research takes the young man through the last phases of his coming-of-age as he discovers that the liberties his generation enjoys are based on an agreement of silence between the winners and losers of the Spanish Civil War. This agreement translated into a humiliator/humiliated relationship during the unbearable 36 years of Franco’s fundamentalist regime. The director’s household—his miserable marriage, which can’t be dissolved, and the court of literati and celebrities who make up his regular entourage—becomes a metaphor of the bigger house of Spain and the decisions taken by the political and cultural elites to rush into an open society, skipping all effort to bring any closure to past wounds. If historical periods were lives, Thus Bad Begins would be situated in the infancy of the democratic pro-European Spain of our time and its little dramas and glories, its actual deficiencies and virtues. It’s not that Marías pretends to analyze Spain on the Freudian couch—Spanish society is famously impervious to psychoanalysis and its by-products; it’s that by placing his story during that moment in history, the author can propose a theory about the reckless exchange of values in a society that went from ultraconservative to ultraliberal in record time. Marías acquired recognition as a master storyteller thanks to his natural hand at developing complex plot lines and a style that redefined the notion of precision in Spanish writing. As years go by, his writing—rendered into English with grace by Margaret Jull Costa so that I never felt as though I was reading a translation—is still that of a virtuoso. His storytelling has evolved into a more reflexive, denser, meditative voice. Thus Bad Begins is a novel, of course, but it could be perfectly read, too, as a beautiful, savage essay on hypocrisy. Álvaro Enrigue’s most recent novel, Sudden Death, was published in the U.S. by Riverhead. Enrigue was born in Mexico and lives in New York City.
From the Publisher
*NAMED THE #1 BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR IN SPAIN BY EL PAÍS*
*NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE BOSTON GLOBE AND LOS ANGELES TIMES*
“As a literary mystery, Thus Bad Begins calls to mind Paul Auster, Donna Tartt, and Carlos Ruiz Zafón; purely as literature, it feels like an heir to the searching human nuance of the novels of Gabriel García Márquez . . . Javier Marías is the real deal . . . Mesmerizing.” —USA Today
“The book that defines Marías’s oeuvre as one of Spain’s most celebrated contemporary writers . . . Marías creates a symphony.” —The Boston Globe
“A demonstration of what fiction at its best can achieve.” —Hari Kunzru, The Guardian
“A major work from a global talent, Thus Bad Begins knits Hitchcockian suspense into a hypnotic tale crackling with erotic tension and political strife.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“Erudite, strange, hypnotic, and beautiful . . . One reads Javier Marías for his ability to make the smallest parts of the world come alive . . . I found myself most loving the book for its pages of brilliant observations, its musings and its suspenseful elegant voice . . . I could not put it down.” —Los Angeles Times
“‘Rear Window’ in Madrid . . . Thus Bad Begins delivers all of Marías’s trademark qualities—chewy philosophical meditation, prose of fastidious elegance, and the suspense of an old-fashioned potboiler . . . It’s now clear that Margaret Jull Costa and Javier Marías have forged one of the most fruitful author-translator partnerships in current literature.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“Fascinating . . . Hypnotic . . . As de Vere and Muriel try to get to the heart of matters, they discover secrets they wish they hadn’t . . . but the reader will devour every exquisitely wretched revelation.” —TIME
“I read the final pages in full thrall of Marías’s novelistic power . . . I was reminded too that Marías is a master of a kind of suspense that is rare in the modern novel.” —Karan Mahajan, The New York Times Book Review
“Marías is the leading light of a generation of Spanish novelists . . . Thus Bad Begins has lots to say about the political and social changes that have shaped Marías’s outlook. It’s also a kind of tragedy in comic form, or perhaps the other way round . . . Marías never seems seriously troubled by the long list of technical challenges he has to tackle to develop all this. With immense adroitness, he makes sure that Eduardo isn’t simply a wronged husband or a vengeful sadist and keeps Beatriz from turning into a doormat, a hysteric, or a vamp, and thereby maintains the reader’s sympathy for both.” —Christopher Tayler, Harper’s
“On the surface, the novel is part detective caper and part domestic drama. [But] Thus Bad Begins isn’t merely a novel about specific characters and their specific scandals; rather, they are stand-ins for the universal . . . If novels can be calls to action, then this one is a clarion for open dialogue.” —Village Voice
“Javier Marías captures his nation’s long-lasting trauma . . . In Madrid of 1980, the setting for Thus Bad Begins, an entire country finds itself at a crossroads . . . Each of Marías’s characters must decide how much is worth forgiving and how much might be worth forgetting.” —The Washington Post
“Javier Marías has entered that rarefied space in which a writer becomes essential to society. He is a critical conscience who can express what philosophers and political scientists can’t…. Thus Bad Begins is a novel, of course, but it could be perfectly read, too, as a beautiful, savage essay on hypocrisy.” —Álvaro Enrigue, Publishers Weekly
“Enticing and absolutely addictive . . . Marías is a writer of formidable skills and achievement.” —Washington Times
“In highly respected Spanish novelist Marías’s new work, we quickly see that political tensions have continued to reverberate [from the Spanish Civil War] . . . Marías reveals how insidiously oppression skews personal lives and relationships year after year.” —Booklist
“Marías’s marvelously idiosyncratic sentences achieve a dazzling textual equivalent of life’s endless complexity. Another challenging, boundary-stretching work from Marías, complete with a jaw-dropping last-chapter revelation.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Marías’s latest resumes his trademark themes of the quest for truth and the haunting presence of Spain’s civil war . . . It wallops audiences with some startling twists.” —Library Journal
“A novel that teases, tantalises, entertains, and is easily as engrossing as anything he’s written before . . . Marías manages to tread the tightrope between a very literary fiction and an absorbing plot; the book dangles the promise of dark, sexual secrets revealed, even as it draws you into a contemplation of the wrenching dilemmas that have shaped modern Spain.” —Siobhan Murphy, The Times
“Marías is Spain’s own modern-day Cervantes . . . His style is less showy than Umberto Eco’s, and wittier and more playful than Elena Ferrante’s.” —Robert Collins, The Sunday Times
“A simply unputdownable psychological and erotic and political thriller.” —Amanda Craig, BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review
“One of Marías’s most enjoyable and accessible novels.” —Luke Brown, Financial Times
“A ferociously addictive, troubling, seductive read . . . I was gripped by every word.” —Emma Townshend, Independent on Sunday
“Hypnotic . . . There’s a slow-building sense of Hitchcock in Vertigo mode that keeps us engaged.” —Lee Langley, The Spectator
“Magnificent.” —John Harding, Daily Mail
“Never less than seamlessly elegant . . . As brilliantly well conceived and emotionally profound as one has come to expect from this master.” —Rosemary Goring, The Herald (Scotland)
Library Journal
08/01/2016
After veteran film director Eduardo Muriel hires 23-year-old Juan de Vere as his secretary, Juan begins spying on Eduardo's wife, Beatriz, and her alleged lover, a doctor friend of the family. Soon, Juan is enmeshed in an ever more complicated web of adultery, suicide, deception, and blackmail. The novel, set in 1980 Madrid and populated with real-life cinema personalities, references Shakespeare (a favorite Marías device), with the title taken from Hamlet and the protagonist's name recalling Edward de Vere, whom some consider the author of Shakespeare's work. Typical of Marías (The Infatuations), the minimal plot starts slowly as Juan exhausts his thoughts, holding readers in suspense with hinted secrets, especially the reason for Muriel's abusive behavior toward Beatriz. Then the pace quickens as progressively more unexpected revelations are divulged. Though none of the characters is likable, flashes of humor offset the somewhat grim tone, as when Juan eavesdrops on a tryst from a tree and is caught by a nun. VERDICT Marías's latest resumes his trademark themes of the quest for truth and the haunting presence of Spain's civil war. Though still digressive, aphoristic, and drawn out, it pays off at the end as it wallops audiences with some startling twists. [See Prepub Alert, 5/9/16.]—Lawrence Olszewski, North Central State Coll., Mansfield, OH
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2016-08-22
The eternally fraught question of whether it is better to punish or forgive takes both personal and political forms in the celebrated Spanish novelist’s latest (The Infatuations, 2013, etc.).Just finishing up his degree in English, 23-year-old Juan de Vere goes to work for Eduardo Muriel, a past-his-prime film director who needs Juan’s help pitching projects to low-rent English-speaking producers like Harry Alan Towers (a historical figure whose real-life antics are deftly employed to underscore Marías’ central argument). Moving into a spare room in Muriel’s Madrid apartment, Juan witnesses the director’s brutally disdainful treatment of his wife, Beatriz, including a late-night confrontation during which he bitterly blames her for a youthful deception disclosed many years later. Excavating the past is not a popular activity in Spain in 1980. Franco has been dead for nearly five years, and the country has its first elected government in four decades. With the promise of legalized divorce and other liberating measures in the air, “denouncing someone for what they had done during the dictatorship or during the [Civil] War was unthinkable” Juan says; exculpatory silence is “the price we have to pay for a return to normality.” Even though it is Muriel who asks Juan to investigate an ugly rumor about his longtime friend Jorge Van Vechten, a prominent doctor generally considered to have mitigated his loyalty to the fascist regime by treating persecuted Loyalist families free of charge, the director soon decides he doesn’t want to know. His explanation, “It doesn’t matter if what I was told is true,” could stand as a motto for post-Franco Spain. Marías neither condemns nor excuses this deliberate amnesia, preferring to focus on the mutability of truth and the mysteries of human behavior—themes as familiar to his readers as the marvelously idiosyncratic sentences in which he winds through subordinate clauses and piles one idea on top of another to achieve a dazzling textual equivalent of life’s endless complexity. Another challenging, boundary-stretching work from Marías, complete with a jaw-dropping last-chapter revelation.
