Berta Isla

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He held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University. Perennials PERENNIALS constant friends A selection of novels, memoirs and more by some of our favourite authors. The espionage premise is initially enticing, but the real draw is the depth of Marías’s characterization. And the years continued to pass and pass, and first, I grew less young, and then, slightly older, I may even have begun to age, although not that much it seems, for I’ve always looked younger than I am, I’m fortunate in that respect and have no complaints, people tend to think I’m at least ten years younger.

How easy it is to be in the dark, or perhaps that’s our natural state,” Berta tells us, twice in the space of seven pages, after another of her husband’s inexplicable absences. Having tinkered with the spook-yarn formula in his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, Marías strips back the action to stage a dialled-up drama of early motherhood, pitting Berta’s experience against her husband’s in a late-night argument over the kitchen table. Powerless to influence him, often unable to contact him, Berta’s love and patience are tested over decades, as the turbulence of the 1970s gives way to the Falklands war, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Judging by Javier Marías’s new novel, I dodged a bullet, not least because of the havoc that a career in espionage wreaks on those closest to you.Berta, we realise, is becoming something she feared as a schoolgirl: someone whose story “did not merit being told by anyone, or only as a fleeting reference when recounting someone else’s more eventful and interesting life”. While she’s horrified that – with their shared memory of life under Franco – Tomás could be a tool of state violence, he accuses Berta of naivety over the skulduggery buttressing everyday life: “Why do you think people can live in peace, can get on with their lives, focus on their personal sufferings and hardships… without a thought for anything else? Marías weaves a thrilling and desolate meditation on the psychic costs of the deep state's dark arts. A bestselling author in his native Spain, Marías is often mentioned as a potential candidate for the Nobel prize. As a result, identity and deceit take center stage in this narrative along with other recurring topics in Marías’s fiction.

Berta Isla is a companion piece to his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, set in the world of the British intelligence service; many of the themes and some of the characters recur.

Both lose their virginity to other people: Tom, while he’s at Oxford, studying languages; Berta to a young bullfighter she meets in the street during an anti-government rally. Tom now embarks on a double life, posing as an embassy employee and raising a family in Madrid with Berta while frequently travelling abroad to take part in undercover operations. Marías is above all interested in negative states: waiting, uncertainty, insignificance, ignorance, deception and self-deception.

Marías succeeds in creating his own fictional world … He continues to validate his well-deserved global reputation. A man, or woman, who knew how to omit would release a much improved novella from this 544‑page tome. When Berta Isla was a schoolgirl, she decided she would marry Tomás Nevinson–the dashing half-Spanish, half-English boy in her class with an extraordinary gift for languages. Remarkables REMARKABLES Intriguing, stunning, or otherwise remarkable books These include fine editions, foreign publications exceptional for their interest or production, special editions and some first-rate books from very small publishers. Berta Isla is a novel of love and truth, fear and secrecy, buried identities, and the destinies we bring upon ourselves.

Spain’s most eminent novelist, Nobel laureate in waiting, translated into more than 40 languages, Marías likes to play with existential ideas.