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BERTA ISLA

Name: BERTA ISLA
Author: Javier Marías
ISBN: 978-0-525-52136-5

by Javier Marías ; translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 7, 2019

Skilled and provocative, as always, but not one of the author’s best.

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Spanish novelist Marías (Between Eternities, 2017, etc.) revisits perennial themes—the mutability of truth, the untrustworthiness of the powerful, the vagaries of human behavior—in a brooding tale of lives darkened by separation and deception.

Berta is intrigued by “Tom or Tomás” from the moment they meet at school in Madrid. Completely bilingual, with a Spanish mother and English father, he’s good-looking and entertaining, brilliant at impersonations, and uninterested in the tortured introspection that absorbs most adolescents. These qualities attract the attention of the British Secret Service when he heads to Oxford in 1969, and Tom (as he thinks of himself in England) is pressured into joining after the police inform him that a woman with whom he’s been having a casual affair has been murdered. Berta doesn’t know this when they marry in 1974, but she’s enlightened a few years later, and for decades she reluctantly abides by Tomás’ insistence that she must never ask where he goes and what he does during his long absences. “Whatever happens will have nothing to do with me,” he insists, “because those of us who do this work both exist and don’t exist…the things we do are done by nobody.” This existential view of spying echoes throughout the novel in fragments from T.S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding,” with its images of a spirit wandering between two worlds, and in Tom’s musings that spies know what others try to forget: that each of us is “an outcast of the universe.” Nonetheless, he justifies his life in the shadows as “defence of the Realm,” a rote claim Berta rejects with contempt: “How can you say that your causes are just causes, if they’re given to you by intermediaries.” As usual, Marías propels his philosophical debates with the urgency of a thriller, including a bravura plot twist that completely unmoors Tom/Tomás. But Berta is more of a construct than a credible female character, and the novel has a slightly perfunctory air despite Marías’ customary brilliant prose.

Skilled and provocative, as always, but not one of the author’s best.

Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-525-52136-5

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
BETWEEN ETERNITIES
by Javier Marías translated by Margaret Jull Costa

- BOOK REVIEW
THUS BAD BEGINS
by Javier Marías ; translated by Margaret Jull Costa

- BOOK REVIEW
THE INFATUATIONS
by Javier Marías ; translated by Margaret Jull Costa

- IN THE NEWS
Author Javier Marías Dies at 70

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.