By Peter Hechtman
Javier Marias, The Infatuations (2013) Thus Bad Begins (2016), Penguin
Book Club
Peter Hechtman
All conversations that are not completely banal begin with one party sharing some words, body language and facial gestures and the other party responding in kind. But in between the two events a world of thinking, interpreting, “fact-checking” and wondering occurs.
This is the literary space Javier Marias has chosen to occupy. In his books we get to see the process of asking: Can I trust what I am hearing? What are the different responses I could make? What are consequences of these responses? Does this situation sound like something I have encountered before? Marias’ characters are better known by their brains than their spleens.
This is not to say that Marias’ novels have no plot. The plots tend to be simple but ingenious stories in which deductive reasoning is rewarded by the solving of mysteries.
The two novels under consideration are Infatuations and Thus Bad Begins. In the earlier book the narrator is a young woman, Maria, who enjoys her morning ritual of gazing adoringly at a handsome and affection couple who breakfast at the same cafe. She learns, to her horror, that the husband is brutally murdered by a deranged street person. The husband’s best friend shows up to console the grieving widow. Maria manages to fall in love with this best friend, Javier, who leaves no doubt that she is a very temporary fling for him until the time is ripe for him to declare his love for the widow. Plots have a way of thickening and she discovers that Javier himself may have set up the murder. Things are never what they seem. I have left a few layers of this onion unpeeled.
In Thus Bad Begins the narrator is Juan, a personal assistant to Muriel, a filmmaker whose artistic aspirations appear forever out of sync with his cash requirements. Juan is given a mystery to unravel. Muriel has written out of his life an old friend, a doctor, based on vague intimations that he had committed “acts of treachery” in an earlier time. Muriel now wishes to know if these stories are true or malicious lies. What this investigation turns up is that, in post-Franco Spain, the shadow of the civil war simply does not go away. But Juan finds a more interesting mystery to investigate. Muriel’s wife, Beatriz, suffers under the cruel neglect and vicious verbal abuse of her husband. Until this mystery is resolved, the reader will align his/her sympathy toward the wife. The nature of the wife’s betrayal changes all that. It is a story that no one will see coming.
I will leave the last word to the author Colm Tóibín, who wrote, “As a novelist, he has a way of posing as a philosopher…all the more to fool the reader and cause great shock when the novel turns out to have a plot after all.”