The 3 best books by the unsurpassed Javier Marías

Regardless of whether you are for or against, it was nice to run into a public figure like the one who had already disappeared Javier Marías. A writer who did not close in band to post-truth and its centripetal power around single thought, as a paradoxical notion of libertarianism. Only (yes, with a tick, give the RAE on this) this class of people can rebel from their position of intellectual beacon to synthesize something profitable in this euphemistic, tendentious society, of dark prudishness.

The truth is that whenever I write about Javier Marías, as in the case of his novel Berta Island, I end up referring to other types of characteristics of its public facet. And by that I do not want to say that I necessarily agree with what he could say at each moment.

The thing is not about finding totems to escape the new ideologues. It is rather a matter of discovering, in the character attacked for opening his mouth to express what he thinks, who is still capable of going against the current despite the new condemnations of Twitter, the media and those who patrimonialize good and punishment. necessary for those who dare to deviate…

Perspectives aside on the character, let's get to the point, let's focus on those 3 novels that for me make up the podium of the literary creation of a Javier Marias who even sounded like a Nobel Prize for Literature, to the greater aggravation and bitterness of many salon haters and small brains.

Top 3 recommended books by Javier Marías

Thomas Nevinson

A novel is composed of as many intra-stories and therefore of potential ramifications as characters inhabit it. Well you know Javier Marías, determined to win back a Thomas Nevinson of that nebula of potential protagonists at the mercy of the narrator's imagination. And so about Berta Island aim for serial or at least second chance to close pending issues.

When things happen like this, from the unexpected strength of a new protagonist (about whom the writer himself seems to discover unsuspected nuances), the new thing to tell awakens the fascination of the writer himself. A fascination translated into an intense, powerful story, decisive in its plot and decisive in the most transcendental notion that also connects with its non-fiction part...

"I I educated to the ancient, and You are never i thought i they went to order a day that will kill a woman. At women I don't know touch, they are not hit, they are not ago hurt«

Two men, one in fiction and one in reality, had the opportunity to kill Hitler before he unleashed World War II. Based on this fact, Javier Marías explores the underside of "You will not kill." If those men maybe should have shot him Fuehrer, Is it possible to do it against someone else? As the narrator of Thomas Nevinson, "You can see that killing is not so extreme or so difficult and unfair if you know who."

Tomás Nevinson, Berta Isla's husband, falls into the temptation to return to the Secret Services after having been away, and is proposed to go to a northwestern city to identify a person, half Spanish and half Northern Irish, who participated in attacks by the IRA and ETA ten years ago. We are in 1997. The order bears the stamp of his ambiguous ex-boss Bertram Tupra, who, through a deception, had already conditioned his previous life.

The novel, beyond its plot, is a deep reflection on the limits of what can be done, on the stain that avoidance of the greater evil almost always brings and on the difficulty of determining what that evil is. Against the background of historical episodes of terrorism, Tomás Nevinson is also the story of what happens to someone who has already had everything happened and to whom, apparently, nothing else could happen. But, while they do not finish, every day they arrive ...

Tomorrow in battle think of me

Very much in relation to what was mentioned above, this novel invites us to participate in the emotional construction of characters that could very well be us, faced with the distorting mirrors of our existence and our reality.

The enchanting first sentence of this novel already says a lot, perhaps too much: "Nobody ever thinks that he can go to meet a dead woman in his arms and that he will no longer see her face whose name he remembers."

This is what happens to the narrator, Victor Francés, television screenwriter and "black" or "ghost writer", in charge of writing the speeches of important and ignorant people. Recently divorced, he is invited to dinner at his house by Marta Téllez, a married woman whose husband is traveling and the mother of a two-year-old child.

After the gallant dinner, the man and the woman go to the bedroom where, "still half dressed and half undressed", she begins to feel bad until she is dying and dies in a shocking scene.

This non-consummated infidelity thus becomes a kind of «enchantment», with very real and immediate problems: what to do with the corpse, to notify or not to notify, what to do about the husband, what to do with the sleeping child, what difference is there between life and death.

This is how the bad begins

We are a balance between desires and morals, still to this day and probably until our last day as a civilized species. Evil begins when the balance falters and we are exposed to what we are on that other side ...This is how the bad begins tells the intimate story of a marriage of many years, narrated by its young witness when he is already a fully adult man.

Juan de Vere finds his first job as personal secretary to Eduardo Muriel, a once successful film director, in Madrid in 1980. His job allows him to enter the privacy of the family home and be a spectator of the mysterious marital misery between Muriel and his wife Beatriz Noguera.

Muriel instructs him to investigate and extract a half-life friend of hers, Doctor Jorge Van Vechten, of whose indecent behavior in the past rumors have reached him.

But Juan will not limit himself to that and will take dubious initiatives, because, as he himself recognizes from his mature age, -young people have postponed souls and consciences-. Thus you will discover that there is no disinterested justice, but that it is always contaminated by personal resentment and by your own desires, and that all forgiveness or punishment are arbitrary.

«It is a book about desire, as one of the strongest engines in people's lives, which sometimes leads to overriding any loyalty, consideration and even respect in dealing with others. Another of the novel's themes is impunity and the arbitrariness of forgiveness and non-forgiveness. How the idea of ​​justice that people demand sometimes has a lot to do with whether the act itself affects us or not. "

Other great novels by Javier Marías ...

Black back of time

A novel based on a shocking realism, the black back of time is all we see when we think we are moving towards something... Little could the author of this "false novel" imagine that with his work All Souls he was going to set a world in motion. that lay asleep or that passed only through the Black back of time that is usually hidden and not seen.

A world in which everything fits, the unthinkable and what fate brings, implausibility and grace, adventure and misfortune, the stray bullet in Mexico and a curse in Havana, a one-eyed mercenary pilot to whom death it always passed by, and the veiled memories of a narrator who becomes more mysterious the more he reflects and tells.

Javier Marías's voice is here more overwhelming than ever, as if it were "a whimsical and unpredictable voice that we all know, the voice of time when it has not yet passed or been lost and perhaps that is why it is not even time."

You have probably missed the Your face tomorrow trilogy. In some other reviews or selections of works I have already commented that I like individual works better, books closed forever despite possible open endings. A seamless ending raises more echoes than any other ending that is expected to return as a new beginning.