Javier Marías: Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico

Charles R. Larson reviews Javier Marías' Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico.

One of Spain’s leading writers, Javier Marías, undertakes quite a flight of the imagination in this skinny little novel—technically a long story or novella—Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico. The fact is that Elvis Presley was never in Acapulco—or at least not during the filming of Fun in Acapulco (1963), his thirteenth film, late in his movie career, and totally formulaic (unless you want to cite the presence of Ursula Andress as providing gravitas to the film). The movie was shot in Hollywood, though obviously some exterior scenes were taken on the assumed location.
What Marías has undertaken is a broad re-envision of what might have happened to Elvis had the film been made in Mexico. The narrative is comparable to, say, Philip Roth’s The Plot against America, which speculates what might have happened to the United States if Franklin Delano Roosevelt had not won reelection in 1940. Obviously, Marías’s scope is nothing of the magnitude of Roth’s speculation of an alternate history for that presidential election. But that hardly matters, since Marías’s narrative is just as profound as Roth’s when the issue becomes societal differences: popular culture and cultural narrow-mindedness.

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Javier Marías: Written Lives

Jeremy M. Davies reviews Javier Marías' Written Lives.

In Written Lives, however, Javier Marías—a brilliant novelist, with one foot in the Trollopian pre-modern and the other in perfect strangeness—has managed, simply and offhandedly, to square the circle of literary biography: noting the tendency of much modern fiction to edge towards the status of the essay (Guy Davenport, Alexander Kluge, Enrique Vila-Matas), he treats the twenty-six famous (and not-so-famous) writers in this collection as fictional characters (“which may well be how all writers . . . would secretly like to be treated”), arranging the details of their lives and personalities as plot elements in perfectly formed prose portraits (accompanied by their likenesses in photographs or illustrations, and which images Marías deconstructs elegantly, like a poetic criminal profiler). Though never dramatized, never becoming “historical fiction,” these pieces are short stories in the best tradition of the form: satisfying both our base urge for juicy gossip about our betters, and the concomitant (and no less natural) desire for the rigor—and humor—of literature. Joyce, Malcolm Lowry, Djuna Barnes, Nabokov, and Lawrence Sterne all pass through Marías’s lens: some mocked, some pitied, all illuminated and enriched for their passage. Guilty pleasure or not, Written Lives is a perfect delight.

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Javier Marías: Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico

Eli S. Evans reviews  Javier Marías' Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico.

At first glance, Javier Marías’ short novella (or long short story) Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico—originally published serially in 1996 in Spain’s El País newspaper—appears little more than a put on, a dashed-off throwback by a Marías who had already reached literary maturity, if not yet the all but uncontested international reverence he enjoys today, to the pastiche of his early, adolescent novels: the absurdist tale of one Ruibérriz de Torres who, from an indeterminately contemporary present, recalls the trip he took to Mexico at the age of twenty-two (just past adolescence himself) to work as Spanish language consultant to Elvis Presley during shooting for the film Fun in Acapulco.

But what seems a mere literary inside joke initially, and perhaps even to the author himself—in the epigraph, Marías dedicates the short novella, or long short story, to “someone who’s laughing in my ear”—reveals itself, upon closer examination, to be a good deal more. Clocking in at fifty-seven rather diminutive pages in its recently released English translation, an elegant gold and white paperback the size of a folded napkin and nearly as slender, Bad Nature performs a virtually Borgesian distillation of, if not the entire literary universe—as is the case in some of the best of Borges’ stories—then at the very least the entirety of Marías’ personal literary universe: the “Yoknapatawpha of the mind,” as Wyatt Mason described it in 2005, that the Spanish novelist has been mapping, in a single voice, over years and across novels.

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New Directions Pearl Series

New Directions launched its collection "New Directions Pearls" with works of César Aira, Federico García Lorca (In Search of Duende) and Javier Marias (Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico).
Of the latter publishes the English translation of the short story "Mala índole" that first appeared in 1999 in Granta.

Interview with Javier Marías

Susan Irvine interviews Javier Marías.

Garlanded in literary prizes, tipped as a future Nobel winner, the Spanish author Javier Marías is also hugely popular, having sold more than 5.5m copies of his work in 39 languages. Yet he remains surprisingly little known in Britain, even though he is something of an Anglophile. His magnum opus, Your Face Tomorrow, is narrated by a Spaniard who works for a shady member of the British Establishment. All Souls (1999) is set in Oxford, and Dark Back of Time (2004) is about the bizarre impingement of the novel All Souls on Marías’ real life.

Even his narrative voice encapsulates a throwback ideal of English maleness, cool and urbane in tone, ironic, somewhat studied. And strangely reserved for someone who never shuts up. For the shadowy first-person narrator in most of Marías’ novels is in no hurry to get to the point.

The first volume of Your Face Tomorrow (2005) begins with a typical Marías sentence (though, it has to be said, one shorter than most). It is an admonishment. “One should never tell anyone anything or give information or pass on stories or make people remember beings who have never existed or trodden the earth or traversed the world, or who, having done so, are now almost safe in uncertain, one-eyed oblivion.” He then goes on, over the 711 pages (in the English editions) of volumes one and two, to do just that, making us remember beings who have never existed and those who are safe, well, almost, in oblivion, well, uncertain oblivion.

His style is one rich in clauses and qualifiers – in another life he would have made a brilliant barrister; his favourite word would seem to be “or”; his books question the border between truth and fiction, and the hidden influence of the past versus what he has called “the prestige of the present moment”, in a style that is mesmerising, crackling with sly wit, above all, prolix. He is a writer who makes Henry James look like the soul of brevity.

Earlier this month Poison, Shadow and Farewell, a final, third volume of Your Face Tomorrow was published, as yet only in Spanish . I arrive at Marías’ flat in Madrid a couple of minutes after the author’s copies have been delivered. We stand in the entrance hall surveying the pile of books. I pick one up. My wrist buckles.

“Seven hundred and seven pages ,” says Marías. “Shorter in English.”

“Goodness,” I say, hefting the wodge of pages. “You’ve outdone Tolstoy.”

“Never mind Tolstoy. Don Quixote is 1,200 pages. Mine is over 1,600 pages. I have beaten Cervantes.” He smiles. “Not in quality, of course, only in extension.” He smiles more. “It’s a terrible boldness on my part.”

But while the thought of a 1,600-page novel by a Nobel Prize-tipped Spaniard revelling in having topped Cervantes may not be the best inducement to would-be readers, rest assured: Marías is pure pleasure of the page-turning kind normally only delivered by spy novels and detective fiction. Which, in some ways, many of his novels also are.

We go into the sitting room, which is dark and moody, stuffed with books, leather chairs, and knick-knacks. A bust of Sherlock Holmes smokes its pipe on top of the telly next to a jaunty statuette of an English naval officer. It’s a very male sort of room, almost donnish. Marías lives here alone. He has never married or had children, though he has written and spoken, reservedly, about girlfriends. He doesn’t own a computer, doesn’t communicate by e-mail, and is innocent of the internet, which is odd, given that the structure of many of his books has the vertiginous labyrinthine quality of internet links.

He will barely start a story before breaking into a side story, into a meditative digression, into fictionalised family history, into a disquisition on a word such as “eavesdrop”, or a rumination on, maybe, Botox, all of which return to the main story to make an intricately interconnected whole.

Marías’ English is fluent, though he occasionally asks me how to pronounce a word, “vehement” for example. He was born in Madrid and studied English literature at university there, going on to translate such English and American authors as William Faulkner, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Thomas Browne, and Laurence Sterne. His first impulse to write, he says, came from reading Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories. “I was 12 or 13. I started to write a poor imitation of William and his gang in order to read more of them.”

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Spanish Literature

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

The short list for The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize was released, with Portuguese and Spanish languages represented by Angolan José Eduardo Agualusa and Spanish Javier Marías.

THE SHORTLIST

The Book of Chameleons, by José Eduardo Agualusa

In Angola, an observant gecko watches as the albino Felix Ventura supplies new biographies to his guilty or vulnerable clients. We (and the gecko) hear their stories as the spy, the photographer or the minister try to re-fashion troubled lives amid the turmoil of post-colonial Africa. Humorous and quizzical, with a light touch on weighty themes, the narrative darts about with lizard-like colour and velocity.
Your Face Tomorrow, 2: Dance and Dream, by Javier Marías

It stands alone as a self-sufficient work, but this novel is also the mid-point of a trilogy. In a brilliantly drawn London, Deza works for an obscure espionage outfit, a watcher unsure of his mission and his unfathomable boss. In the sinuous, gorgeous prose of a true virtuoso of European fiction, scenes of offbeat comedy gives way to memories of horror, and incidents from the Spanish Civil War summon up all the unquiet dead.

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Book Review: A Heart So White / Dark Back of Time by Javier Marias

Mere plot summary would give you a mistaken impression. A nameless Spaniard spends two years teaching at Oxford, has an affair with a married woman and buys a lot of rather obscure old English books. A man in Madrid is about to have an affair with a married woman when she drops dead in his arms; he flees the scene and spends the next few months surreptitiously getting to know the surviving members of her family. A simultaneous translator, recently married to another simultaneous translator, uses the growing friendship between his wife and his father to unravel the mystery behind a suicide that took place before he was born. An author reflects on the strange events -- many of them involving eccentric Englishmen, others having to do with his own private and public life -- that are connected to the publication of one of his earlier novels.

These are the story lines (though that may be precisely the wrong word, for they come to us in circular, disconnected form) of ''All Souls,'' ''Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me,'' ''A Heart So White'' and ''Dark Back of Time,'' the four novels by the Spanish writer Javier Marías that are now available in English. If you judged by the summaries alone, you might guess that Marías's fiction is ludicrously melodramatic or cruelly comic or tediously postmodern. It is none of these. On the contrary, all four novels possess an odd combination of true sadness and deeply satisfying wit that I have yet to find in any of Marías's English or American contemporaries.

Although this review will concentrate on the two novels that are most recently available, it is difficult, with Marías, to segregate any single work from the others. The experience of reading him is cumulative. When you take up a Marías novel or even a Marías short story, you are at once enclosed in a strange world that becomes increasingly and addictively familiar. Names and characters recur: the wives are often called Luisa, a slightly suspect friend will be either Custardoy or Ruibérriz de Torres, and there are frequent references to an Englishman named John Gawsworth and his position as king of Redonda. Public figures, too, put in an appearance, though Franco is not always called Franco, and Margaret Thatcher may simply be identified as a female British leader. The events take place mainly in Madrid, but London, Oxford, Havana, Venice and New York are also knowledgeably invoked. Time is an active presence, a nearly tangible entity. Ghosts flit through; sometimes (as in the title story in the collection ''When I Was Mortal'') they even act as narrators.

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Spanish Literature

Books of the year

From this year's The Guardian's selection

Kiran Desai: A new translation of Roberto Bolaño's Distant Star (Harvill), pertinent once again now we're back to discussing the machinery of dictatorship, of institutionalised distrust. This book charts the destruction of bohemian life in Chile, the corruption of poetry.

Hisham Matar: Javier Marias' Written Lives (Canongate) is a wonderfully luxurious collection of short biographical pieces on authors the Spanish writer so clearly enjoys evoking. Marias's gaze is affectionate, humorous and penetrating.

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Latin American Literature

Written Lives by Javier Marias

Javier Marias is perhaps best known to English-speaking audiences as the author of the novels All Souls and A Heart So White, winner of the 1997 IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award.

Yet, in his native Spain, his weekly articles in El Pais are hugely popular and he is equally well known for his essays and translations. It is in this latter guise that we see him now in Written Lives.

Written Lives is an exquisite collection of miniatures, ironic and idiosyncratic portraits of 25 of the most famous (and infamous) writers of the past two centuries. Here Marias turns his affectionate (in most cases) and humorous gaze onto, among others, William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, Isak Dinesen, James Joyce, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and Emily Bronte.

You can find the review here

Written Lives by Javier Marias

Spanish novelist Javier Marías' "Written Lives" is a collection of portraits in miniature of 20 writers, the choice of whom was "entirely arbitrary" but for two qualifications: the subject could neither be living nor hail from the author's native Spain. The book is notable for Marías' wit and charm but also for its unabashed and refreshing subjectivity.
Marías chooses one quirkily titled aspect of each writer -- "James Joyce in His Poses," "Joseph Conrad on Land," "Rudyard Kipling Without Jokes," "Rainer Maria Rilke in Waiting" -- and then, based on a few choice facts, lets his imagination loose on his topic for about five pages. Avoiding any controversy regarding his inventions, Marías states in his prologue that while "almost nothing in them is invented ... some episodes and anecdotes have been 'embellished.' "

You can find the review here

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Written Lives by Javier Marias

The Spanish novelist and translator Javier Marías has lived so long in other countries and other languages that, by his own account, some of his compatriots have come to deny his own "Spanishness." It shouldn't be too surprising, then, that no Spanish writers are among the "fairly disastrous individuals" Marías has honored in "Written Lives," a collection of short and scintillating portraits deftly translated by Margaret Jull Costa and inspired more by intriguing anecdotes and details than by a determination to capture basic biographical facts. While he claims that his selections are "entirely arbitrary," it can't be coincidental that most of these writers, with a few exceptions like Faulkner, lived for extended periods abroad, either as exiles or expatriates.

You can find the full review here

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Written Lives by Javier Marias

Why isn't Spanish writer Javier Marias more well known in this country? Although he has published 29 books that have been translated into over 40 languages, American readers have been slow to embrace the work of the witty and stylish writer.
New Directions, Mr. Marias' American publisher, knows this and has begun a campaign that may finally win him the following he deserves. Last year they brought out "Your Face Tomorrow," the first installment of a three-volume tour de force in which the author has added espionage to his signature explorations of love and marriage.
Now comes "Written Lives," a book that contains 26 mini-biographies of famous writers from around the world. The idea, Mr. Marias writes in the introduction, "was to treat these well-known literary figures as if they were fictional characters, which may well be how all writers, whether famous or obscure, would secretly like to be treated."
He notes that he offers "snippets" of their lives, adding slyly "Far from being a hagiography, and far too from the solemnity with which authors are frequently treated, these Written Lives are told, I think, with a mixture of affection and humour. The latter is doubtless present in every case; the former, I must admit, is lacking in the case of Joyce, Mann and Mishima."
Though he reckons that all of his subjects were "fairly disastrous" individuals, he notes that what he feels about them as individuals "does not necessarily correspond to any admiration or scorn I might actually feel for their writing."

You can find the review here

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Written Lives by Javier Marias

Two reviews of Javier Marías' Written Lives.

For many of the 25 writers Javier Marías includes in this blissful little book of biographical sketches, nothing in their lives became them like the leaving of it. Robert Louis Stevenson, on returning from the cellar with his customary bottle of Burgundy, enquired of his wife, 'Do I look strange?', before collapsing from a brain haemorrhage.

His friend Henry James was rather more rehearsed, hearing a voice not his own announce: 'So it has come at last - the Distinguished Thing!', which appears to have been a polished rewrite of Laurence Sterne's 'Now it is come', before putting up his hand as if to ward off a blow.

Joseph Conrad was heard by his wife to shout, 'Here...!', before falling off his chair. Oscar Wilde called for champagne on his deathbed, if only as a cue for his final bon mot: 'I am dying beyond my means.'

The prize for epitaphs must go to Lowry: 'Malcolm Lowry/Late of Bowery/ His prose was flowery/ And often glowery/ He lived, nightly, and drank, daily,/ And died playing the ukelele.' As for the Japanese writer, Yukio Mishima, his death was 'so spectacular that it has almost succeeded in obliterating the many other stupid things he did in his life...' (For full details of Mishima's last breath, buy the book.)

The ludicrous Mishima aside, it becomes quickly apparent from these pages that the reason most writers choose to write rather than, say, work in an office, school or hospital is because they are incapable of leading anything like a life which might involve moments of sobriety, modesty or basic politeness.

Taking for granted a state of permanent drunkenness, let's have a look at modesty. Most of the writers described in these thumbnail sketches believed absolutely in their genius. 'Kipling is by far the most promising young man who has appeared since - ahem - I appeared,' wrote Stevenson to Henry James.

You can find the full review here

Not that I don't revere the ground that Javier Marías walks on, but I do think him distinctly lucky to have been able to persuade anyone to publish this volume. Of course, on the continent there is no kind of interest in formal biography to match our own. In Spain, readers might welcome a volume of short biographical essays. Here, despite Marías's occasional wit and elegance, I can't see who would see the point.

What we have are 26 essays which, on the whole, run through a few famous stories about writers: the one about Nora not reading Ulysses; the one about Verlaine shooting Rimbaud in Brussels; Emily Brontë's comb; Nabokov's butterfly net.

Some of these stories just aren't to be trusted. In the chapter on Henry James, two long-discredited stories from the notoriously unreliable memoirs of Ford Madox Ford are included: the one about his being entangled in his dachshund's lead (too good to be true); the other about being received by Flaubert in a dressing gown and always "hating him" thereafter. That last story was disproved 60 years ago by Simon Nowell-Smith.

This book would certainly have been improved by some more extensive reading. It is slightly shocking to read an essay on Thomas Mann, for instance, which reveals not just so little sympathy with the novelist, but apparently so little acquaintance with his novels; it seems to Marías a telling point to claim that there is only one Spaniard who has ever read Joseph and His Brothers from beginning to end. I admit that is fairly amusing, but probably more amusing about Spanish readers than about Mann. And someone who says that Mann's talking about his own irony displayed "a rather extraordinary belief " can't, I think, have read The Magic Mountain with much attention.

A lot of this comes from a distinctly peculiar insistence on gathering information about writers only from their own writings, and from the writings of their contemporaries. In many cases, these are not to be trusted, as with Ford Madox Ford's often fantastical reminiscences. Where Marías has backed his reading up with a good biography - the essay on Lampedusa draws heavily on David Gilmour's classic biography - the result is noticeably better.

You can find the full review here

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Written Lives by Javier Marias

Javier Marias, one of Spain’s leading novelists, turns his hand to literary mini-biography in these short sketches of writers’ lives, supposedly written "as if they were fictional characters, which may well be how all writers, whether famous or obscure, would secretly like to be treated". In practice his method is more conventional. While admitting to having "embellished" certain stories from his subjects’ lives, he assures us that nothing is invented. The result shuns the equivocations of the more careful sort of biographer without straying into outright fantasy.

The line-up of writers is mainly Anglophone, and includes several whom Marias has worked on as a translator, such as Laurence Sterne, Robert Louis Stevenson and Vladimir Nabokov. Each is approached via a particular viewpoint or characteristic: Joseph Conrad on land, for instance, or Thomas Mann and suffering.

You can find the full review here

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Written Lives by Javier Marias

Spanish writer Javier Marias has been celebrated around the world for decades as a master of fiction and non-fiction. His books have sold five million copies in more than 40 languages, and his weekly articles in El Pais, in which he muses on politics, art or wherever his thoughts take him, have an enormous following. This 'clandestine greatness' was profiled in the New Yorker last year, when Marias published the first volume of his tour de force of treachery and espionage, Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear, which is set in England. So why doesn't Marias have a larger audience in Britain? Indeed, why is comparatively little of his work (a mere eight, soon to be nine, of his 29 books) available in English? Marias's passionate readers feel exhilarated when a new title arrives, then hold their breath while his skilful translator, Margaret Jull Costa, tries to keep up with the backlog.

Written Lives, which contains essays on well-known literary figures, probably won't do much to broaden his reputation, but it does prove what a beguiling, clever and original writer Marias is, and may act as a taster for the next volume of Your Face Tomorrow, due here in June. In the introduction, Marias says that his selection of writers was 'arbitrary', the only stipulations being that they were dead and not Spanish. In fact, the book is more personal than that; quite a few of the writers he's translated into his native language. The result is a survey of 26 international authors, among them Conan Doyle, Madame du Deffand, Faulkner, Kipling, Nabokov, Rilke, Sterne and Wilde, who led illustrious but primarily tragic lives. Marias knows the dangers of taking on subjects who have been dissected many times over, and his solution is to treat them 'as if they were fictional characters'. As an observer-cum-biographer, he allows himself to embellish history, filter material, omit certain facts and dwell on others, stopping short of invention. He brings these well-known faces into the light by making them seem strange, even bizarre.

You can find the full review here

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Written Lives by Javier Marias

A review of Javier Marias' Written Lives

It's difficult to be moderate about the charm of these brief portraits of Rimbaud, Turgenev, Rilke, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Robert Louis Stevenson, Isak Dinesen, Djuna Barnes and a dozen other literary eminences. "The one thing that leaps out when you read about these authors," writes the acclaimed Spanish novelist Javier Marías, "is that they were all fairly disastrous individuals; and although they were probably no more so than anyone else whose life we know about, their example is hardly likely to lure one along the path of letters." That wry sense of amusement characterizes Marías's approach. Though he acknowledges the artistic greatness of his chosen writers, he prefers to point out and relish their personal oddities, all those quirks, eccentricities and obsessions that make them neurotically and sometimes pitiably human.

You can find the full review here

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London Times Books of the Year

From the selection made by the London Times writers:

Nadine Gordimer

Carlos Fuentes's This I Believe : A Life From A to Z. The work of a complete mind, emotions: the dazzling range of experience opened, questioning, exulting, believing, doubting. There is bountiful pleasure in being led by wonderful prose and effortless erudition from Christ to Kafka, Revolution to Sex, Time to Jealousy, Death to Urbanities, Children, Politics, Velázquez, Globalization. The philosophy? Best expressed by Fuentes himself: "Preserve and create are our rival verbs at the dawn of this new century".

You can find the full article here.

Alberto Manguel

The new novel by the Argentinian Eduardo Berti, Todos Los Funes, is a wonderfully funny, literate adventure story set in academia. An absent-minded professor named Funes discovers that an astonishing number of Latin American writers have chosen the name Funes for their protagonists (Borges, Bioy Casares, Roa Bastos, etc).

You can find the full article here.

Ian Michael

The major event on the Anglo-Spanish literary scene was the publication in New York of Fever and Spear (New Directions; Chatto in the UK), the first part of Javier Mari­as's tripledecker tour de force, Your Face Tomorrow, of which the second part, Baile y sueño (Dance and Dream), appeared in Madrid (Alfaguara) late last year.

You can find the full article here.