Berta Isla

by Javier Marías (Autor)

Paperback, 2018

Description

"Berta Isla thought she knew what to expect from life. When she was a young girl she decided she had found her match in Tomás Nevinson--the dashing half-Spanish, half-English boy in her class with an extraordinary gift for languages--so she was even able to endure their time apart while Tomás studied at Oxford. But after his graduation, he returns to Madrid a changed man. Distracted, sullen, and anxious, Berta's new husband has become a stranger to her, and she begins to suspect that his mysterious job at the Foreign Office is responsible. But it's more than just that: Tomás has unwittingly set in motion events that will derail forever the life they had planned. With unerring insight into the most shadowed corners of the human soul, Marías plunges the reader into the growing chasm between Berta and Tomás and the decisions that irreversibly change the course of the couple's fate. Berta Isla is a novel of love and truth, fear and secrecy, and the destinies we bring upon ourselves"--… (more)

Genres

General Fiction

Collection

Fiction

Publication

Hamish Hamilton (2018), 544 pages

Media reviews

The Guardian

“There is but one art, to omit!” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. “If I knew how to omit, I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knows how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper.” A man, or woman, who knew how to omit would release a much improved novella from this 544‑page tome.

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The Guardian

By the time the climax swings back to his perspective, with Tomás finally emerging from deep cover, it’s moot whether his high-minded defence has survived, as Marías’s trademark long sentences – stories in themselves, undoing facts even as they’re stated – unspool a twisty,

thought-provoking tale that puts notions of truth and morality under pitiless scrutiny.

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User reviews

LibraryThing member thorold

Berta Isla takes Marías back to his exploration of the damage done by the secrecy and deception of espionage, begun in Tu rostro mañana, and links it to the idea of a character who comes back from presumed death after a long absence, previously explored in Los enamoramientos. It's a spy-story

where all the actual espionage happens offstage and in secret, and we are left only with its indirect effects on those involved. Berta discovers a couple of years after her marriage that there is more than meets the eye to her husband's job in the British Embassy in Madrid. She has started to get used to not being allowed to ask where he goes or what he does when he disappears for months at a time; but then he goes off on a mission at the start of the Falklands War and never comes back. It's a bit like what Le Carré did in The spy who came in from the cold, only more so. Much, much, more so.

And it's also classic Marías, taking us though a rich landscape of obscure corners of modern history, word-games, philosophical digressions, doorbell-scenes, B-movie references, a famous Oxford policeman, sex, some minor characters from earlier books, and more literary texts than you can shake a stick at: apart from a book-length riff on T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding", a seminar-level discussion of a couple of scenes from Henry V, there's a comprehensive quick-fire anthology of "recalled to life" texts taking us from Martin Guerre and Colonel Chabert right through to the opening of A Tale of Two Cities on which the book ends. No time for nodding off in the back row!

I think this is possibly Marías's best to date, certainly at least on a par with the Trilogy. But then I always seem to think that when I've just finished one of his novels, no matter what order I read them in. In any case, Berta is interesting as a character and felt like a more convincing and more rounded female narrator than María in Los enamoramientos, and she made a refreshing change from the oversexed Juan who narrates Así empieza lo malo. But he wouldn't be Marías if he didn't tease the critics by killing off a female character in the first 100 pages...

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1 more

LibraryThing member flashflood42

Stunning novel, Beckett like in that nothing seems to happen (except for a crime. A disappearance, a few sexual encounters, a handful of serious dialogues) but I couldn’t put it down. The language (translated) is beautiful; the thoughts philosophic and engaging; even the plot drew me along

because until I read the final words I was still unsure of what was to come. I’ve read nothing like this novel before—it challenged and fully engaged me. Set in Madrid and Europe in the 70’s-90’s. I was reminded of LeCarre’s A Perfect Spy and Samuel Beckett’s plays.

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