When a writer chooses to express something in a particular way, all the other approaches he might have chosen are usually encouraged to disappear in the hope of creating an atmosphere of authority and precision. Javier Marías, the masterly Spanish novelist, follows the opposite policy and, even after he has filled a descriptive vacancy, continues to interview other candidates for the job. The rival formulations turn up one after another, in sub-clauses that offer everything from subtle qualification to flat contradiction. Here is the narrator of “The Infatuations,” Marías’s new novel, contemplating the memory of Miguel and Luisa, the husband and wife she grew to think of as the Perfect Couple, if only on the thin basis of observing them have breakfast each morning in the same cafe: Enlarge This Image Emiliano Ponzi THE INFATUATIONS By Javier Marías Translated by Margaret Jull Costa 338 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95. Enlarge This Image Corbino.nl Javier Marías “They became almost obligatory. No, that’s the wrong word for something that gives one pleasure and a sense of peace. Perhaps they became a superstition; but, no, that’s not it either. . . . ” Marías has pointed out that the Latin root of the verb “to invent,” invenire, means to discover or find out. His special gift is to bring these two processes, inquiry and narration, into a conjunction, making things up as he discovers them and discovering them as he makes them up. He never works to a plan, and so his prose stays close to the thought processes of a writer working out what to say next and responding to what he has, perhaps mistakenly, just said. “The Infatuations” goes on to explore the narrator’s relationship with the widow and with the best friend of the murdered Miguel. At first he appears to have been killed by a stray madman. The plot, several times changing our perspective on the murder, works very well as a thriller, but it is essentially a pretext for advancing the skeptical worldview embodied by the style. The very first sentence of “The Infatuations” is provisional, offering alternative versions of a central character’s name: “The last time I saw Miguel Desvern or Deverne was also the last time that his wife, Luisa, saw him. . . . ” Death is certain, but identity is not; even after it appears to have been sealed by death it continues to mutate in the treacherous memories of the living. People are not only made up of what they are, but also of what they are not, what they lack, what they might have been, wished they had been, are uncomfortable with having been, and so on; Marías invites all the ghosts to the table. His sentences often contain a tangle, or an explosion of tenses that do everything to undermine the majestic simplicity of the past, present and future in favor of remembered anticipation or fevered speculation. Here is the narrator imagining the calculations of a usurper: “There’s still time for him to die tomorrow, which will be the yesterday of the day after tomorrow, assuming I’m alive then.” This is of course not quite true: it will still be the yesterday of the day after tomorrow whether the person having this thought is alive or not — but it is typical of Marías’s method that bare facts are instantly colonized by subjectivity. In “Your Face Tomorrow,” the monumental trilogy that preceded “The Infatuations,” the narrator puts it this way: “Consciousness knows nothing of the law, and common sense neither interests nor concerns it, each consciousness has its own sense, and that very thin line is, in my experience, often blurred and, once it has disappeared, separates nothing.” Marías’s punctuation tells the same story as his arguments: his long sentences, full of thoughts that other writers might separate with a paragraph break or a full stop, often run on, punctuated only by flimsy commas. Chapter breaks, conversely, appear to create a large gap between sentences that could have followed each other without a break. Both approaches play with the sense that the categories we take for granted have fragile or nonexistent borders. Marías also puts the thoughts of his characters in quotation marks, blurring the distinction between what is said and what is only thought. The main impact of this technique is to emphasize that thoughts are stories we are telling ourselves. Identity rests on the continuity provided by memory, and memory depends on turning experience into narrative. We remember our stories long after our sensations have disappeared. These stories are highly problematic in themselves, and even if we manage to make sense of anything, which is not very likely, our understanding takes place in the context of “the darkness that surrounds and encircles any narrative.”
Posted on: Fri, 09 Aug 2013 17:23:38 +0000
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