Javier Marías, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

Posted on October 22, 2019 by Simon Lavery

Javier Marías, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. Penguin Modern Classics, 2012. Translated (brilliantly) from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa. First published in Spanish, 1994; in English, 1996

Javier Marías is the novelist I’ve written about more than any other at this blog. I’ve argued in previous posts that he’s one of the most exciting and rewarding writers alive today. This novel is another I’d recommend highly.

As in every other novel of his that I’ve read, the plot is simple, and it’s impossible to say much about it without spoilers. Despite the labyrinthine, digressive style, with sentences that spool out over pages, loosely linked by subordinate ‘or else’ clauses, speculations and modalities (‘perhaps…’), there’s a powerful central mystery in the plot that keeps the reader turning the pages, but finding the satisfaction of (dis)closure increasingly deferred, elided or sleighted away into yet another fictive possibility.

It’s this cerebral, philosophical narrative discursiveness that’s what gives Tomorrow in the Battle the distinctive Marías tone. Also present are many of his usual tropes and motifs: old movies and actors; the plot involving a dead spouse, whose demise may or may not be ‘silently longed for’ (from Thus Bad Begins); this in turn leads to plot developments and doublings, involving trust and deception, betrayal and secrecy, surveillance and spying; a female figure named Luisa for the narrator to be infatuated by; the impossibility of truly ‘knowing’ anything; stories and storytelling.

Here’s the protagonist-narrator, Víctor (his name isn’t revealed until late on – a typical act of playful withholding by Marías), anticipating the telling of his extraordinary story of the unexpected death of a woman he was sexually involved with (the plot I withheld earlier) to his friend Ruibérriz – another of those louche and lewd, disreputable sidekick characters he’s so fond of; this indiscreet friend would have ‘proclaimed it [this story] to the four winds’, embroidering and distorting it to suit his whim and ego –

the world depends on its storytellers as it does on those who hear the story and occasionally influence it…

Just as our narrator lulls us into feeling how superior to his crass friend’s is Víctor’s sensibility, we’re told that he does tell that story to Ruibérriz at a racecourse, between races, in tones alternately ‘sinister and jocular’, interrupting his narrative now and then ‘to watch the final straights through our binoculars’, to go to the paddock, to the bar or to the place where they place their bets. This is classic Marías: meditating on abstract concepts, narratology and metaphysics then splicing the moral high seriousness with low humour and self-referential, bawdy wit. Shakespearean, perhaps.

As usual this moment leads to another riff developing on the initial theme:

Nothing is ever told twice in exactly the same way or using exactly the same words, not even if the storyteller is the same each time, even if it’s the same person.

This could be an account of the novelist’s technique in all his fiction. Plots, motifs and characters recur, are reworked. A ladder in a young woman’s tights leads to lascivious thoughts and sexual tension, as in Your Face Tomorrow (YFT); the Old English term ‘ge-bryd-guma’ is contemplated by a man who’s slept with a woman who has other sexual partners (YFT again), and so on. [Btw: the phrase ‘your face tomorrow’ is used several times, even though this novel was published several years before the first volume of that trilogy.]

As with music, a Marías novel’s slowly accreting development and iterations, cadences, echoes, resonances and recurring motifs are what’s consequential (this can be across books, too). People endlessly tell stories, and sooner or later, ‘everything is told’ (YFT again).

Incidents and observations of the moment in the plot lead to larger abstractions and universal considerations (‘we all do this’ is the type of reflection on one such moment). We are thus invited to comply with the attempts of the protagonist to make sense of or interpret the moments experienced, to find some epistemic ‘reality’ or certainty among the endlessly forestalled cues and clues life throws in his way.

The other key theme in Tomorrow in the Battle is another favourite of Marías’: memory and forgetting. He’s been criticised in the past for not castigating the Franco era of Spain’s recent history. I find that criticism strange, for the ‘pact of forgetting’ that Spain indulged as a means of erasing its memory of that shameful period is central to much of what he’s written. It is here, too, especially in the superb final pages, where the truth of what the bereaved spouse was up to while his wife was dying is finally, unbearably revealed (‘everything is forgotten or invalidated’, no matter how compelling the storyteller).

A final thought on the ‘male gaze’ in a Marías narrator’s repertoire. Almost any young woman Víctor encounters is seen and appraised with varying degrees of lechery – like the way he notices the ladder in that young woman’s tights; his imagination leads him higher – and I don’t mean metaphysics this time. That racecourse scene becomes highly farcical as Víctor and his friend flirt half-heartedly with two young women they assume to be on the prowl. They can’t be bothered in the end to consummate their plans: the betting takes precedence. But not before some brazen scenes that wouldn’t be out of place in an early Bond movie.

I quoted Margaret Drabble on this tendency in Marías in an early post on YFT; she’s alarmed by the ‘sexual tension’ that ‘verges on pornography’ in his fiction. I found Víctor’s casual lechery disturbing throughout. There’s a particularly sordid section where he picks up a sex worker in the street, thinking she’s his estranged wife, Celia (another recurring character type). He seems throughout this graphically detailed sexual sequence simultaneously to believe she is and isn’t Celia; either possibility excites him; neither does him much credit.

When he later breaks into her apartment and finds her naked and asleep in bed with her new partner, the creepiness is even more disturbing.

No doubt this is all part of the author’s intention: even his narrators are culpable, flawed and unreliable, in a universe that’s haunted by the ghosts or revenants of our own past history and that of our countrymen (the dead are ‘quite wrong to come back’, he wrote in The Infatuations, another novel of spousal hauntings).

A Marías protagonist’s occupation is always significant; here, Víctor is a ghostwriter, a man of shadows, (linguistic) deceptions and pretence, whose identity is evanescent. The recurring Shakespearean theme (there’s always one of those in a Marías novel: he’s a great admirer – and translator – of English lit) is the nightmares endured by guilty Richard III on the eve of his fateful battle at Bosworth Field, when the ghosts of those he’d murdered return to haunt and threaten him with the words of this novel’s title: ‘think on me’ tomorrow and despair.

#1930Club: William Faulkner, Helen Zenna Smith

Posted on October 17, 2019 by Simon Lavery

Karen at Kaggsysbookishramblings and Simon at Stuckinabook are hosting this week’s #1930 Club: do go and take a look at what they’ve been posting, and join in with comments or thoughts of your own on anything from that year that you’ve read and want to share, here, and/or on their blog sites.

I’m just past p.1000 of Uwe Johnson’s massive Anniversaries, so don’t have plans to start a new book from 1930 while immersed in that, but didn’t want to let this week pass without some sort of contribution, so here we go, with two posts from the archive.

Penguin edition of ‘As I Lay Dying’ used for this review

Faulkner As I Lay Dying cover with Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies

My ex-library hardback edition is rather battered but has an appropriately abstract cover design; Vile Bodies (also been bashed around when in a library, rescued by me from a bin) I read pre-blog, so although it’s another 1930 publication I can’t link to it here

First is William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (link HERE), first posted in 2013. This was Faulkner’s fifth novel, and is a high modernist, fragmented narrative account (fifteen different narrators, each with a distinctive voice and idiolect) of the Bundren family’s difficult quest to carry the body of matriarch Addie to her people’s home cemetery at Jefferson, some 30 miles north of the Bundren farm. Neighbours think this is a crazy scheme, but ‘pa’ Anse insists he’d promised his wife that her dying wish would be fulfilled.

Faulkner himself called it a ‘tour de force’: it’s maybe not a modest claim, but well justified.

Others have posted this week on my second #1930Club choice from the archive: Helen Zenna Smith’s novel Not So Quiet… My post was from the summer of this year.

It’s her riposte to Remarque’s similarly titled All Quiet On the Western Front, and deliberately foregrounds the experience of a female ambulance driver in the horror and carnage of WWI near the front lines. It’s one of the most compelling, unflinching accounts of that terrible war that I’ve read.

Namiki maki-e crane and turtle pen

Posted on October 15, 2019 by Simon Lavery

I was made redundant from my teaching job this summer, and was given a small payoff. I put some of this, plus a generous birthday contribution from Mrs TD, to buy myself a special fountain pen – a Namiki with a maki-e design of a crane and turtle. (Namiki is the high-end brand name of its parent company, the better-known Pilot corporation).

I started my collection of pens a few years ago when the always thoughtful Mrs TD gave me a Mont Blanc for a significant birthday. Since then I’ve acquired about one a year: a green Pelikan, an Onoto special Cambridge University edition (see my homepage banner photo of these two pens), and a few others.

I wouldn’t say I’m a fountain pen geek, but I do love writing with a handsome instrument that glides over the paper leaving a glistening ink trail. I like the heft of a well-made pen in my fingers. It’s inspiring.

I have several beautiful Japanese pens, including a red Nakaya ‘Aka Tamenuri’ (the ‘tame’ element means ‘pool’, and ‘nuri’ refers to the lacquer-layering process: one sees the colour as it were through a pool of water) and a black Platinum ‘Kuro Tamenuri’, both made with the urushi lacquer technique – a process that dates back centuries in Japan. The lacquer is drawn from the sap of the sumac tree. The underlying ebonite base tends to discolour and wear over time, so the craftsmen of Japan applied the ancient art of lacquering to create a more durable, beautiful finish.

Highly skilled artisans painstakingly coat the barrel and cap with layer after layer of lacquer, carefully and repeatedly polishing the clear finish, a process that takes months, creating a rich, deep colour and texture through which a contrasting lighter shade is faintly seen. With use this underlying hue gradually emerges more clearly.

This was my first pen made with the hira maki-e decoration. This involves an intricate design of gold powder and pigment being applied by a skilled artist with a variety of delicate brushes to the deep black urushi undercoat layer of lacquer (while still wet) applied to the body of the pen. This production takes place at the Kokkokai artisan workshop in Hiratsuka, Kanagawa province (midway between Tokyo and Mt Fuji).

The workshop was founded in 1931 around the master craftsman Gonroku Matsuda. It was named from the statement by the co-founder, Ryosuke Namiki: as sumo is Japan’s national sport, maki-e is the nation’s light (‘kokko’ in Japanese). With his fellow founder he travelled to the west in 1925 and began marketing this distinctive type of product; a London Pilot office was set up in 1926, and a contract made with Alfred Dunhill in 1930. The ‘Dunhill-Namiki’ pens were established.

The golden crane on my new pen is depicted with its distinctive red cap, wings outstretched, as it flies over the turtle below, looking up at it. They make eye contact, showing rapport and unity. They are ancient Japanese symbols of long life and good fortune. There’s an old saying in Japan: As the crane one thousand years, the turtle ten thousand years.

The water from the turtle’s pond is shown as stylised swirling waves curling around the barrel.

The 14K nib in inscribed with the outline of the sacred Mt Fuji. There’s a lovely short film about the pen-making process at the Namiki website HERE

The swirling water design with the artist’s signature underneath

Sebastian Faulks, Paris Echo

Posted on October 11, 2019 by Simon Lavery

Sebastian Faulks, Paris Echo. Vintage paperback,2019. First published in hardback by Hutchinson, 2018

A central theme in this novel is the way the past seeps, as through a ‘semi-permeable membrane’, into the present. The Paris of 2006, where the main action is set, is haunted by the past: in the canonised historical figures and places whose names are commemorated in the names of Métro stations, squares, streets and so on; and more poignantly in the ordinary people who walk those modern streets and squares in the footsteps, as it were, of their antecedents.

This is most movingly apparent in the audio files accessed from an archive by one of the two central characters (their voices narrate the chapters in a kind of counterpoint). Hannah is an American scholar in her early thirties, researching the part played during the Occupation of WWII by Parisian women. We are given full versions of the transcripts of two of these women, one from the seedier side of the city familiar to the young Édith Piaf, struggling to maintain moral and physical integrity when faced by the sexual importuning of German soldiers with money to burn, and the other from a different world.

The choices they make and shocking, terrible dilemmas they face are sensitively handled by Faulks. One plot twist left me gasping.

I’m less impressed by his choice of the two voices I mentioned. One is of a nineteen-year-old Moroccan lad called Tariq, who’s smuggled himself illegally into the capital of the former colonial ruler of his homeland with the vague aim of finding out something about his half-French mother, who spent her earlier years there. This enables Faulks to indulge in some important, sometimes heavy-handed consideration of France’s often oppressive and brutal colonialist history, and of the plight of immigrants in the 21C city – marginalised and mostly scratching a living, as Tariq ends up doing, in sleazy dead-end jobs like fast-food joints. Two cities, two nations.

At least Tariq’s voice enables Faulks to inject some much needed humour into this dark, disturbing story of historically layered or textured narratives of oppression and hardship, both during the Nazi occupation, and in the modern incarnation of the city. His narcissism, sexual urgency and being constantly hungry are often hilariously apparent; his callow disingenuousness, lack of common sense but basic integrity and decency – with some lapses – also ring true.

Hannah is a less convincing narrator. She’s emotionally scarred and numbed by an ill-advised love affair some years earlier, and Faulks’s providing her with the possibility of romantic redemption is handled, to my mind, rather too conveniently and clunkily.

The author clearly knows Paris intimately, and he brings it sensually to life – especially that dark underbelly noted above that tourists and the fashionable rich rarely see. Tariq serves as a kind of Candide figure, blissfully ignorant of the significance of the names of his beloved metro stations. This causes me to re-examine received notions of such names as Monet or Stalingrad and what they could signify to someone not from a western European culture – and what they say about that culture.

I liked the magical-realist way in which Faulks has figures from the past seem to appear in the flesh in modern Paris. Some embody Tariq’s desperate wish to establish an identity for himself in the living archive of the city, and more pertinently to know and see his late mother in the city, providing him with a personal connection to this alien city which has so far in his young life been only obliquely experienced through its political-historical impact on his homeland.

Others fulfil Hannah’s more academic longing (partly a response also to her emotionally empty life) to animate the past more immediately than historiography allows. The electronic voices she listens to in the archive take on flesh and blood, in a way: this is how history could look, if we had eyes to see, Faulks seems to be saying. Mostly this works.

The puppeteer/beggar on the metro, Victor Hugo, is a more playful example of the ghostly presences that populate this novel as vividly as the supposedly living ones. An epigraph on the first page is a quotation from Hugo’s L’Homme Qui Rit (never heard of it), which gives the book its title. It translates as:

What is history? An echo of the past in the future. A shadow (or reflection) of the future on the past.

There’s a lively interview with Faulks by Sam Leith at the Spectator books podcast from September last year, where I learned that the dedication to ‘Hector’ is to his dog. Why not?!

Only women grow up: Kay Boyle, My Next Bride

Posted on October 10, 2019 by Simon Lavery

Kay Boyle, My Next Bride. Virago Modern Classics, 1986. First published in America, 1934

If ever I see the faces of Brancusi, or Duchamp, or Gertrude Stein, I shall look the other way because of the history of courage they made for you. “If you can’t live hard, die holy like a piece of cheese, Victoria.”

The cover of this handsome VMC paperback shows ‘Mrs Douglas Illingworth’ by Meredith Frampton

This cryptic thought and strange aphorism appears in parentheses early in Kay Boyle’s künstlerroman My Next Bride. It thus contrasts bracingly with the Modernist narrative account of the early scene in which nineteen-year-old, virginal Victoria John unpacks her few treasures in a decrepit, crumbling boarding house at which she’s just arrived in Neuilly, Paris.

It’s the early thirties, and Paris is the city of that Lost Generation of American expats like Victoria (and Kay Boyle). She’s an aspiring artist (who favours, significantly, portraits from the lives of the saints) whose much-loved woman friend, an older Australian vaudeville singer called Lacey, with whom she’d hoboed across the States and Canada, had recently committed suicide. Lacey had challenged and inspired her, ‘a stricken thin madonna’ who’d said to the ingénue Victoria, in addition to the startling words quoted above, that ‘life was an obligation in arrogance, talk an experiment in insult.’

What I’ve quoted so far indicates that Boyle’s narrative voice is typical of its period and her coterie: experimental, unconventional, fragmented and poetic. Perspectives shift abruptly, mid-paragraph, even mid-sentence: the Modernist verbal equivalent of the artistic developments favoured by the avant-garde of Montparnasse in which she moved. Dos Passos, Pound and Hemingway had been there – some of the few names Boyle doesn’t let drop. Archibald MacLeish is name-checked, DH Lawrence, Picasso. No wonder Victoria gravitated there to develop as an artist, to find herself as an artist and person.

It’s a thinly veiled autobiographical novel. Victoria, like Boyle, joins a commune run by a shady American proto-hippy named Sorrel. He’s clearly based on Isadora Duncan’s brother Raymond. A charlatan scoundrel, who preys upon lost souls like Victoria and lures them into his squalid community to exploit. She’s put to work as a salesgirl in his shop in fashionable central Paris; the stock is the hand-crafted tat churned out by his doting disciples. He meanwhile swans around in classical Greek robes and sandals, striking poses and extolling the virtues of the simple life, dance, art, vegetarianism, and free love. Entering this group, where washing up is rarely done and the food is vile, is like ‘taking the veil’, another member breathlessly tells Victoria, unaware of the hypocrisy of her despicable phoney guru, who pockets a wealthy American patroness’s cash at the end and takes off for the Riviera with his mistress. “They don’t know what they want,” he confides to wide-eyed Victoria at one point, gleefully.

Victoria is attracted to the charismatic Anthony Lister, who seems to be based on a combination of Harry Crosby, the wealthy, sexually promiscuous playboy who with his wife Caresse was part of the bohemian expat artistic scene in Paris, and Laurence Vail, modernist sculptor and writer who was became Boyle’s second husband in 1932. He’d previously been married to Peggy Guggenheim, the heiress, who appears in the novel as Fontana (also resembling Caresse C.), destined to become Victoria’s most true friend – if not her next bride.

He quickly singles out Victoria as his next bride, chatting her up with the most bizarre line in garbled stream-of-consciousness monologues, that read like an Imagist poet on opium (pretty much like Crosby, then). Here’s a sample from their first meeting:

“It’s the first time I’ve walked up this side of the street. I always take the other. I believe in embassies, and always in the emissary of the soul. The patterns on these walls take the sight right out of the eye like an operation. My name’s Anthony,” he said, his eyes escaping. “I believe in bone.”

Right. Not sure what escaping eyes look like, but this is impressive hokum.

After numerous late-night debauches with him Victoria comes to see his darker, troubled side. When she’d told him of the problematic issue of the poor (herself included), he replied:

Rich or poor, every one was stabbing every one else with hate, stabbing in envy and in terror. “It isn’t a great deal to ask, only that every one put down their weapons…I ask that people give up their brides. The whole universe on a honeymoon of horror, wedded to their daggers, stabbing their way from one betrayal to the next…”

Poor Anthony. He knows there’s more to life than partying, being ‘the eternal bridegroom’, despite his best efforts to prove otherwise.

Some of the best scenes in this uneven novel (brilliant at its best, which is most of the time; dire in places) involve the two starving, genteel Russian sisters living in the grim Neuilly boarding house. Aristocrats from before the Revolution, they’re reduced to applying to an agency for domestic staff where, in a scene of comic genius, they’re mistaken as employers in search of maids, when in fact they’re looking for work themselves, but can’t quite articulate this evidence of how low they’ve sunk.

Fontana’s dog is excellent, too:

The Russian dog came after them into the car and slouched down beside them, incredibly bored, incredibly clean, with his hair curled smooth as a caracal and his loose, tapering limbs bent under his pointed breast.

In later life Boyle became a fervent social activist, fingered by the McCarthyists for her left-wing tendencies. In this novel there are signs of this tendency, as in a stirring speech towards the end from Victoria to privileged but angst-ridden Anthony. She’s begun to grow up, to see through fakes like Sorrel, and to discern the self-indulgence of Anthony’s atrophied poeticisms:

Only women grow up, Victoria was thinking; men go on remembering the time when their families stood on guard about them, or the books on the table, or the silver, and there was no need for explanation. Haven’t you learned that once cut out of the family’s life you are a single thing given to yourself and other people, carved out separate to stand alone or not to stand at all?

Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado is a weaker, more frivolous version of My Next Bride‘s more ambitious, satisfying account of a young American woman’s painful growth into selfhood and discovery of love’s unexpected springs.

Éric Mathieu, The Little Fox of Mayerville

Posted on October 9, 2019 by Simon Lavery

Éric Mathieu, The Little Fox of Mayerville. QC Fiction, Québec, 2019. Translated from the French by Peter McCambridge. ARC

My whole childhood was nothing but dread, drifting, and disappointment. And yet I wanted to be happy.

These opening words of Éric Mathieu’s novel The Little Fox of Mayerville give an indication of most of what follows. Émile Claudel is born in 1945 into an ‘austere, joyless family home’ in the small, gossip-ridden village of the title, a rural place in Lorraine near where, significantly, Joan of Arc had lived. He too is born to suffer France’s pains.

It’s a magical realist bildungsroman; for example, the boy is able to speak from the moment he’s born, and he babbles competently in several languages, quoting from an early age from canonical literature he can’t possibly have read. From the outset this precocity – and everything else about him – arouses only hatred in the rest of his family.

With his red hair and vulpine features he quickly acquires the eponymous nickname. It’s not a token of affection. His slyness, tricks and (often cruel) pranks, usually perpetrated with his only friend Max, don’t endear him to his community.

As the narrative proceeds we learn that he suspects the man he calls father isn’t his biological father (he’d returned from the war, having been a POW, too late for the dates to fit). Much of the time Émile desperately searches for clues about the identity of who his father could be.

His supposed father is a shadowy, barely-present figure. His mother is moody, volatile and unloving towards the boy – he presumes out of guilt about his illegitimacy. She also seems to be promiscuous, especially with a sinister neighbour, Ducal. Could this demonic man be the one? Or was it an American GI who’d been quartered at the Claudel house during the war?

Aged about eight, before he can find the answers to these questions, he’s abandoned by his family and sent to an orphanage, euphemistically called ‘boarding school’. This place makes Jane Eyre’s Lowood seem like heaven. After suffering and growing up there he absconds and has a number of picaresque adventures. Falls in love. The sixties arrive: rock and roll, Bardot, liberation. Kennedy is shot. Maybe what’s coming isn’t liberation.

The novel never flags – in fact at times it’s almost too packed with incident, so the scenes blur. The protagonist is protean: at times feral, a kind of werewolf (werefox?), at others a scared, lonely child. It’s often unclear if what’s narrated is his fantasy. Dreams are interwoven with the narrative without distinction from ‘real life’, adding to this magical quality. Most of the people he meets are monstrous, distortions, like nightmare figures.

The poignancy of Émile’s childhood is the most affecting aspect of the novel: he’s lost, searching for some kind of identity – he assumes finding out about his father will solve this problem. Like most of us, he discovers that the truth isn’t always what you really want to find – or expect. The epigraph to Part III highlights this ambivalence: a quotation from The Brothers Karamazov – ‘who doesn’t desire his father’s death?’

He craves love and affection, and when it’s withheld not surprisingly his dark side exerts itself. I suppose The Little Fox is best summed up as a kind of postmodern fairytale. There are elements resembling Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. But I was most reminded of Truffaut’s seminal film ‘Les Quatre cents coups’– Émile, like Truffaut’s alter ego, barely copes with his abrasive contact with mid-20C French conservatism and duplicity. Its society is scarred by memories of war. It attempts to gloss over its dubious record under German occupation. Maybe Émile’s quest represents in microcosm that of modern France.

Although the narrative seemed (for me) to lose its way a little towards the end, I was always engaged in Émile’s troubled, delinquent quest. The short chapters, some just a sentence or two, and the nimble, restless narrative voice, create a breathless, other-worldly effect that accords well with the theme.

The translation by this innovative Québec imprint’s fiction editor, Peter McCambridge, is lively and fluent. My thanks to the publisher for the ARC, and a welcome addition to its growing, impressive catalogue.

Tredynas Days

A Literary Blog by Simon Lavery

Monthly Archives: October 2019