GatesyRead

  The fact that Javier Marías died in September 2022 has no doubt impacted on how I responded to his last novel  Berta Isla  in 2024. Longer term readers of this blog might remember that I have previously spoken  about All Souls, A Heart So White,  Dark Back of Time ,  and  The Infatuations .  Suffice to say that I am one of Marías’s many admirers and was very sad to hear of his passing.  Berta Isla  may not to be everyone’s taste, but he was a writer at the height of his powers, with (one suspects) much more to say. The story concerns a couple – Berta Isla and her husband, Tomás Nevinson – from their teenage years to middle age. By the end of the story, Tomás appears much older, for reasons we will get to, while Berta’s life has passed by in waiting for his return. Most of the narrative is told from Berta’s point of view.   Part 1 – Berta (pp. 3-33) Part 2 – Berta (pp. 37-40) and Tomás (pp. 41-119) Part 3 – Berta (pp. 124-165) Part 4 – Berta (pp. 169-211) Part 5 – Berta (pp. 215-313)

  The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney has been sitting on my bookshelf for years. It’s not that I don’t admire the author: Richardson’s first novel Maurice Guest (1908) is a true favourite I read once a decade. But I baulked at Mahoney – it seemed overly long; the image on the cover looked too colonial; I liked her Leipzig tale so much it was bound to disappoint. At last, I found a reason: research for my next fictional project would require engaging with fiction and non-fiction to do with 19 th Australia. I pulled Mahoney from the shelf, opened the first page, and plunged in. ‘In a shaft of the Gravel Pits, a man had been buried alive,’ reads the opening line. A few pages later, the grim humour of the anonymous colonial death: ‘Who the man was, who now lay deep in a grave that fitted him as a glove fits the hand’ (pp. 7-9). Paul Giles writes that the novel, ‘takes the theme of the self-made man, the characteristically Victorian trope of a picaresque hero which American fiction reconf