Berta Isla

 

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)

Part 6 – Berta (pp. 317-363)

Part 7 – Tomás (pp. 367-403)

Part 8 – Tomás (pp. 407-462

Part 9 – Berta (pp. 465-480).

In setting out these page markers (Alfred A. Knopf 2019 edition), a few things become obvious. For one thing, it is a lengthy work. Then there is the duration of Berta’s suffering and her impressive endurance, emphasised by the slow pace of the novel, as Berta narrates action primarily off-stage. For her own life, Berta’s high school romance with Tomás begins during the Franco regime. Tomás goes to study at Oxford University (he is half-English) and when he returns to Madrid, she marries her brilliant linguist. In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, there are two children (Guillermo and Elisa) and young motherhood. As Tomás’s diplomatic career leads to longer periods away from home, Berta begins to teach literature at university. At some point Tomás confesses to a fact known to the reader from Part 2, that he has been recruited by the British intelligence services, though what exactly he does undercover is hinted at rather than ever described.

Like The Infatuations, Marías demonstrates his ability to write from a woman’s point of view – something this male reader, at least, finds convincing. Berta comes across as intelligent and loyal to her husband, yet as the years pass, she reaches out for occasional company, and becomes, by necessity, independent of any one man. (She steps alongside of and ahead of social changes in Spain in Tomás’s absence). It also wouldn’t be a Javier Marías novel without a range of intertextual allusions – from Balzac’s Colonel Chabert to Shakespeare’s Henry V – stories about long-lost men returning from war, and the masterful use of disguise on the eve of battle. Putting these two things together, the novel narrates a life of slow change and waiting, caught up in Cold War drama and espionage which might as well be fiction to Bertha.

It wouldn’t spoil the novel to quote from the first paragraph, even if, as sometimes happens in a rich novel by a veteran writer, it’s all said there:

For a while, she wasn’t sure her husband was her husband, much as, when you’re dozing, you’re not actually sure whether you’re thinking or dreaming, whether you’re in charge of your own thoughts or have completely lost track of them out of sheer exhaustion. Sometimes she thought he was, sometimes not and at other times, she decided to believe nothing and simply continue living her life with him, or with the that man so similar to him, albeit older. But then she, too, had grown older in his absence; she was very young when they married (p. 3). 

There is a tragic piece of trickery that leads directly to their lives stalling in the promise of youth and a life where ‘like so many, many others, [mine and his] simply exist and wait’ (p. 480). If lines like these don’t shake you awake, then you may as well return to counting down the days yourself.