276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Berta Isla

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

Elegant … Persuasively vivid … Marías knows that espionage depends on lies and weasely versions of the truth; that sometimes the false stories used to bait the enemy are as important as James Bond heroics. With peerless 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. Marias weaves a thrilling and desolate meditation on the psychic costs of the deep state's dark arts.

Berta also shares the novel’s general astonishment at the unknowability and likely insignificance of everything. Full of humour and intelligence … More sinuous and satisfying than many of its precursors … Ranks as Marías’s best novel in years. Marías succeeds in creating his own fictional world … He continues to validate his well-deserved global reputation. Throughout the book, he enacts his characters’ various degrees of puzzlement in winding digressions about the mists and vapours that obscure our knowledge of each other and ourselves.As is the case with many of Marías’s protagonists, Tomás, or Tom, is an individual of many identities. Marías is above all interested in negative states: waiting, uncertainty, insignificance, ignorance, deception and self-deception.

And that strange qualification at the end, “or perhaps some other feline”, sounds bookish and absurd. These, and the name of a young Oxford detective who investigates Tomás - “our diligent Inspector Morse” – suggest another possible twist: perhaps the real master of deception is Marías himself, and his book is simply a potboiler in heavy disguise. Peter Wheeler, who recruits Tomás, and Bertie Tupra, his handler, play significant roles in the other books. After Michael Ondaatje’s Booker-longlisted Warlight and Kate Atkinson’s Transcription, Javier Marías’s new book is the latest literary novel to take an unexpected approach to the espionage-thriller formula, mixing marital intrigue with a history lesson of late 20th-century conflict.No sooner does he decline than he’s hauled in by police, after a woman he’s been sleeping with is found strangled hours after their last meeting.

Their conviction that they are meant to be together is particularly striking in a book that so often asserts our powerlessness over our fate and questions our basis to make judgments about anything.A stellar student, whose learning of Spanish and English began naturally at home in Madrid, Tomás soon becomes an admired polyglot by his professors at Oxford. Photograph: Katherine Young/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Sixties Madrid, where Berta and Tomás spend their early married life. Moreover, literature is the only tool available for unveiling what lies dormant in our most hidden emotions and our many masks and desires. Both characters first fall in love as youngsters while in high school, but once they are married, Tomás’s schooling will take him to Oxford for a doctoral degree in foreign languages. How easy it is to be in the dark, or perhaps that’s our natural state,” Berta tells us, twice in the space of seven pages, after another of her husband’s inexplicable absences.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment