Berta Isla

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Peter Wheeler, who recruits Tomás, and Bertie Tupra, his handler, play significant roles in the other books.

Having tinkered with the spook-yarn formula in his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, Marías strips back the action to stage a dialled-up drama of early motherhood, pitting Berta’s experience against her husband’s in a late-night argument over the kitchen table. Marías, who’s long had a reputation as your favorite author’s favorite author, has lately earned himself a growing readership in the States, and Berta Isla is certainly likely to help the cause.Truly multicultural and multilingual, he can claim more than one place of belonging while also being perfectly capable of feeling at ease in more than one cultural setting. He declines their offer, which is made through his tutor, Peter Wheeler, but then finds himself a suspect in a murder inquiry. An unexpected approach to the espionage-thriller formula, mixing marital intrigue with a history lesson of late 20th-century conflict … [Also] a dialled-up drama of early motherhood … A twisty, thought-provoking tale that puts notions of truth and morality under pitiless scrutiny.

While Berta is a fourth or fifth generation madrileña, Tomás is Anglo-Spanish and has an extraordinary gift for languages. 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.New Paperbacks NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks. In the past, he has talked about using his writing to do a special kind of literary thinking, worrying at an idea over a succession of clauses to get at a kernel of truth or exactness. 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. Deceit and arbitrary power are the dynamos of this dense, compelling novel by one of Europe’s most admired authors … Time reading and thinking about it will be well-spent.

It is a source of continuing regret to me that I’ve never been approached to be a spy – especially since I came of age during the cold war, speak Russian, and went to boarding school and Cambridge. Powerless to influence him, often unable to contact him, Berta’s love and patience are tested over decades, as the turbulence of the 1970s gives way to the Falklands war, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is not a novel about spycraft, the drama of going undercover, or even – despite much allusion to the subject – the moral choices attending the profession of secret agent (we never find out what Tomás’s work actually entails, so it’s impossible to know what moral boundaries he may or may not transgress). He held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.

The intelligence services – the exact branch is never made clear – use the murder accusation as a means to entrap Tom in a career as an infiltrator.

At first blush, Berta Isla appears to be a spy thriller in the style of John le Carré … Soon, however, Marías’ trademark webs begin to spread, and the novel becomes an interrogation of language, relationships, and the modern condition. 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. For instance, Tomás’s tutor “looked straight at Tomás with his blue eyes slightly narrowed, and so penetrating they were like sparks, as if they could not help scrutinising everything with a degree of suspicion, to the point that the blue seemed to metamorphose into yellow, like the eyes of a sleepy, but very alert lion, or perhaps some other feline”. Marías transforms a spy thriller into an eloquent depiction of those left behind at home in this rich novel . Marías, a celebrated Spanish author, offers up a masterly premise and plot that are worthy of a Hitchcock adaptation, and the denouement does not disappoint.Here as elsewhere, the translation by Margaret Jull Costa has a lyrical flow, but she can’t rescue this sentence. Marías has been touted as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, this novel illustrates why. The espionage premise is initially enticing, but the real draw is the depth of Marías’s characterization. Unbeknownst to her, he has been approached by an agent from the British intelligence services, and he has unwittingly set in motion events that will derail forever the life they had planned. His] stories are always interwoven with deliberations on truth, morality, deceit and the impossibility of knowing one another, with side trips through literature and history … Berta Isla has many of the master’s signature preoccupations … The elegant translation is alive to every nuance … Berta, the desolate wife, is the heart of the story; her first-person narrative eloquently occupies the bulk of the novel … A complex, emotionally torn character, she evolves and matures, and her intimate story carries the book.