Berta Isla

March 1, 2019

Schoolgirl Berta Isla sets her sights on Tomás Nevinson, the half-Spanish, half-English charmer who thrills everyone with his gift for languages. But he's a different man when he returns to Madrid from his Oxford studies, having been approached (though not to her knowledge) by British intelligence. From International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award winner Javier.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2019
Spanish novelist Marías (Between Eternities, 2017, etc.) revisits perennial themes--the mutability of truth, the untrustworthiness of the powerful, the vagaries of human behavior--in a brooding tale of lives darkened by separation and deception. Berta is intrigued by "Tom or Tomás" from the moment they meet at school in Madrid. Completely bilingual, with a Spanish mother and English father, he's good-looking and entertaining, brilliant at impersonations, and uninterested in the tortured introspection that absorbs most adolescents. These qualities attract the attention of the British Secret Service when he heads to Oxford in 1969, and Tom (as he thinks of himself in England) is pressured into joining after the police inform him that a woman with whom he's been having a casual affair has been murdered. Berta doesn't know this when they marry in 1974, but she's enlightened a few years later, and for decades she reluctantly abides by Tomás' insistence that she must never ask where he goes and what he does during his long absences. "Whatever happens will have nothing to do with me," he insists, "because those of us who do this work both exist and don't exist...the things we do are done by nobody." This existential view of spying echoes throughout the novel in fragments from T.S. Eliot's poem "Little Gidding," with its images of a spirit wandering between two worlds, and in Tom's musings that spies know what others try to forget: that each of us is "an outcast of the universe." Nonetheless, he justifies his life in the shadows as "defence of the Realm," a rote claim Berta rejects with contempt: "How can you say that your causes are just causes, if they're given to you by intermediaries." As usual, Marías propels his philosophical debates with the urgency of a thriller, including a bravura plot twist that completely unmoors Tom/Tomás. But Berta is more of a construct than a credible female character, and the novel has a slightly perfunctory air despite Marías' customary brilliant prose. Skilled and provocative, as always, but not one of the author's best.

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June 3, 2019
Marías (Thus Bad Begins) transforms a spy thriller into an eloquent depiction of those left behind at home in this rich novel. Popular, beautiful Berta Isla decides she will marry Tomás Nevinson, a half-Spanish, half-British classmate with a preternatural ability to learn languages, while they are students together in mid-1960s Madrid. During his studies at Oxford, Tomás is recruited by a professor to use his abilities with languages and accents to serve as an infiltrator for the British Secret Intelligence Service
. He demurs, until he is accused of murdering his British lover and needs help evading the charge. Marías toggles to Berta as a narrator for Tomás’s return to Spain, their marriage in 1974, and his cover job for the British Embassy. Berta struggles to cope with her husband’s long, mysterious absences and forces a confession about his real job after a terrifying threat on their young son’s life. Tomás offers scant details of his work, which only partially satisfies Berta, who spars with him. When he leaves on assignment just before the start of the Falklands War in 1982, Berta’s worries compound as his time away stretches into months and then years. Marías switches back to a third-person narrator for the gut-punching conclusion that explains what happened to Tomás. The espionage premise is initially enticing, but the real draw is the depth of Marías’s characterization. This weighty novel rewards readers with the patience for its deliberate dissection of a marriage.

Starred review from August 1, 2019
Acclaimed author Mar�as has been described as a novelist posing as a philosopher?but one who surprises readers by providing a plot, after all. And so it is in this novel about a marriage imbued with secrecy. Berta Isla and Tom�s Nevinson meet as teens in school in Madrid in the 1960s and soon are a declared couple. Yet both lose their virginity to others when college separates them, she after a chance encounter in Madrid, he in Oxford in an emotionless, utilitarian sexual relationship that becomes key to determining a future not of his choice. Berta and Tom�s finally marry in 1974, and he establishes a pattern of travelling between Oxford, where his work is based, and Madrid, where they live. His absences from his family become longer, and, when he leaves in April 1982, just as the Falklands War breaks out, he doesn't return, leaving Berta with their young son and daughter. What the future holds is revealed gradually in Mar�as' signature prose, with large chunks of exposition that may initially be off-putting, but through which the narrative flows smoothly, engulfing the reader. Mar�as has been touted as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature; this novel illustrates why.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)