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Episode 3: backlist spotlight: "House of Splendid Isolation" by Edna O'Brien; "Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me" and "A Heart So White"
129 Plays1 year ago
Welcome back! In our third episode we discuss House of Splendid Isolation by Edna O’Brien for the backlist deep dive. In the Marías portion we dig into Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me and A Heart So White. We really hit it out of the park in both sections, if we do say so ourselves.
Books mentioned in this episode:
- The works of Edna O’Brien, specifically: Girl and The Little Red Chairs
- Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lúcio Cardoso, translated by Margaret Jull Costa & Robin Patterson
- Galore by Michael Crummey
And returning champions:
- John Crow’s Devil by Marlon James
- A Companion to Javier Marías by David K. Herzberger
Click here to subscribe to our Substack and do follow us on the socials, @lostinredonda across most apps (Twitter and Instagram for now; we’re coming for you eventually #booktok).
Music: “Estos Dias” by Enrique Urquijo
Logo design: Flynn Kidz Designs
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I'm Tom Flynn. I'm Lori Feathers. And welcome to Lost in Redonda.
00:00:26
Speaker
Hi, welcome to Lost in Redonda. Today Tom and I are going to talk about one of my backlist recommendations for him.
Introduction to 'House of Splendid Isolation'
00:00:34
Speaker
It's a novel by the author Edna O'Brien called House of Splendid Isolation.
00:00:40
Speaker
Edna O'Brien is an Irish author who's lived most of her adult life in England. She's quite old, I guess I'll just have to say that. I think she's 90 or something close to that. She's published so many books.
00:01:00
Speaker
She's quite a phenomenon. If you've not read her before, I would also highly recommend her trilogy, The Country Girls, which I think is every bit as good, if not better than the Elena Ferrante books, My Brilliant Friend, et cetera, because it kind of talks about two girls that are friends in childhood and how that friendship develops over the course of their lives.
00:01:30
Speaker
But today we're here to talk about House of Splendid Isolation. So Tom, tell us what you thought.
Narrative and Language in 'House of Splendid Isolation'
00:01:38
Speaker
This might become a bit of a recurring theme in our conversations, Laurie. But once again, I'm quite annoyed. I haven't read this book before, much like with Marilyn James. I've known of Edna, I mean, much like with Marilyn James, I've known of Edna O'Brien. I think I received, I think someone brought out her collected stories a couple of years ago.
00:01:59
Speaker
And I got that as a gift, but hadn't really dipped into it. So I was quite pleased when I saw this on the list as another reason to to dig into someone I hadn't hadn't done yet. This is an outstanding novel. Its range is really incredible. The. There's almost a cacophony of voices taking place here, just absolutely creating this intricate, complicated
00:02:29
Speaker
desperate social situation. It jumps back and forth through time in just really gorgeous ways. It's stunning. The writing is spectacular. It's the kind of prose that no matter how quickly you want to get through it, and there are moments where the action starts to really kick in and you are desperate to learn what is the next turn, what is going to happen next.
00:02:56
Speaker
Uh, her writing demands that you take your time with it, that you, there's just something about the way she writes sentences that you can't force your way through, or at least I couldn't find a, find a way to do that. Even when I was, you know, again, eager, eager, or maybe a little afraid to find out what exactly was about to occur.
00:03:15
Speaker
And I just really appreciate writers who have that kind of control in their writing, not just amazing plotting, but on a sentence level, an understanding of how to control the pace of the narrative. And I don't know, I don't think that she necessarily is doing too many pyrotechnics in the writing.
Characters and Themes in 'House of Splendid Isolation'
00:03:39
Speaker
It's just more a really strong structural understanding is probably the best way I can put it.
00:03:46
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think it feels experimental really in any way, but I think and
00:03:53
Speaker
I'm probably going to say this way too often over the course of episodes because it's something that really attracts me. And so that's the kind of books I recommend. But I think that there's something falconarian about the language, particularly when it comes to Josie's part of the story. And so maybe we should tell folks a little bit of like what the premise of the novel is. Sure. So it's taking place in Ireland.
00:04:23
Speaker
I mentioned this to you in email. I was actually struggling a little bit to place the exact timeframes because it does take place in two different periods. Josie as an old woman, I believe in her 80s at this point or thereabouts.
00:04:38
Speaker
Um, also when she was first married in a little bit of a ways into her marriage, um, some 60 odd years before, uh, but it's taking place in, um, the countryside in Ireland, uh, in the later period, I would hazard what late eighties, early nineties Ireland thereabouts. Um, and a member of the IRA has escaped from a police van that take him into custody and is on the run. Um, and he's well known for.
00:05:07
Speaker
constantly escaping and being especially violent, although that's probably a weird way of putting it when you're describing someone that's participating in the troubles at this time, especially violent. Everyone was extremely violent. So he's on the run and he eventually happens upon or
00:05:27
Speaker
as it turns out, very specifically went to Josie's house. She has just been returned from a nursing home where she was for a bit with pneumonia. The house is dilapidated, which is brought into really stark relief when Josie thinks back to her first arrival there, where she got married. It's this gorgeous, massive, incredibly isolated house and an already incredibly isolated countryside. She details
00:05:57
Speaker
her really failed, troubled marriage. But O'Brien does such smart things there. She gives such an incredibly, builds up to all the fault lines in the marriage in that first recollection and how her husband eventually dies somewhat young.
00:06:20
Speaker
But then there's another flashback later on that fills in even more of the gaps and actually expands how long they were together. I mean, Lori, it's really masterful, like how she constructs this. But back to the narrative. So she happens, and the man's name is Frank, Frank McGreevy. And over the course of a few days spent together in this house, Frank and Josie start to,
00:06:49
Speaker
I wouldn't say necessarily understand one another, but they seem to be reaching towards something in the other as it progresses. And of course, Frank is being hunted, is being watched. And that's kind of in the present day where the action starts to take off after they've spent about five days alone in the house together, the outside world begins to catch up. And from there, it gets quite, quite dangerous, quite fast.
00:07:19
Speaker
Well, and it's not that she invites McGreevy in. The section of the book where he kind of comes and almost takes her hostage in her own home is called captivity. But speaking, I'm so glad you brought up the house. And I'm such a sucker for homes kind of
00:07:49
Speaker
um, being a character in a book and then kind of their, um, their decrepitude and their rottingness kind of being a reflection of what's happening to the people. Um, I can think of a number of books like that, that I love.
Gothic Elements and Historical Context
00:08:08
Speaker
Bunden Brooks by Thomas Mann is one Chronicle of the Murdered House, which won the best translated book award. Um, I think in 2016,
00:08:17
Speaker
Is another Absalom Absalom Faulkner again, but um, I wanted to just read if I could The first two sentences of the book History is everywhere it seeps into the soil the subsoil like rain or hail or snow or blood a house remembers a
00:08:41
Speaker
And I think that's just, you know, there's there's something I think in all of her novels that kind of gets to this historical inherited memory idea and the fact that place is such a repository of the history of the place and you really can't escape that. And you mentioned the the
00:09:11
Speaker
scene where she has just married James, who has inherited this home and lives there with his brother Mick.
00:09:20
Speaker
Um, we can say a few words about Nick as well. Um, but when she arrives at this house, you know, when she sees it and how beautiful and opulent and that's green all around it. And she says any girl would have given her eye teeth to marry into it. And she does, but then she ends up having this pretty miserable marriage. Yeah. Josie's also an interesting character in that I feel like
00:09:50
Speaker
She's almost written. There's a way in which she could have been the protagonist of about 10 other different kinds of novels. I mean, this period, she has very much. There's not really elements of the Gothic, but something more about, like, you know, the country life and life in that way.
00:10:10
Speaker
She was briefly, the character lived in the United States in Brooklyn for a bit, working as a maid. And so you have elements of the immigrant story there that could be told as well. And we get a brief, a couple brief snapshots of her life in the United States.
00:10:27
Speaker
I mean, she is such a rich and fascinating character in that way. And in some ways become, I mean, as you're talking about the house, she becomes a part of the house. I mean, it ages with her. She knows it. There's a scene where after Frank has taken over the house,
00:10:46
Speaker
Um, she happens upon him and he's about to turn on a light and she stops him because she knows that there's mildew and mushrooms growing right by that light switch. And if he flips it, he's going to electrocute himself. And she has, in a way, that's one of the first moments where she's wondering what she's doing because she could have been done with him right then and there. He could be gone. Um,
00:11:07
Speaker
but she chooses to save him instead. But yeah, that movement of this house that was immaculate, that had a housegirl, that had a houseboy that stables all these things, and that it's now become taken over in a way by the land that surrounds it, by the land that it almost ruled over previously.
00:11:29
Speaker
But there is, I think, a real strong Gothic element to the novel, too. I mean, you know, people talk all the time about the curse and the curse that was on her husband, James' family and the curse that's on the house. And James and Mick's parents, you know, died when they were just children. And so a lot of the characters in the town, you know, that have
00:11:58
Speaker
known the history of the family, tell Josie about the curse and James, her husband in his drunken fits and he almost, you know, fairly well, the passage of time is a little confusing in the book, I think. But at one point he before she sends him to a monastery, he's like so drunk and he's having delirium tremens and he stumbles around and
00:12:29
Speaker
and rapes her and, you know, just talks about, you know, the curse of the house and the ghosts. And so I do think there's there's a real strong Gothic element to it. Well, and as you're reading the opening portion, I'd actually I mean, I only just read it, but I kind of glossed over the fact that the opening section of the novel is called The Child and The Child is also the closing section of the novel. But I mean,
00:12:57
Speaker
I think it's fair to say this is the child that she never had, but the child that she never had is narrating this place and then is once again narrating the place at the end. Um, so yeah, this haunting, this, this cursedness of the, of the area is, I mean, it's something that you could perhaps pull if you wanted to. And I don't know that we want to on this podcast, but a little bit of the cursedness of,
00:13:23
Speaker
of the society at the time. There's a conversation between two members of the guard towards the end of the novel where it's described as, like the North is described as full-blown war up there. Let me look it up, I think it's page 200 in my edition. I tried to make a mental note of exactly where that was. Yeah, it's open warfare up there and it's half open warfare down here.
00:13:51
Speaker
But that was true even in Josie's youth with James. That is in fact how James died. The houseboy gets caught up or joins up with the IRA and is watching an arms dump and James decides to help him and makes his way to it. But the police know and James is half drunk as he often was at that time. Shots are fired and that's how James dies.
00:14:22
Speaker
There is the curse in some ways could be applied to what is tearing apart the country and altering it on like altering the society on a very profound level over the course of Josie's life. There's also this element at least early on in the book that Josie's almost as a young wife, a new wife, seen as like a succubus by James and Mick the brother because
00:14:51
Speaker
She kind of is the wedge that breaks this very strong bond that they've had, at least insofar as she makes James tell Mick he's got to go. Right. Well, there's a real peculiarity to that relationship between James and Mick. I mean, you get this sense from how James is
00:15:16
Speaker
portrayed and how he's thinking of Josie as he's bringing her home after they're married and how they became married. I mean, basically, Josie, after coming back from the United States, is working in her uncle's bar, which happens to be in the town nearest to this house, this land. James is there a lot playing cards and drinking. She catches his eye. He somewhat catches her, just I think in some ways because she knows who he is and what he has.
00:15:46
Speaker
And the courtship barely exists. He basically proposes. They get married. She moves in. And I get the feeling that up to that point, other than what staff they had, James and Mick were more than half wild. I mean, they spent their time, even as adults, just sort of roaming the land, doing what they wanted.
00:16:11
Speaker
raising horses, fishing, rowing a boat. It's a weird sort of, I don't know, almost like a landed gentry sort of lifestyle, but not quite at the same time. And also just very little other social contact. There's a very... Sorry, go ahead.
00:16:30
Speaker
No, I was just going to say, but James is kind of a sophisticated fella at first. He has a neat appearance. He cares about what glass he uses to pour his fine whiskey. He's kind of a little bit of a landed gentry dandy for a while, even though he and his brother can be kind of wild. But you get the sense that
00:16:55
Speaker
over time and perhaps even pretty quickly after the marriage, he just kind of falls apart and becomes this slothful drunk that really just acts like a total brute
00:17:16
Speaker
to her. And it makes me kind of curious about whether that was something that intentionally Mick was doing trying to kind of, because you get the sense that there's this jealousy that Mick has that, you know, now there's the wife and now my, my best friend and brother is like no longer my close buddy. Well, there, but there were, I think it was more than just a jealousy, though, in that like in their first
00:17:44
Speaker
their first night all
Societal Implications and Mythmaking
00:17:45
Speaker
in the house together. There's this very strange, almost sexual tension coming off of Mick. And it's not explicitly stated, but almost feels like Mick is hopeful that he also got married here, that this is now- That they'll share her. Exactly. I mean, that, that, I think, I mean, so yes, I think she's a, I think you're, you're absolutely correct in that she's a wedge and that she tells James that Mick has to go eventually because of their shenanigans.
00:18:13
Speaker
because of just sort of the general weirdness of the situation. But she's also wedged in that I think this is one of the first times they stopped sharing in their life together, which is, yeah. It also kind of cuts into that, you know, brother versus brother theme that, you know, sort of pervades the book with the tension with the IRA and the black and tans and the guard.
00:18:41
Speaker
everyone just sort of being at everyone else's throats on a certain level. So when we get to McGreevy, who's kind of kind of hold himself up in Josie's house and kind of, you know, against her will, not at her invitation, but there does develop this close relationship with them. And how would you describe that? Is it kind of like Stockholm syndrome?
00:19:10
Speaker
I don't know if it's as far, I mean, certainly, and this is even brought up later by a guard member who interviews Josie of her being lonely and suddenly having companionship, having someone else to talk to, someone to share her time in this house with. But it also seems that Josie wasn't exactly
00:19:38
Speaker
She doesn't like the violence or the bloodshed, but it doesn't seem that she's entirely against the IRA or the Republican movement. And it's made clear throughout the novel that almost everyone is implicated to some degree, that there are feelings of understanding and horror, revulsion and attraction to that cause, and also specifically when it comes to McGreevy.
00:20:08
Speaker
He becomes an escaping from this prison van. He becomes this sort of mythic figure. He's this boogeyman that's scaring the hell out of everyone across the country, it sounds like.
00:20:20
Speaker
Folks as kids are complaining of nightmares. People are, you know, but at the same time, they're comparing him to Koolan, one of the great heroes of Irish legend. So, I mean, there's this really, and I think in some ways, Josie is embodying that too. She sees him not as this, you know, she sees the man. She's afraid of him in many respects.
00:20:47
Speaker
But at the same time, she's kind of interested in wants to talk and understand more. So maybe it is Stockholm syndrome. Maybe it is just that she is that she is lonely.
00:20:59
Speaker
It's also certainly the case that Josie's attractions to men were mostly men that are in some way removed or unavailable. She had a incredibly emotional, almost physical relationship with a young priest, not long into her marriage. When she was in the US, she went out on a walking date with a married man. It seems that
00:21:24
Speaker
the inaccessibility, the sort of taboo, at least as it's presented to us, those were the men that she was interested in or interested in engaging with, exploring aspects of herself with, and certainly in the grieving represents that too, I would think. Should we talk just briefly about the discredited cop that we're introduced to early on and his family?
00:21:52
Speaker
Do you think that fits well with the book in terms of the narrative? Because we get this page and half prologue, the first two sentences of which I've read called The Child. And then the first thing we hear about is this family scene where the cop comes home and he's talking to his wife.
00:22:14
Speaker
It's called the present, so it's in the present day. But, you know, about the fact that he's not getting a promotion and it's because he made a mistake and, you know, thought that the wrong person or accused the wrong person of a crime. And then so we hear about them, him and his situation before we even really get into Josie. Right.
00:22:43
Speaker
I think this is also just, I think this is also a Brian really kind of establishing the landscape in a way, like that there is this wildness there is this house that is off on its own, you know, barely near anything else. But then you also have, you know, something, you know, modern life you have what looks like a suburban suburban household.
00:23:09
Speaker
dashed dreams, not being able to move up in the world. I mean, it very much sounds and reads like a novel from, you know, in that respect, a story from the mid century or even now, you know, like just not being able to achieve what you want. And Rory, the officer who's introduced there, his section at that point ends with him thinking back to his glory days as an athlete.
00:23:34
Speaker
And so you get this image of someone who maybe peaked at 17 or 18, and life has just been a series of slow disappointments since. Which, but again, within a very different setting from this wild landscape full of hauntings of a sort that is teeming with life. Yeah, she's, O'Brien's really good, eh? Like she's quite a good novelist.
00:24:04
Speaker
Um, but, and Rory appears later. I mean, he is a key part of the hunt for McGreevy that takes up, um, what's probably about the last third of the novel, I'd say last quarter. Um, where the, the guard starts to close in and a lot, I mean, it almost has the feeling of a, um,
00:24:26
Speaker
a part of our scene in a way, right? Where everyone is addressed, every character who's available in the present that's been in any way a part of this story makes an appearance, has some sort of a decisive, not entirely decisive, but a bit of a conclusion to their part of this story as it progresses towards what feels like, I guess, looking back on it, a bit of an inevitable conclusion.
00:24:54
Speaker
Yeah, Rory's an interesting one. I think it's really something, I'm not an expert by any means on Irish society or the troubles, any of that. I come from a family that is extremely Irish as my last name might suggest.
00:25:19
Speaker
So I mean, I have a little bit of a, I guess, a passing cultural awareness of it. This book came out in 94. The Good Friday Accords don't happen until 98. Some of the worst violence is behind, but it's still ongoing. And I think if I remember correctly, 94 was a period when, actually it was probably earlier than 94 because 94 is probably the paperback edition copyright date. It feels like
00:25:46
Speaker
Writing this novel at that time is an incredible statement. O'Brien, I mean, I don't even think saying that she humanizes people is really the right way of putting it. She she complicates and gives all of the ins and outs of all of these people on every possible side of the divide. She devotes an incredible amount of time getting into the guardsmen and making them feel like
00:26:14
Speaker
And in a matter of pages, these really rich characters with their their own desires, their own feelings, their their feelings of admiration towards the IRA or revulsion or what have you. Yeah, it's it's it's a lot. She does. She does a lot with it. And yeah, I there's a quote on the back of my edition from
00:26:43
Speaker
John LaRue and the review from the New York Times book review that ends with, this is a brave book. And I certainly think that's the case, but it's also just a truly, I mean, I am certainly one that feels that fiction is one of the best ways for us to understand a time or a place to really get into all of the nuance of a setting. And yeah, I certainly think that,
00:27:12
Speaker
this is accomplishing that. Well, to your point, she's a brave writer. She was pretty much made persona non grata for her first novel, The Country Girls and the books that followed because it addresses abortion. You know, as an Irish writer writing in the 50s and 60s, you know, talking about abortion that was
00:27:37
Speaker
That was something that was not looked upon kindly by the Catholic Church, and she got a lot of heat for that. I think that's perhaps, I don't want to make stories up, but perhaps that's part of the reason why she doesn't live there. She left Ireland.
00:27:57
Speaker
And so, yeah, well, I'm just I'm just really happy that you like this story. And hopefully some of our listeners will go out and grab this novel. It's not so easy to find anymore. That's another interesting point.
00:28:15
Speaker
It is still in print. It was, I don't believe terribly, I ordered it through a local store, exile in Bookville. I don't believe when I, because they let me behind the counter, I checked the main distributor. I don't believe it was available there. It was available through the publisher. It's kind of strange to me that it isn't a little bit more out there and I'd be curious
00:28:40
Speaker
maybe this is something that folks could chime in about, what stores are actually carrying it as part of their backlist. I mean, this is another one, I think, as is rather the point of what we're doing, that you really do need someone in the store that wants to champion it, that wants to put it forward and put it into the right customer's hands. But at the same time, there is so much richness to this, and it's by such a clearly important writer,
00:29:08
Speaker
Um, that I'm a little surprised that it wouldn't be on more shelves or at least more widely available. Yeah. I mean, I think that you're likely to find on the shelves, um, her more recent books, um, the red chairs, which deals with Serbian war crimes and then girls, which is really.
00:29:30
Speaker
amazing departure for her. She went to Africa to research Boko Haram and the girls is about the the kidnapping of girls from the school and you know the the horror of that and so
00:29:51
Speaker
Yeah, I think that she was already like 88 perhaps when she traveled to Nigeria and like investigated that and did the research for the book. So those books are quite worth your while too. But of the backlist, The Country Girls and this one are my favorites. But she's written so much. It's not surprising to me that
00:30:15
Speaker
stores wouldn't think that they could carry, you know, every single of her, you know, 22 novels or
Transition to 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me'
00:30:22
Speaker
so. But I think this one is well worth a space on everyone's shelf. I feel like we're kind of drawing to the end of the conversation. So I was going to ask you what, you know, in the interest of what books do you think resonate with this one? Like what what would be the connect like the books you would connect it up to that you would that would maybe
00:30:45
Speaker
make you think a customer would be interested and someone else would be interested in reading this or that you would think would be the next one to do after it. Well, I've added to for listeners information and maybe we mentioned it in a previous episode, but Tom and I are kind of sharing backlist recommendations with each other and deciding, you know, taking turns reading
00:31:09
Speaker
What the other is recommended for each episode and we've got a list going and I think I've recently added this to my list Basically because of my revisit of this book and it is a book that I mentioned at the top Chronicle of the murdered house. It really reminds me of that which is this Just murky Gothic
00:31:37
Speaker
kind of, um, soil and house haunted book that, um, that the, the language is, is a bit, um, similar in so far as the, then the story is told kind of in this, um,
00:32:00
Speaker
kind of hazy way that you're sometimes questioning, is it real? Is it a dream? Is this happening now? Is she remembering the past? What's the timeframe here? But that's a book about family and curses and incest. And it's so much fun. I love that book. So that's the one that comes to mind for me.
00:32:28
Speaker
Yeah, I was thinking, um, I actually haven't, I have that, uh, I have not read it. Um, I think it's size threw me off at the time cause it's a, it's a, the beefy guy. Um, but, um, galore by Michael crummy, which I think I actually put onto the list of suggestions to you. Um, I don't think stylistically is that similar, although when you brought up sort of the falconarian elements, um, it kind of made a little more sense. Frankly, I think it would.
00:32:59
Speaker
If you were to combine John Crow's devil and House of Splendid Isolation, you might get something like galore. Takes place in Newfoundland from the late, or yeah, late-ish beginning of the 19th century into the beginning of the 20th century, this small village. You're basically tracking in some ways Canada's modernization, but you're also very specifically following these families and parts of the family
00:33:26
Speaker
do become hauntings and part of the land. Everyone has the same name, so initially you have absolutely no idea who's being discussed when, but it has a lot of the same echoes of lived-in-ness and the way the land kind of takes things back.
00:33:50
Speaker
causes folks to change along with it as much as the people are changing the land itself. Yeah, that's one of my favorite books, but it's definitely one that I think would work well for folks who dug into this one. Okay. Well, I'm totally tempted now, so stay tuned. I'm sure we'll be talking about that one in an upcoming episode. Excellent.
00:34:29
Speaker
So Laurie, this week we are talking about Heart So White and Tomorrow on the Battle Think on Me, but before we launch into that discussion, a quick programming note. Up on our substack is something of an episode guide of the Maria's titles we'll be talking about each episode and
00:34:50
Speaker
In previous episodes, we pretty much said that your face tomorrow is something that we are building up to sooner than later. We decided to change things up because, well, it's our podcast, and we decided we want to change things up. We changed our mind. Yeah. Which is fine. I think that makes a lot of sense, especially with the way Marius writes and how he changes characters I color at different points and all those things. I think we can change things however we want.
00:35:19
Speaker
Next episode, we'll actually be talking about Berta Aila. The full episode will be about Berta Aila. And then the following episode will be on the new novel, Thomas Nevinson. That is in no small part because that episode will go up the week after Thomas Nevinson publishes, and we felt that
00:35:40
Speaker
it'd be best to kind of talk about it at the at the same time or as close to pub date as possible. Yeah. So that is we should probably explain that the two the two titles are are related. Thomas Nevinson, of course, the forthcoming book here in the United States is what sadly we think is going to be our last
00:36:05
Speaker
Our last book by how the last one he completed before he died and thomas nevinson is the name of the male protagonist in
00:36:17
Speaker
the Berta Isla and the Thomas Nevinson partnership. And Bert, of course, is his wife. And so it's a little bit of a he said, she said perspective, totally riveting and fantastic. So nobody's going to miss anything that we're bumping these up. In fact, I'm really excited to talk about both of them. Well, I'm also really excited that, yeah, that we actually get to take a look at or at least I believe you already have taken a look at Thomas Nevinson, but
00:36:47
Speaker
that I'll get to see it a little bit before pub date. One of the perks of being a bookseller is you often see books in advance and no longer being an official or at least a steadily employed bookseller. That's a little bit harder to come by these days for me, so this is a welcome blast from the past.
00:37:07
Speaker
Yeah, so that that is the programming note. But today we are, as I said, going into a heart so white and tomorrow in the battle think on me.
00:37:18
Speaker
This was intentional, us pairing these two books together, much like we paired All Souls and Dark Back of Time, but I think we're doing a really great job of twinning Maria's titles. These books are very much in conversation with one another in ways that I think, I mean, even more,
00:37:40
Speaker
even more so than they would have been in conversation with All Souls or The Man of Feeling or really a lot of these other books. They're also very, very different books in terms of tone, which is something that in an email exchange you pointed out, Lori, that you found tomorrow in the battle to have some of the funniest moments you've read in Marius' work. So why don't you speak to that? Yeah, it's true. The two books were written
00:38:08
Speaker
pretty close together, 1992 and 1994 in Spanish, of course, translated and published here much later. But yeah, tomorrow in the battle, think on me. I mean, it's not all giggles and laughs, but there is
00:38:28
Speaker
character in the book. He's a government official and he's a rather pompous, self-important man. And his staff refers to him as the only one or the solo. They have all these kinds of nicknames for him. And I think
00:38:49
Speaker
colloquially people that know of him kind of refer to him that way as well. I could definitely feel Morea as kind of like poking fun at this guy. There's some discussion in the novel about
00:39:07
Speaker
the weird way that he eats his, I don't know what you'd call it, his assistant, an old guy that kind of almost like a butler to the government official tells the main character of Victor and his companion when they're waiting to meet with the only one that
00:39:36
Speaker
the official engages in something called Fletcher rising, where he's very methodical about the number of times that he choose a morsel of food. And just like the way he describes it, I don't know, I laughed out loud. And that doesn't happen to me very often when I'm reading mores.
00:39:59
Speaker
Actually your point about not knowing quite what to call this assistant to also another nickname is the lone ranger that Maria's employees or Victor rather the narrator employees. But yeah, the assistant is referred to as a steward or seneschal and Victor himself is I am not versed in the different names of the various posts. So like there's an ambiguity even for the person in the scene as to what to refer to this person who then goes into some detail about
00:40:28
Speaker
how this person goes about chewing up their food. I do remember when I first read this, have you ever seen the movie Bugsy with- Yeah, Warren Beatty. Oh my goodness. Yeah, Warren Beatty. Early on the movie, he's at dinner with his family and he goes to some length telling his daughter about how many times she needs to chew her food and how healthy that is. And throughout the movie, when you see him eat something,
00:40:56
Speaker
worm baby literally sits there and like chews for like 20 seconds as if he's actually doing it. So that was what came to my mind and it made me chuckle back when I first started and maybe chuckled again on this.
Moral Dilemmas and Character Dynamics
00:41:08
Speaker
I'll do you one better. I actually have a in-law that does this and it is the most pain-saking thing to eat a meal with this person.
00:41:20
Speaker
Because he I mean, we're like, you know, finishing the meal and he's barely gotten started. But anyway, that's an aside. But I've never heard him say, you know, describe what he does as Fletcher rising, but it's about the same thing. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's it's a really amazing scene. It also just does such a remarkable job of like,
00:41:48
Speaker
kind of tearing into notions of identity, of presentation to the world, which is made even funnier. The Lone Ranger doesn't really have a very good idea of how to present himself to the world at all, it seems, despite occupying this incredible place of power and privilege. And I mean, Victor is there to ghost-write a speech. So he's trying to get a sense of what is it the person wants to get across. And the guy talks.
00:42:17
Speaker
crossways in so many different moments and different ways about what it is he wants to express and all that. But to have that up against this very mechanical notion of how to eat and how to exist as a person and make digestion better, but then to have really no idea of how to talk about yourself. I mean, that's a very, I don't know, it really created a quite memorable character that's
00:42:44
Speaker
I don't know. In some ways, very much barely in the novel, just in this one scene. Yeah, he is. Ultimately, he's kind of a character of not much importance, except that for the purposes of the novel, he introduces the main character, Victor, to this other
00:43:08
Speaker
family that we'll have to get into when we talk about the premise of the novel that's very important for the novel. But yeah, it is so interesting because he wants to be someone historical, this is the government official, someone who's remembered, but he can't help but know that
00:43:27
Speaker
His speeches are incredibly boring and meaningless and people fall asleep during them. So he's really trying to look for someone to write for him that will help him create an identity that will be memorable and respected. And that's a really interesting part of the book, especially when we get into the fact that Victor's a ghost writer and
00:43:57
Speaker
The conspiracy that he has with this friend of his that is kind of a playboy and is the purported ghostwriter, but he's really not ready for prime time in terms of dealing with important people. So Victor's kind of placed in front of him to be like the presentable one and to be the true ghostwriter.
00:44:26
Speaker
Yeah, and I mean, on that point of telling a story about oneself in order to be remembered, I mean, this is something that we've touched on before, but I think Maria's as a writer would be deeply, deeply distrustful of this ability to actually control a story.
00:44:45
Speaker
even, not even once you're gone, once it's out in the world, the story changes, it alters. This is a recurring motif I've made very explicit in Your Face Tomorrow when we get to that, but it recurs throughout this book and is really kind of in some ways the heart of A Heart So White is what is known, how things fade, how that changes, but
00:45:10
Speaker
What is the reality behind that story? Does that ever have to reemerge, become part of it? I'm looking for a specific line, but not about 30 pages on or so from his interaction with the Lone Ranger. He has a line about how
00:45:29
Speaker
Stories do not belong only to those who are present or to those who invent them. Once a story has been told, it's anyone's. It becomes common currency. It gets twisted and distorted. No story is told the same way twice or in quite the same words, even if the same person tells the story twice, even if there's only ever one storyteller. And there are multiple further clauses along that because, of course, this is a sentence written by Marius, but that's kind of the thrust of it.
00:45:53
Speaker
So I guess we should probably let our listeners know in the event that they haven't read this kind of what this book is is about. Victor's the main character and he kind of has a date with a married woman and he met her like at a cocktail reception and they went for coffee a couple of days later.
00:46:22
Speaker
And then they decided to go for dinner on a night that her husband, her name is Marta, is out of town traveling for business in London. And Marta says at the last minute that she can't find a babysitter
00:46:41
Speaker
And so, would Victor please come to her home and have dinner, and she'll make dinner for them? And he does. And it's not really clear to him at first, I think, that they're going to have a sexual encounter. But eventually, the child goes to bed, and they head to the bedroom. And then,
00:47:08
Speaker
something very unexpected happens. And I don't think it's a spoiler to kind of divulge that to you, Tom, because it happens pretty early on. No. I also quickly would say that I think these two books in particular are ones where
00:47:26
Speaker
I don't think we need to hold back too much on what happens in them. We will spend a lot of time dancing around a lot of things otherwise. I think we can be pretty straightforward about the narrative. It's really how Marius gets there that I think is so engaging.
00:47:48
Speaker
Before they actually engage in intercourse, Marta just kind of quietly dies in the bedroom with Victor and Victor then is left with this predicament because what does he do?
00:48:10
Speaker
The child is asleep in the next bedroom. He doesn't really know this woman very well. He certainly doesn't feel comfortable with the fact that, you know, calling the police or calling an ambulance and like what's he doing there because he's obviously in a compromised position in bed with her. And so that kind of
00:48:37
Speaker
launches us into this whole kind of, I guess, exploration of consequences and things happening. And then, like you were describing a little bit earlier, getting out of control somehow. And
00:48:54
Speaker
His life ends up getting tied in a bit to Marta's husband, Dion, because we learned that Dion also has a secret. And they kind of come together through, ironically, the Lone Ranger, because Marta's
00:49:19
Speaker
Father knows the Lone Ranger very well and he offers to introduce the Lone Ranger to this ghost writer who happens to be Victor. And then Victor shortly thereafter finds himself at lunch with Marta's father and her husband Dion and her younger sister.
00:49:47
Speaker
And the younger sister name is Louisa, which is not the only time we're going to run into a Louisa in this conversation or across all of our conversations because a whole host of names in the world. And I think Maria was picking some very specific ones for some very specific reasons. Yeah.
00:50:11
Speaker
It is a book about consequences, about control. Again, going back to what the Lone Ranger wants in terms of controlling how he's remembered, what his place in history is. Victor trying to control, I mean, at the outset, trying to control the circumstances that
00:50:29
Speaker
will surround the discovery of Marta's death, trying to control how he gets to know more and encounter more, and feeling like he needs to explain something, that there needs to be more said. It almost has, in some ways, this is an oversimplification, but in some ways it has a little bit of a feel, almost like a morality play. It's just sort of like this
00:50:59
Speaker
one thing leads to another leads to another leads to another leads to a denouement that complicates everything else that came before it and doesn't really offer resolution other than the idea that life just continues onwards, that you just keep progressing, you keep things going. I think that one thing that just hearing you talk right now that I didn't think of when I was preparing for this episode, but it is a recurring
00:51:29
Speaker
theme. Victor here almost is an example of
00:51:36
Speaker
someone who is too curious. Because in a lot of ways, the thing to do once he gets away that night, of course, and it feels like no one knows that he was there, would be just to push it as far away from himself as possible and not become endangered of being implicated or found out.
00:52:02
Speaker
But he can't do that. He just wants to dig deeper and deeper into it. And I feel like that's something that happens again and again with Moreus' protagonist is that there is kind of like a simple way out to avoid complicity or consequences, but there
00:52:25
Speaker
insatiable need to understand human nature and the motivations of others just kind of draws them in like a spider web that you're just kind of like sucked in and to the risk of your own innocence sometimes.
00:52:47
Speaker
I mean, yeah, absolutely. I mean, there is this sense of once there is a secret, it needs a telling. Is it a secret if it's held by one person or does it become a secret once more than one person knows? Or I mean, frankly, when something happens, it's in the world and therefore available to interpretation, to understanding, which is a very consequential and fun thing for someone like Maria, who also is a translator.
00:53:17
Speaker
to kind of grapple with. How do you phrase this? How do you frame it? And what changes along the way in the telling? Yeah, I think maybe we should get into a little bit of the last bit of the book where the inevitable meeting between Victor and Mara's husband, Dion, occurs.
00:53:41
Speaker
So I mean, finally, they're face to face. And I think Victor kind of felt from the outset that he needed to give some context or some explanation to Eduardo. And it's always been a little unclear to me how much of that was a feeling of complicity
00:54:06
Speaker
And despite the fact he had nothing to do with Mara's death, he was simply a witness to it. But the fact that he was about to engage in Mara's betrayal of her husband.
00:54:18
Speaker
And how much of it is like a certain degree of empathy that Marta didn't just die alone, which I mean, I think Dion was pretty clear on that front. What emerges though, is that at the exact same time that Marta was participating in this betrayal and Dion was away on business, he was doing the exact same thing, that he was
00:54:42
Speaker
having an affair. And in the midst of a fight on a bus in London with the woman that he was with, in a fit of rage, he starts to strangle her. And then he stops. And she, terrified, of course, runs off the bus and runs across the street and is hit by a cab and killed. And Dion stays on the bus, realizes that
00:55:11
Speaker
No one's going to know it was him. No one really knows that he was there with her. He can just ride away and pretend not to have had that happen. And yet he is telling this story to the man who was with his wife the night that she died. Again, that
00:55:32
Speaker
events deserve or require a telling in order for them to maybe for them to even have occurred in the first place. Otherwise, there are these ghostly ephemera, right? Yeah, I know. What did you take or how did you take the that interaction that that will seem?
00:55:50
Speaker
There is a very long buildup to it and a lot of suspense. Victor tells the truth to Louisa, Marta's younger sister, and asks Louisa, will you please tell Dion that I was there that night?
00:56:12
Speaker
And there was a part of me, and this is probably because I watched too much Agatha Christie, but I was like, well, perhaps, you know, Eduardo Dion has been like slowly poisoning Marta or something, and he's perhaps a little bit responsible for
00:56:32
Speaker
For her death or he knew that she was fragile or something but it doesn't go down like that at all it actually as you said ends up being that. Dion was much more complicit in a young woman's.
00:56:48
Speaker
death a lover's death than victor ever was and the reason that things go sour with deon and his lover is because she lies to him that she's pregnant.
00:57:03
Speaker
and they decide to go to London and get her an abortion and she goes into the hospital alone to have the procedure and he's waiting in a coffee shop across the street and for some reason decides to go into the hospital
00:57:22
Speaker
And he sees her in the waiting room leaping through glossy magazines. And then the whole thing explodes that she didn't have an abortion. She didn't need an abortion because she was never pregnant to begin with. And she just kind of felt the need to hold that over his head to kind of, I guess, prove his love or have his love prove to her or something like that.
00:57:47
Speaker
Yeah, it wasn't at all where I thought the story was going to go. Yeah. I mean, she's also interesting in terms of the twinning of these two novels as this, this idea of
00:58:02
Speaker
proving your love, proving your devotion, and making that request of someone else leads to some pretty horrific occurrences. It runs throughout both books. It's an interesting way as well, as this conversation between Victor and Dion,
00:58:32
Speaker
basically ends the novel. I mean it's all been building to this point.
00:58:36
Speaker
many of Marius's novels have almost a coda at the end, where he's sort of wrapping things up. And there is a bit of one here, but usually it's a bit longer and a little bit more introspective, or at least it pulls in some other material. This one, Victor says he's leaving. And then the very next paragraph is him considering that he's probably going to try and pursue a relationship with Louisa. And that's it.
00:59:02
Speaker
Like, that's it. It opens with a woman's death. It ends with a conversation with her husband where he admits complicity in the death of another woman. And we're done. I mean, it's really strange that way. I mean, it works. It's incredibly impressive. I'm not sure much more needed to be said at that moment. But I just, I found that
00:59:27
Speaker
On this reread, that just sort of jumped out at me as something a little bit different, a little bit strange in a way for a Maria's novel. It's also kind of interesting that Eduardo Dion feels this need to confess his own illicit love affair to Victor.
00:59:51
Speaker
But for I guess a need to tell someone his own secret and that person being Victor, I guess, you know, it could have been very much.
Literary Style and Thematic Exploration
01:00:04
Speaker
An accusatory type of one way conversation, you know, what the hell were you doing in bed with my wife? You know, what kind of you know, what kind of adulterous asshole are you? You know, that kind of thing. But
01:00:18
Speaker
But yeah, it's an interesting choice that he, I guess, feels the need to unburden himself. And I guess it is this theme of the secret, and it's really not a secret if only one person has the knowledge. So at some point, there's almost this compulsion to share the knowledge, whether you really
01:00:47
Speaker
whether the person receiving the knowledge really wants it or not. Right. Absolutely. It's this really interesting consideration of happenstance, which really runs throughout Marius's work there, but for the grace of God, go I. Had they gone out to dinner that evening,
01:01:11
Speaker
Marta and Victor, and she started to feel unwell in the restaurant. Would someone have been able to intervene or recognize symptoms? Had Dionne been home? And so the meeting would never have been possible in the first place, how different things would have been. All these sort of small choices that occur against the backdrop of major events, someone's death.
01:01:36
Speaker
a lover's quarrel that leads to a death. I think this is also part of what Marius is playing with. I mean, I brought this up before, but even the circumstances that made his own birth possible, the fact that his mother went to the police station to get his father released, if she had not done that, he could have
01:01:59
Speaker
you know, Julian Marius, that may have been the end of his story. So just these sort of small, these decisions and these moments that lead to all these explosive results and occurrences, which almost
01:02:13
Speaker
in some ways pushes back against that very notion of narrative. You know, life has a series of one-off events that you can look at and talk about as a whole, but you could also look at them in a slightly different way and talk about them as a different kind of whole.
01:02:29
Speaker
So yeah, I mean, I think you can also see how as a 20 something young bookseller with, you know, not long removed from college with a philosophy and religion degree, that this would be the sort of thing that like would absolutely fry my brain as I'm reading. Yeah, for sure.
01:02:48
Speaker
Maybe we should turn to Heart So White because that novel as well involves the unexpected death of two young women.
01:03:01
Speaker
Yeah, and this is also a good moment to talk about some of the Shakespeare connections here as laid out in the titles. Another brilliant way that we twinned two books written by the same person. Tomorrow on the Bell, Think on Me is a line from Richard III. And A Heart So White is taken from Macbeth, specifically from Lady Macbeth's speech after the murder of Duncan, if I'm remembering my Shakespeare correctly. I think that's right.
01:03:31
Speaker
And the richer the third one is a little bit more.
01:03:37
Speaker
oblique to me. And I've mentioned before, but I've also been using and referring to a companion to Javier Marias by David K. Hertzberger, this academic title as a wave. I mean, that's incredibly useful for some more context around Marias and his writings, especially the ones that are only in Spanish. But also just sort of getting some ideas a little bit straighter in my head, though I don't always agree with all of his conclusions. But that's probably the point of good academic
01:04:07
Speaker
interaction. But the specific moment that A Heart So White refers to, as a reference to Shakespeare, is after being told of Duncan's death,
01:04:21
Speaker
Lee Macbeth thinks of how the blood of Duncan is on her hands, which seems strange to her when her heart is so white. And one of the things that Hertzberger actually pulled up, which I would never have known otherwise, is that Marius actually wrote a
01:04:42
Speaker
an essay about this specific moment. And in general, how he doesn't always feel like he got Shakespeare, that some of the ambiguities in there that he, I think, in that sense, I don't think he, her story writes it super clearly, unless I'm just misunderstanding.
01:05:01
Speaker
that the ambiguities and the uncertainties in Shakespeare leave Marius. He's happy to live in that space. He doesn't feel a need to come down on one interpretation or the other, which makes a hell of a lot of sense given how the man writes and what he writes about. But this notion of, you know,
01:05:22
Speaker
her heart being white, is it because she's innocent? Is it because she doesn't actually have culpability because she was not the murderer, even though she encouraged the death? Which ties very directly into the action of A Heart So White. Yeah, before we dive too much further into it, I just want to say that A Heart So White is in many ways what put Maria's on the map in the
01:05:47
Speaker
The English speaking world, it won the impact Dublin Award. It I mean, it just went completely ballistic when it was published and got out there and really established him as one of like the preeminent novelists going. And perhaps for our US based listeners might not be too familiar with the Dublin Award, but it is the highest payout award
01:06:17
Speaker
for a novel. It's an annual award. And yeah, I think the payout now is 100,000 pounds, which doesn't seem crazy when you think about what sports figures make. But for a literary award, that's a lot of money.
01:06:37
Speaker
And the nomination process, unless it's changed, but my understanding is it's through libraries and librarians around the world. So it isn't even necessarily a there is a bit of a jurying of it. But how the books get out there is almost from readers and very like well-read and devoted readers at that. Also, at least when
01:07:02
Speaker
a heart so white one, the payout gets split. If it's a work that's translated into English, the payout is split evenly, I think, between the translator and the novelist, which is incredibly, frankly, just
01:07:18
Speaker
rather unusual. I mean, also like is a recognition of the translator as a writer of the finished product of the finished book, which I don't know, even five years ago, I feel like that would have been a controversial thing
Exploration of 'A Heart So White'
01:07:32
Speaker
to say. I think we've made some serious progress in recognizing the importance of translators. And I frankly think that's part of what made this pop even more when it won was the unusual nature of the fact that like a translator also got paid so well. Okay.
01:07:49
Speaker
but Hearts of Light is following a
01:07:55
Speaker
I mean, he's he goes unnamed for almost the entire book to the extent that I can never remember his name. All I know is that he's despite some despite some similarities with the protagonist of All Souls and in the future, Your Face Tomorrow, it's not the same person, though it almost could be. I think I made the claim in the last episode that you could almost swap the protagonist in and out of Maria's novels, and it would
01:08:24
Speaker
work pretty well. And I think this is another instance of that. Anyway, our narrator has just been married to a woman named Louisa. He's feeling at the outset and kind of throughout some, maybe not quite ambivalence, but he's trying to understand how he feels about being married and on how he feels about
01:08:47
Speaker
his wife in this register of a relationship. And as the novel progresses, it comes out that his father, his mother has passed, but his father makes a comment to him towards the end of the reception after the wedding, and I'm skipping a few important things that we'll get back to. But his father makes a statement that if he has any secrets that he has not told Louisa, that he should just hold on to them himself, which is,
01:09:17
Speaker
as we'll find a very specific and probably to his father, Ron's mind, really good advice, but it's also 100% a dare. You've just put the thought of withholding into someone's head, which again, is it a secret if only you know it? Doesn't a secret require a telling?
01:09:43
Speaker
And throughout the novel, he discovers more and more about his father's life. He's always known that his father had been married to his mother's older sister before she died, but it slowly comes out that he was actually married
01:09:59
Speaker
before that as well. The novel actually opens with his aunt's death. She commits suicide by firing her father's gun into her chest. And the way that there are some incredibly humorous moments in Tomorrow on the Battle Think on Me,
01:10:22
Speaker
There's less of that in A Heart So White. I do want to point out, though, that in this opening scene, she kills herself while at lunch with her family. And her father is there. And when he enters the bathroom, he still has food in his mouth. And he keeps switching it side to side to side to side, unsure what to do with it, unsure whether to spit it out or to swallow or what have you. And in a different circumstance, this would be much like the Fletcher rising, absolutely hysterical. So I mean, I think
01:10:52
Speaker
There's an absurdity. There's an absurdity to everyday life that I think Maria's picks up on really well that depending upon sort of the English you put on the situation is either really funny or just like bleak in its in its comedy.
01:11:10
Speaker
But yeah, so she, she kills herself. Um, he finds slowly finds out more about who she was, um, to a degree or who her father was, um, finds out that his father was married previously. And some of this discovery takes place in front of his wife, Louisa. And as the novel progresses, we get to
01:11:34
Speaker
There are a few other elements we're very much going to spend some time on. But as the novel progresses, we get to something of the final conversation between Louisa, Ron's the father, with our narrator,
01:11:49
Speaker
accidentally hidden away another room over hearing the entire conversation and discovering what happened to his father's first wife and how that directly in many ways led to the death of his aunt, his father's second wife. God, this is so good, Lori. It is so well plotted. It's amazing.
01:12:14
Speaker
kind of point to the fact, and by the way, the protagonist's name is Juan, and really the only reason I know this is because it says it on the back of my copy. Because you're right, he remains pretty much unnamed. But what were we going to say?
01:12:32
Speaker
I was going to say, yeah, no, it's back in my copy too, but I'm pretty sure in 20 minutes when we're done with this conversation, um, his voice is going to take over as his name in my head. But, um, one's ambivalence about being married, um, I think is,
01:12:49
Speaker
In large part because he's waited quite a while to get married he's been single for a while and i don't i don't get the sense necessarily that he's you know like a woman eyes or anything like that but he's just lived you know.
01:13:06
Speaker
as a bachelor for a long time and so he's got mixed feelings about getting married. And the opening scene that you talked about happens. It's actually a luncheon to celebrate Ron's marriage to
01:13:25
Speaker
to one's aunt. And and so that's a very, very drastic thing to happen, you know, at an occasion when no one should have been more happy than the bride, presumably. But she's in the bathroom blowing her head off with a gun. So that sets up like the story in an interesting way. But it's also interesting, I think, that one's wife, Louisa,
01:13:54
Speaker
in some ways is that curious person that i talked about in tomorrow in the battle think on me because she's kind of the one that keeps saying to one will don't you don't you want to know more about you know
01:14:10
Speaker
your dad's life and your aunt and how she died and why she died. And she kind of just keeps at this. And so she in some ways sets up this situation where she's going to be the conduit for Juan to find out about his father's backstory.
01:14:33
Speaker
which I found kind of interesting as well. And again, as you mentioned, we already have another another Louisa. We'll have many more before we get to the summer and our final discussions of the work of Marais. But yeah, there's a lot of repetition in the names as well as we've got a Berta in this novel.
01:14:53
Speaker
And as we discussed at the front of the program, we will be talking in our next episode about, um, about a book named after Alberta. So, um, another name as well. Yeah. I mean, it's also, it's interesting as well in that, I mean, Victor in, uh, tomorrow, um, is divorced. Um, and there's an interesting scene where with, frankly him,
01:15:22
Speaker
He does not have a relationship any longer with his ex, Celia. And at one point is sort of convinced or at least unsure if she is engaging in prostitution and picks up a prostitute that he thinks could be her. But even after the interaction, he's not totally sure if it was or not, which again, going to like presentation, identity, all these things. But Maria says,
01:15:47
Speaker
protagonists, the ones that are married or the ones that are in relationships, don't have very stable relationships. Or at least they seem not to last. And in some ways, I think that's almost a reflection on... It's ambivalence about institutions maybe, but it's also ambivalence about how you change over time and how that change is reflected in your relationship.
01:16:14
Speaker
whether or not you're the same person after five years that got married to that person, whether they're the same person and how you frankly deal with that.
01:16:26
Speaker
I think in terms of the face to the world, which is something that we've talked about in our emails in preparation for some of these episodes and also just as far as these hidden stories and who people choose to tell or not tell their secrets to.
01:16:46
Speaker
I think that really plays a role in Maria's work overall. He keeps saying the word, it's going to become a dirty word eventually, his larger project as it were in these novels. It's also though, I think the face that you'll have
01:17:04
Speaker
tomorrow might not be the same as the face that you have today. And of course, we'll be rounding out and closing our mores episodes with his what you and I both think is his masterwork, the three volume fiction called Your Face Tomorrow, but it's it's kind of
01:17:28
Speaker
a recognition or trying to figure out like when the going gets tough or when the screws are tight, like what kind of person will you end up really being? And I think that we really find that out or I guess Louisa and Juan find that out about Juan's father runs because
01:17:52
Speaker
He turns out to have not been a very nice guy in his early life. And and the the crime he committed actually is something that you could well understand why it would have should have been perhaps a secret, you know, that he took to his grave. And and what he was kind of warning one about
01:18:22
Speaker
in that private discussion that they have right after the wedding ceremony to, you know, if you've got a secret, keep it to yourself. Right. Just debating whether I do want to go ahead and go into more of the actual, what do you think? Should we talk about what the secret is explicitly or leave that for folks who haven't? I feel like that's a morsel that we can probably leave to the side. I think maybe
01:18:52
Speaker
Just in so far as to say that it explains why the young bride shot herself yes, and it again ties Ties back into complicity and Ron's totally doesn't take his own advice you know he tells he tells one you know if you've got a secret keep it to yourself and He ends up divulging the secret to Louisa Ron's does but really
01:19:20
Speaker
Ron's knows from firsthand experience that telling your wife a secret can be very, very dangerous. Right. He does say at the end of the conversation that Louisa asks him whether or not she should tell Juan and Ron's his responses. Um, I would actually like you
01:19:43
Speaker
to not tell me what you decide. That is up to you. I don't want to know, which in some ways is passing the secret along. It's almost as if he has unburdened himself of it, leaving it to someone else to decide whether or not that secret needs to be passed along to be made present to others. But Louisa doesn't have to make that decision because she knows that Juan's in the adjoining bedroom. And here's the question. Does Ron also have a suspicion of that?
01:20:13
Speaker
I don't think so. No, it's hard, right? Because the way that he's talking, it almost feels like how he would have said it to his son if his son were the one pushing if he were willing to actually tell him what took place. And there's also a way in which, throughout the novel, there are a number of interactions with Ron's and some quasi flashbacks to him earlier in his life.
01:20:42
Speaker
I never got, Ron's feels old by the end of that conversation in a way that he hadn't to that point. Um, it's as if he's aging, um, before our eyes. And that is something also really, I mean, I mean, Hey, it's a remarkable feat of writing, but in a way it was as if, uh, this private part of his life, this deepest secret that he possessed, um,
01:21:08
Speaker
the secret that took away the person that he loved most in the world, that once that was unburdened, he lost some of his vigor. He lost the story that animated his life in some ways because it's no longer his. Yeah, that's a really good point because up until that point,
01:21:28
Speaker
Juan is always thinking or remarking on how well put together his dad is. You know, he's always impeccably dressed. His father is very proud of his appearance.
01:21:43
Speaker
He's forever the gentleman. He's kind of an athlete. He's a collector of art and has very fine tastes in food and whiskey and wine. He's very much someone that is looked up to by his community and someone that has always seemed as having
01:22:12
Speaker
having it together and being a very kind of well, well put together and well presenting person. And then you kind of see this story. And as he's telling it, it's like it's, it's, it's draining him. It's draining him physically and mentally. Um, and yeah, you're right. It's, it's quite masterful the way that, um, Lores is able to depict that.
01:22:38
Speaker
As far as some of the carrot, this is a book in which this is one of the books in which a lot of
01:22:45
Speaker
Marius's other work starts, you can see where intersections are emerging. There's a character we're introduced to through Ron's, or Ron's work anyways, Custerdoy the Younger, who will later appear in Your Face Tomorrow. I made a comment to you at one point that I almost feel like Marius's novels are not quite a shared universe.
01:23:12
Speaker
You know if you want to use that sort of superhero movie or comic basically comes from the comics that's a shared universe but.
01:23:24
Speaker
universes abutting one another, intersecting at different points. Well, this one is very firmly situated with all souls, your face tomorrow, etc. Which is just, which is fun. And I think, frankly, it's fun for Marius as well. Like it's just sort, it's a little bit of a little bit of a game that he's playing in some respects, not in a big metafictional sort of way, but just just
01:23:51
Speaker
You know, a lot of his characters are kind of exploring similar themes. He's exploring similar themes across his novels. So it kind of makes sense that they would in some ways be maybe one or two social connections away from one another or actually
01:24:09
Speaker
in their long lives actually have known it one another at different points. In some ways it reminds me of that Seinfeld episode. Do you remember the one where like there's the Bizarro Jerry and the Bizarro Kramer and the Bizarro George? Because for, I mean, not in a comic way like that is, but for instance, like the Berta in A Heart So White
01:24:30
Speaker
has a very distinctive limp. She's crippled. And I don't recall Berta in the novel Berta Isla being being crippled or having a limp unless I'm wrong. I don't remember. I don't remember either, but that is what I'm reading next. So we can speak to that. We can speak to that in the next episode.
01:24:57
Speaker
But this Berta is, um, was married is having something of a frustrated life, which is not unlike our other Berta. Um,
01:25:10
Speaker
I think a lot of women, I don't want to speak for all women for God's sakes, but Berta's a little difficult to understand. Again, I guess you'd say curiosity for hooking up with this very creepy
01:25:31
Speaker
uh guy not one um but one in her are our former i think briefly lovers but they're no longer they're just friends now um but uh yeah this guy is is demeaning and crude and
01:25:54
Speaker
And yet she still wants to go out on a date with him and kind of have a romance with him. And it's a little hard to understand, I think.
01:26:05
Speaker
Yeah, at one point, Juan actually somewhat puts that to her and her response is something along the lines of, I don't know, but I feel like this guy might have what I need. And not necessarily saying like he's the right guy or he's a good guy, but what he's offering right now is what I want right now, which in some ways cuts back to Juan's own ambivalence or uncertainty around marriage. But I guess that's what I think is so hard to understand, like how could
01:26:34
Speaker
The guy is just bad for her in every way. I mean, she's she's got to be like concerned about her safety. He says really nasty things about her and her limp. And yeah, I just I don't know. It's hard. It's hard to understand that attraction or that compulsion to wanting to be with someone that seems cruel. I mean, it's certainly not.
01:27:02
Speaker
and attract your compulsion, I share, which is probably good. Very good. Good from my perspective. But this also, I mean, so it's also interesting that, again, in terms of twinning, Berta is a translator and as is Juan, and that is also how he meets Louisa. So in terms of twinning, we're also talking about
01:27:31
Speaker
Victor, who's a ghostwriter and is translating other people's words to then to create a narrative that they present to the world as their own words. Juan and Luisa, I mean, their flirtation hit its peak when they were part of a meeting between two high ranking. And it's clearly implied that it's the prime minister of England, the prime minister president of Spain.
01:27:59
Speaker
and they're providing live translation with Juan leading the translation and Luisa there to kind of be the check to make sure he doesn't go off script, to make sure that it's put as clearly as possible. So again, these are people who are taking other people's narratives and then presenting them and presenting the world as if that's what the person said. And there's actually a really, I thought, really great moment. That is a
01:28:28
Speaker
a humorous part that scene, because we were talking about how funny parts of tomorrow in the battle think on me is, and we didn't find a heart so white, all that funny. But the part where they kind of meet Juan and Luisa as they're both interpreting for this high level kind of conference between two
01:28:56
Speaker
to, uh, to high ranking officials is really funny because they're making it up, right? Yeah, absolutely. It's also a kind of a sweet scene because as it, so
01:29:08
Speaker
Just a really quick note, what was interesting, especially in terms of how things are adjusted as they're spoken, the Spanish politician wants to smoke. So he takes out his cigarettes and says, listen, do you mind if I smoke? I hurriedly translate his words. Do you mind if I smoke, madam? I said, which are two completely different. I mean, those are different sentiments, but he's now rephrased it in a way that's far more polite.
01:29:34
Speaker
And that continues throughout. And then one starts, it's like a very boring meeting, very banal. They're not really saying anything. And then one starts changing what's being said. And it happens specifically where he goes.
01:29:56
Speaker
would you like me to order you some tea?" he said, the heave there being the smashed politician. And I didn't translate. I mean that the English I put into his mouth was not his polite question, which it must be recognized was as trite as it was tardy.
01:30:10
Speaker
A really quick aside, I feel like much like the scene in All Souls, the dinner table scene, I really feel like Marius has a great time skewering those in positions of authority, those with power. Those are the ones that he makes the funniest and the most absurd, which is probably to his credit as a person. But this other question, tell me, do the people in your country love you?
01:30:32
Speaker
And from there, it goes off in some truly wild directions. It turns into this conversation about what does it mean to be loved? What do votes mean? How does that feel? And these two politicians actually starting to engage on something. Is it the most meaningful thing in the world? No, but meaningful to them, actually giving them personalities. It's almost tender in a way and such a wild
01:31:01
Speaker
redirect from what would have otherwise been a bunch of pleasantries. Yeah, it is really clever. And they end up talking about the pros and cons of being
01:31:13
Speaker
being loved by your electorate and sometimes the people love you, sometimes the people hate you, and there's pros and cons to each. It does turn out to be a heartfelt discussion about the burdens of power and leadership and holding high office, but yeah, it starts out
01:31:40
Speaker
being anything but something that has substance. But thanks to the interpreters, it does become something that has substance. Yeah. It's a really wild moment. It also gives a sense of, I don't know, Juan's mischievous nature. I mean, that I don't think all of Maria's characters have. And I'm not sure Juan really presents this anywhere else throughout the novel.
01:32:09
Speaker
Yeah, it's fun. It's certainly a scene that sticks with you and very much stands out in a re-remembering of the novel. I think once again, we're also dealing with a novel about consequence and happenstance.
01:32:30
Speaker
What leads to the death of Ron's first wife is his meeting Teresa, Juan's aunt. Had he not met her the way, when he did, things would have gone differently. Had he married his first wife, he married a Cuban woman, but they got married at the Spanish embassy in a Spanish ceremony, and at the time Spain did not allow for divorce. And Ron's even kind of muses that that was probably
01:32:58
Speaker
his wife and her mother's plan was to make sure that he was locked in. Had they simply gotten married in a Cuban ceremony where divorce was possible, what happened next wouldn't necessarily have occurred. Yeah, it's just, again, these little decisions that lead to very impactful moments and then how those moments carry forward. I also think that
01:33:27
Speaker
Tomorrow in the Battle is very much, in some ways, a haunted story. Victor is haunted by Marta's death. I believe I said in our episode on All Souls that I very much feel like this is a ghost story in some respects, if the ghosts are floating around.
Concluding Thoughts
01:33:47
Speaker
And I think you could probably apply that to
01:33:51
Speaker
or at least a version of what a haunting or ghost story can be to most of Maria's work. You know, the ghost of who you once were and the decisions you made and the ramifications, the ghost of the people that have been a part of your life, whether they're alive or dead, still a part of your life or not. Yeah, there are hauntings throughout these novels and very much in some ways an argument that
01:34:18
Speaker
The past is never actually passed. Yes. And I think that it's it's almost.
01:34:26
Speaker
In some ways, it's almost a double entendre that victors a ghostwriter because that's what we call people that write in the name of someone else, but it's also this idea of having these secrets and these memories that just don't die, that just keep resurfacing.
01:34:52
Speaker
And both Louisa and Juan and Berta in some respects are ghosts in their own profession. Much like Louisa is the conduit, they're conduits in terms of what they are doing and what they are sharing and what they are getting across.
01:35:13
Speaker
And as we'll see in subsequent works, that becomes even more pronounced and even more of a motif in his work. Yeah, these are some of my favorite Moreas novels. I mean, I don't know. Maybe at the conclusion of our Moreas segment this summer, we maybe should try to go through the exercise of each ranking our favorites.
01:35:44
Speaker
Yeah, these two novels are just so enjoyable. I actually selected A Heart So White for our in-store book club, and I wasn't quite sure how it was going to go. A few years earlier than that, I also recommended
01:36:01
Speaker
the infatuations, which is also a mores title that we'll be talking about later on. But in both instances, everyone, you know, everyone loved them. And I think it says a lot that this author can can pull you into these complex psychological novels that really are not plot driven in a lot of ways. Right. But that
01:36:31
Speaker
The attention is still sustained in a deep way because you are so caught up in the psychologies of the characters. Yeah, absolutely. And on the in-store book club note, that is an incredibly stressful
01:36:52
Speaker
thing to do to choose which book is going to be. It is very easy to kill an in-store book club. I very successfully killed one at 57th Street Books almost, yeah, like 18 years ago. Do you want to divulge the title? Oh, yeah. No, that was, it was Europe Central by Bowman. That's a tough book. That was, it's a tough book. It's a long book. The book club was already hanging on by a thread. And man, I cut that thread.
01:37:21
Speaker
No one came to that one and no one was interested in doing a book club for quite some time after that. So yeah, it's a little bit more stressful than you think, deciding what book people are going to read and then show up to a public space and talk about. Well, it was great. It was great talking about these two novels with you, Tom, and I can't wait till our next episode with Berta.
01:37:44
Speaker
Yes. I'll be very, I'm very excited. Um, we're moving into a different part of Maria's career when we get to, uh, Berta Isla and then Thomas Evanson. Um, but, uh, they are still very much part of a piece with his other books and, um, it'll be actually be fun to talk a little bit about, I think some of the differences between, um, Berta and A Heart So White, Tomorrow, All Souls, et cetera. Um, so. All right. Thanks Tom. Thanks Lori.
01:38:17
Speaker
you