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Episode 8: "The Infatuations" and "The Man Of Feeling"
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A fun discussion this week of two novels published almost 30 years apart in The Infatuations and The Man of Feeling. We walk down some interesting paths and may get ourselves into a moral quandary or two (wouldn't be a discussion of Marías without some moral murkiness, now would it?).
These are the last two Marías novels we discuss before wrapping this season with a three episode discussion of that absolute beast: Your Face Tomorrow. A backlist episode next week and then we begin the deep dive. As always, thank you for listening.
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Music: “Estos Dias” by Enrique Urquijo
Logo design: Flynn Kidz Designs
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Transcript
Introduction to Lost in Redonda
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I'm Tom Flynn. I'm Lori Feathers. And welcome to Lost in Redonda.
Overview of Javier Marías's Novels
00:00:27
Speaker
So today for our Maria's discussion, we're going to be actually doing a little bit of his later career and something from quite early in his career, the infatuations and the man of feeling. We'll be starting off with the infatuations and then kind of weaving some of the themes for the man of feeling, I think, into that conversation.
00:00:50
Speaker
If I remember correctly, and I can probably just double check his bibliography, The Infatuations was the first novel that came out that he wrote post Your Face Tomorrow, which is interesting in that it's
00:01:06
Speaker
It definitely, I feel like it's marking a little bit of a switch, or switch is the wrong word, bit of a turn in how he's writing what his consider, what Maurice's considerations are. And it's really reflected what comes with Thus Bad Begins. The cast of characters is becoming more expansive. The infatuations is structured around really like two or three conversations, which is often true of his work. But there is a greater
00:01:35
Speaker
plot narrative, timespan even taking place here. And that's something I think we see much more pronounced in this work, Thus Bad Begins, Berta Isla, Nevinson, and so on. So I don't know what the still one would be there. I think I just rattled off all the last few books.
Plot and Themes of 'The Infatuations'
00:01:55
Speaker
Yeah, The Infatuations was published in Spain in 2011. And so yeah, I think that that does make it the book that came after, at least the novel, maybe there's some nonfiction works, but the novel that came after the third volume of Your Face Tomorrow.
00:02:15
Speaker
Yeah, I believe written lives, the collection of his observations of other famous writers, I believe New Directions brought that out after your face tomorrow, although my memory could be could be wrong about that. And that was, you know, pieces called from other places. Yeah, it's, I think a really
00:02:37
Speaker
intriguing book. I think we're moving into some interesting territory here. He's once again becoming more
00:02:47
Speaker
more preoccupied, I think, perhaps with crime and justice and what should be done when someone does something. Certainly that appears in the other works, but in much more of a moral sense. This has almost a, yeah, a retributive sense. Who do you denounce what happens next when you uncover some form of wrongdoing and not just someone behaving poorly or
00:03:15
Speaker
a woman dying in your arms and what do you owe her family for an explanation, but an actual an actual murder in this case is what really sets the action, all the action in motion. Yeah, I think that they I will say that in our discussion of my heart hemmed in, I confess that I had picked that for our store book club selection and it didn't go over so well.
00:03:45
Speaker
I can happily say that I picked the infatuations for another later bookstore discussion and it was fabulously popular to my joy because I think that it lays up some really intriguing themes about
00:04:04
Speaker
Well, just the premise, and I guess I'll lay it out there that a man who knows that he's terminally ill decides that he wants to die before he hopefully gets super, super ill and can't really function very well.
00:04:23
Speaker
And he wants to die, but he doesn't want to know the exact manner or date of his death. And then his accomplice in this endeavor has a...
00:04:38
Speaker
has a problem and those who know of what happened have a problem and are trying to sort through the fact of, well, if you were involved in a murder and you're not the one that held the weapon, or if you weren't directly involved in the actual killing,
00:05:00
Speaker
How culpable are you? And I think those are just themes that are juicy and intriguing and people like to talk about them and think about them.
00:05:13
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And interestingly, there is some Macbeth reference throughout the infatuations, but the work that he really goes to is the French this time. He brings up Balzac, but he also brings up the Three Musketeers, which is a fascinating choice for Maria to dig into. But very specifically, you know, Milady de Winter and her character and
00:05:41
Speaker
What are the demands? What does denunciation mean? What are the demands of justice for someone else to enforce a justice of some kind onto someone else?
Character Dynamics and Moral Dilemmas
00:05:53
Speaker
I will point out, though, that the terminal illness is one version of events or one suggested story. So to very quickly summarize, which I think I always say I'm going to do and then
00:06:09
Speaker
I don't remotely quickly do it quickly. It's hard to quickly summarize the plot in a Marais novel. Very, very much so. But in an attempt at that.
00:06:20
Speaker
Our narrator this time is Maria Doels. She works in a publishing house in Madrid and has some really amazing commentary about publishing, about writers, which I don't know. I feel like you could very much see Maria's holding some of these opinions of both how publishers work and how other writers are, or maybe even how he views himself as a writer.
00:06:44
Speaker
She, every morning, or just about every morning before work, she has breakfast at a cafe and observes this couple whom she refers to as the perfect couple. They seem relatively well to do. They seem very much in love and just in their own bubble, in their own world. And one day, they stop showing up.
00:07:02
Speaker
And she later finds out that the murder that she skipped reading about in the newspaper one day was actually his murder. His name is Miguel de Verne. He was part of a movie making family and a homeless man stabbed him to death as he exited his car one morning after getting breakfast with his wife.
00:07:25
Speaker
The book actually opens with Maria remarking on the fact that she saw him the exact same last time as his wife saw him living, and sort of the unfairness of that. Maria eventually meets the widow, Louisa, and in so doing, meets her friend, who's also the widow's friend, but also the best friend, seemingly, of Miguel, a man named Javier Diaz Varela. Diaz Varela and Maria,
00:07:54
Speaker
begin seeing each other. They talk a lot, but it seems to be primarily something of a passing fling, though for Maria, it's much more. She is quite taken with him.
00:08:08
Speaker
And I don't know, this is one of those unusual things that happens sometimes in Maria's novels where you can kind of see him telegraphing what's what's about to come. But it doesn't quite matter because he's so good at structure and such an interesting writer. Maria knows that Diaz Varela is in love with Louisa that his that he's constantly checking on her that it
00:08:31
Speaker
it can't just be a sense of duty to his past, to his lost friend, that also there's more there and that he is, yeah, that he's in some ways waiting for Louisa to get past her initial grief such that she notices him and moves on to him. But in her own infatuation and her own interest in, I'm just gonna call him, so I don't have to keep saying is, you know, what Maria's refers to as the double-barreled surname. I'm just gonna start calling him Javier.
00:09:00
Speaker
It occurs to her, Maria, that if Louisa died, that maybe then Javier would notice her and fall towards her, which then leads her to think, well, before Javier wouldn't have been the case that if Miguel had died, then Louisa would have opportunity to notice him and move on to him. And one evening while staying, while at Javier's apartment after they've had sex and she's fallen asleep, he gets a visitor.
00:09:28
Speaker
Um, a name named really buries who we've met before and tomorrow in the battle think on me and is also this subject, uh, the main character of the novella, uh, bad nature or with Elvis in Mexico who shows up. Uh, and.
00:09:44
Speaker
Javier and Rui Beriz have this conversation that she mostly overhears that very much seems to suggest that the homeless man who attacked Miguel, ostensibly because he was accusing Miguel of turning his daughters into prostitutes, that they in fact had somehow put him up to it. That it wasn't as random and out of knowers it seemed that there was a guiding hand of some sort behind this.
00:10:11
Speaker
This scene reminds me so much of A Heart So White.
00:10:15
Speaker
where you have someone in the bedroom, you know, kind of overhearing this discussion. In this case, it seems that maybe Javier really didn't want Maria to overhear this, but basically the secret is revealed through someone in another room overhearing something that maybe they should or should not, maybe they want to know or maybe they don't want to know.
00:10:43
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And interestingly, though, that reveal in A Heart So Light pretty much brings the novel to a close. I mean, that really is sort of the final action. This is the midpoint of the novel. And again, I think this marks some of the different things that Marius is doing. I mean, this novel, in some respects, has a bit of the
00:11:07
Speaker
the mystery element to it. Like it feels much more like a I'm going to investigate and uncover the truth behind this killing, which is even referenced in somewhat mocked at points throughout the novel that that sort of structure. And there there's even I mean, there is frankly, like a parlor scene at the end, but it's Javier giving away all the clues.
00:11:31
Speaker
So after overhearing this conversation, she does not see Javier for a couple of weeks. He calls her up and asks her over. And it's very clear when she gets there that he is going to try and tell her a story, that he realized that she overheard everything, or at least enough to have an opinion on what took place. And he's going to fill in some of the facts.
00:11:51
Speaker
He doesn't dispute any or really what she thinks took place, that Rui Berise and another intermediary, they planted a cell phone on this man and were calling him and telling him that this is what's happening with his daughters and who's responsible and so on and so on and got him a knife. But the turn here is that Javier claims that Miguel had been diagnosed with cancer, was metastasized throughout his body, that all the effects of it were going to be horrific, as you said.
00:12:21
Speaker
But the idea of committing suicide was completely impossible. He could not do that. The family doctor who actually gives the full diagnosis to Miguel is another character we've met before, Dr. Vidal, who in Thus Bad Begins is the one that explains to Juan all of Van Vetchen's treachery and evil doings in the past.
00:12:45
Speaker
It's really fun that these little Easter eggs and intermingling of stories, I mean, this universe he creates is what makes rereading him delightful. It isn't just the gorgeous prose, or at least for me, that's part of it. It isn't just the gorgeous prose and how expert he is. It's also just sort of the winks and nods and sort of the welcome into his head and this universe.
00:13:16
Speaker
So this is Javier's claim that he was asked by Miguel. He was told by Miguel that I have a month and a half to two months before the symptoms get bad. Find a way to kill me somewhere in that time. However you don't tell me how you're going to do it, don't tell me the day. Just I don't want to go through this or put my family through this. It would be better if I was dead, but I can't do it myself. I'm asking this of you, my friend. And that's what he does.
00:13:43
Speaker
Now, Maria, this and throughout this conversation is occasionally posing questions to him, which irritates the hell out of Javier because he's just trying to get this all out. But, um, she very much is picking up on the fact that this could be all complete BS. Like.
00:14:00
Speaker
This could be the story that he is telling her so that it's no longer, it's a assisted suicide. It is not a homicide or at the very least it is a death, not a murder, that he is not a murderer necessarily with everything that comes with that word.
00:14:17
Speaker
And I think we're left in kind of an ambivalent state there. I mean, she does run into Ruby Bereese later and it seems to act despite initially thinking that it was a setup that Ruby Bereese was looking for her to try and intimidate her and make sure she isn't, you know, having any thoughts about it. It does seem that he was trying to find her and run into her because he wanted to see her. There was a scene earlier where he saw her half naked and clearly liked how she looked. But Ruby Bereese even says that, you know, oh, wait, he told you about the sickness. And again, this could be
00:14:47
Speaker
this could be rebreeze maintaining an act, which seems unlikely, or what Javier told rebreeze to get him to go along with it. And the novel closes a couple of years later. She is, I believe, married at that point. She's at a restaurant still in publishing with a author that she keeps some scorn upon. And across the restaurant sees Javier and Louisa, but they are now the perfect couple. They are in their bubble.
00:15:15
Speaker
they seem to be fully enraptured with one another and moving through a world that doesn't have sharp edges. And she goes over not really sure what she's going to say. But Louisa sees her and pops up and says hello and you know, caught refers to her as the what was it the very proper young woman? No, it was that's
00:15:35
Speaker
Yes, that's what I think that's what Miguel called her because for so long, they were frequenting the same restaurant and would notice each other across the restaurant at different tables. But, you know, to to Maria, they were just the perfect couple. And to the perfect couple, Maria was just, yeah, I think that's the term that they use.
00:15:59
Speaker
And in that moment, she decides that she's not going to say anything. She's not going to reveal the fact that she had a relationship with Javier, that whatever his reasons, Javier had a hand in the death of Miguel, she decides to leave it, that she can't put herself in the position to decide
00:16:17
Speaker
how a crime should be adjudicated, how it should be dealt with, that these things are that there are the facts of what took place, but then there are the stories of why it took place and who is in way who is she to force her her story upon the story that Louisa is now engaged with. And this is one of the things that I think ties this so
Infatuation and Moral Questions
00:16:39
Speaker
much to Thus Bad Begins, to Berta Isla, to Thomas Nevinson is is
00:16:45
Speaker
How do you deal with wrongdoing? And not just a financial crime, not just being rude to a friend or a betrayal of some level, but very serious life-altering damage that one person inflicts upon another. How do you address that or redress that or don't you? Or do you just
00:17:10
Speaker
can sign it to the dead being the dead, and you continue to move along. And I'm not really sure where precisely it lands here. It certainly does not land in the same way that, say, Tupra and Nevinson, or at least Nevinson was for a while, landing that accounts need to be put right. It's much more of the, this is in some ways not my story to tell, not my story to be involved with any longer.
00:17:38
Speaker
Yeah, there's a phrase that's used in the book, and it's murder by instigation. And I really like that. That's an intriguing, intriguing kind of way to possibly depict what, what Habiar is responsible for here. And
00:17:57
Speaker
I also think it's very interesting to think about, I mean, I kind of put myself in Miguel's situation and would I ever sign up for this kind of weird death and what he kind of
00:18:20
Speaker
It seems to me like he was trying to straddle both a certain death, but the uncertainty of the circumstances. Right. There's a really great line, um, that I, I just, it's a turn of phrase that I've never, yeah, that you just don't encounter outside of like something like Maryse's writing. I didn't give him hope at the same time I did enough for him to be able to enjoy the saving grace of uncertainty. And that saving grace of uncertainty is just.
00:18:47
Speaker
That lands like a hammer below. That is such a beautiful way of, I mean, just thinking about how we all move through the world. Anything can happen at any moment, but we have to function as though the worst things are not going to happen. Because otherwise, how can you function in the world? Right. I mean, if you knew the exact time and date of your death, which is the premise of another novel,
00:19:14
Speaker
Not a Marais novel, but how would you act? Would that be a comfort to you or an amazing discomfort? And I have to feel like for most of us, it would be pretty horrible to know that fact. And that's kind of the grace of the uncertainty, I think, that he's referring to there.
Complex Relationships and Storytelling
00:19:35
Speaker
I also think it's interesting in this book how, of course, the title, the infatuations. Maria is infatuated with Javier, for sure. And Javier is infatuated with Louisa. But there's also Maria's infatuation with the perfect couple. There's a pretty nice buildup of this at the beginning of the book.
00:20:00
Speaker
She sees this couple practically every day while she goes in and has her cup of coffee and they're having breakfast and they're always laughing. They're always very engaged in conversation and with each other. I think this was before cell phones, but nonetheless, even if they had cell phones, you would think that they would probably not even look at their phones while they were together.
00:20:27
Speaker
They are just like totally absorbed with one another and Maria is kind of infatuated with that kind of connection that they have. Yeah, there's a lot of levels to this. And also, I mean, when you were commenting about the fact that there's a lot of cutting acerbic remarks about what a pain in the ass writers and authors can be and how they can be pompous.
00:20:57
Speaker
And, you know, maybe that's Maria's projecting. Well, he did name his narrator Maria. So, you know, maybe he's trying to show that she's not so, so far removed from what he really thinks about the same subject. I don't know.
00:21:15
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there's, there's this interesting, as you're saying, like this interesting notion of causality here, right? Like, and the cascade of infatuations and how they play one into the other. If Maria wasn't quite as infatuated with the perfect couple as she was, she would have walked up to Louisa after Miguel had died and she saw her again to offer condolences and would have been invited over to the house, which then began her infatuation with Javier.
00:21:42
Speaker
who was already in that show with Louisa, so perhaps it's just sort of this turtles all the way down sort of effect. And there's another line earlier, unlikely truths are useful and life is full of them, far more than the very worst of novels. No novel would ever dare give house room to the infinite number of chances and coincidences that can occur in a single lifetime, while all those have already occurred and continue to occur. It's quite shameful the way reality imposes no limits on itself.
00:22:10
Speaker
I mean, yes, he's talking certainly about crime and all that, or at least how to assign blame and what that blame means, I guess, in a way. That's a sloppy way of putting it, but that's trying to remove criminality. But he's also talking about the messiness of life and the messiness of life as it's contained or reflected in a novel. I mean, that's what he's been doing in a lot of his novels, and certainly that's what
00:22:39
Speaker
The Man of Feeling is a very messy life being explored. This is, in some ways, and this is going to sound like a capstone. I'm not trying to capstone this particular part of the conversation. But I feel like in the same way that All Souls would be a really great introduction to Maurice's work, so are the infatuations. I would not want someone to start with Us Bad Begins because I would rather them have a sense of how he writes and what he's doing so you can pick up on it a little bit better and Thus Bad or
00:23:08
Speaker
even a heart so white. But this is such a, there's so many of his concerns. And there's, yeah, there's so many of the things that he thinks about and that he tends to mull over in his novels present here that I think it makes for a really, and frankly, it's just it's an engaging plot, like,
00:23:30
Speaker
Who doesn't like a bit of a murder mystery, a bit of a figuring out what happened when? Yeah, there are different levels in terms of, you know, what what the truth is. But but I think with all of Maria's work and with this one is no exception. There's there's that that overlaying
00:23:54
Speaker
moral issue that's so much deeper than just, Oh, I got to find out what actually happened. You know, what's, what's the truth about how Miguel died? An interesting question, but not the most interesting question or the most profound question. Those are the ones that Maria is, is trying to suss out in terms of how much she wants to
00:24:21
Speaker
personally feel or blame Javier for Miguel's awful end. And I mean, it's not like the result was a peaceful death for Miguel. He was stabbed multiple times really brutally. And one has to think that
00:24:42
Speaker
when he tapped his buddy Javier on the shoulder, presumably, and said, hey, could you help me out with this little problem that I have? I'm going to die soon, but I want you to kill me before that, or have me killed before that.
00:24:57
Speaker
I don't think he was talking about dying in this horrific way, which was obviously extremely painful, but would also be very painful for his family, too. I mean, a bullet in the head's one thing, but this multiple stab wounds and bleeding out on the ground, which the newspapers apparently had pictures of, and yeah, not the way that anyone would want to go, I don't think.
00:25:25
Speaker
I mean, the pictures are something that Maria reflects on multiple times of how this was a incredibly well put together man who always dressed a certain way with a nod to the old fashioned, but at the same time, you know, not, not stodgy or anything. And for the last image of him to be on the ground with his cufflinks, you know, torn off of his shirt and exposed and tubes running into him as they try and stabilize and all those things, it just seemed that seemed
00:25:55
Speaker
a horror to her, both before she knew, when she saw the picture in the paper, she immediately had that thought for this person. But then once she knew that it was Miguel, she returns to it, I think, at least twice more in the novel. And then that's also in terms of the validity of the truthfulness of Javier's story. That's something that she kind of goes back to, is that if
00:26:19
Speaker
supposedly they worked on him for five hours to try and save his life. But in no mention of the write ups, does there say that they found cancerous growths throughout his body or any of these things. She's like, and if it's metastasized across his body, why wouldn't they say that? I mean, they might not say it because it's irrelevant to the story.
00:26:37
Speaker
He does a really nice job, Maria sub introducing a lot of ambiguities to it and putting it and eventually bringing Maria to a point that she states at the, at the very end of.
00:26:51
Speaker
As I said, I cared nothing for justice or injustice. What business were they of mine? For if Diaz Varela had been right about one thing, as had the lawyer Durville, this is a reference to the Balzac in this fictional world and in his time that does not pass and stays quite still, it was this. Far more crimes go unpunished than punished, not to speak of those we know nothing about or that remain hidden, for there must inevitably be more hidden crimes than crimes that are known about and recorded.
00:27:16
Speaker
I think in a certain way, it's coming back to the fact that Miguel's dead and how things progress from there in terms of I think there's more of a weighing up of what would be just here.
00:27:27
Speaker
Would it be just to reopen all these, reopen the wounds and throw this all back to Louisa after she's moved on with her life? Is it so pressing that Javier, if he did commit this, be brought to, and he even says, you know, the reasons wouldn't matter to a court of law, you know, what we did, you know, the facts of it would, would be sufficient. Um, doesn't matter to,
00:27:54
Speaker
have him jailed or held accountable and not get his happily ever after, as it were, does that matter more than what Louise's life would be like moving forward?
00:28:07
Speaker
I just have to, um, not that anyone can accuse us of not being a plaudatory toward Moreus on this podcast, but, um, I think this book in particular just shows a really extraordinary imagination on the part of this author. You know, I'm, I'm just kind of thinking about, I don't know how he worked exactly, whether, you know, he had,
00:28:32
Speaker
a whole notebook of novel ideas that he would like, you know, ruminate on for a decade before actually putting pen to paper on any of them or
00:28:43
Speaker
whether it was, okay, it's time to write a new novel. Hmm, what should this one be about? But just to kind of explore these really complex ambiguous moral questions in a way, I mean, I really couldn't think of a better setup.
00:29:06
Speaker
for the exploration of these kind of questions than the one that he gave us. And I'm not quite sure. I mean, I don't read every book that's ever printed, but this just seems like a really unique way of looking at the existential question of life and death and and what who's good and who's bad. And yeah, it's it's just brilliant. Absolutely. I mean, I think
00:29:31
Speaker
I mean, I also think that what's interesting, I had a text exchange with some friends the other day about, you know, not speaking ill of the dead or some such thing. And I don't think that's such a big deal, personally, mostly because I don't think things should, we should ignore the worst things about people simply because they're dead. But the larger point, I think, and I think this is something that maybe Maria is infected in me or I came to a similar, I don't think that Maria cares what the dead think.
00:30:00
Speaker
For him, they are dead. Their concern, their consideration is no longer...
00:30:09
Speaker
a valid one. Their story has ended. The facticity of their life is over. So it's really much more about what the living need or care about or make decisions around. Yeah, I think there's an element to his moral philosophy, if you can call it that, that
00:30:31
Speaker
what someone wants or would want stops mattering the moment they cease to a certain degree, which is, I don't think often reflected elsewhere. I can't think of too many other novelists who would take that position or at least utilize it in their writing the way he does. And, you know, if the if the idea of the perfect couple here is not fraudulent, then you would think that Miguel would have a
00:30:58
Speaker
above and beyond anything else wanted to do what was best for Louisa, knowing that she was going to be left behind. And that's a good question. I mean, was this what a kind of a slow agonizing death where she had opportunity to, you know,
00:31:21
Speaker
for a long goodbye would that have been better for her than this horrible stabbing or even if it what didn't end in stabbing maybe it would have been like a nice silent quick poisoning a la agatha christie but but even so i mean is that
00:31:40
Speaker
I don't know how much he was thinking about her in making this decision. If the story did really go down the way Javier is telling us it went down. But then even pushing it a little bit further, let's say that Javier is completely full of it, and that he is lying to Maria. And he has taken the two weeks between her overhearing this, him figuring out that she heard it, and coming up with a story that he could use, or a story he already did use with Ruby Berese.
00:32:10
Speaker
I mean, this is gonna sound like I'm arguing for a murderer, but wouldn't Miguel, rather Louisa, be happy and be cocooned once again in perfect couple-dumb than
00:32:24
Speaker
looking over her shoulder the rest of her life at all of her friendships because her husband's closest friend murdered him in order to be closer to her. According to Javier's story, Miguel wanted to die like this so that he didn't suffer and so that his family didn't suffer. Well, he's dead now and Javier is providing that sucker for his wife and has recreated what she previously had
00:32:53
Speaker
life moves on no longer for Miguel. So maybe this, maybe in having died, Miguel would rather this outcome than Javier behind bars. Who knows?
00:33:24
Speaker
Wow, we really went on a journey on that particular thought process.
00:33:29
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's the kind of book that just makes you, you know, you think about it long after you finish reading it because it's just it's just a great puzzle of a novel.
Exploration of 'The Man of Feeling'
00:33:41
Speaker
But maybe we should talk about the man of feeling a little bit and and kind of what it's doing that might be a little bit similar or a little bit different from some of the other moreus novels that we've spoken about on the show so far.
00:33:57
Speaker
Sure. The Man of Feeling is from much earlier Emerius's career. I believe it's his fourth novel. It was published in Spain in 1986.
00:34:09
Speaker
I mean, so I probably first read this book in like 2000. I first read it in probably 2004 or so. Laurie can see me because we have video on this, but I'm looking at the label on the back of it from the store I worked at the time and I can still read the labels to see when books came in and all that. Because for some reason I can't remember Latin anymore. I can still read barcode labels from, you know, almost 20 years ago now.
00:34:34
Speaker
So what I was going to say about that is that it was written in 1986. I read it in the early 2000s and reread it for this. And it's remarkable how modern it feels. I mean, this could be a story that's taking place right now in so many ways.
00:34:53
Speaker
I think it certainly feels like an early work. He's definitely trying. A lot of the themes are still there. There is an interweaving of some Shakespeare, but this time via opera. His style is certainly, and his ability to undercut
00:35:14
Speaker
the narrator and how trustworthy the narrator might be is certainly really already well developed here. It is functionally the recounting of a dream by someone who
00:35:29
Speaker
periodically claims that he can remember with perfect clarity what someone said. And then a few pages later say, I think this is basically what the person was saying. And that this is, again, his memory of a dream, which is in itself a reflection of events that took place four years previously. So a lot of fun metatextual layers that he's drawing in there. Do you want to give a stab at a quick summary there, Laurie? Maybe you do a better job than I do.
00:35:58
Speaker
I'm not sure. I will. But I'll try. The narrator here, as Tom suggested, is an opera singer. So he's constantly traveling to foreign cities and singing in operas. And he's kind of on the road a lot. We're told at the opening that he had a fear of flying, which he's now overcome.
00:36:28
Speaker
But he's kind of recounting this story to us because he's just woken from a dream that brought all of this stuff back that happened four years ago when he was performing Othello in Madrid. And on his way to Madrid, he was in a train and he was sitting across from three people and none of these people were engaging with him. It was
00:36:58
Speaker
a guy looking out the window and a woman that was asleep and another gentleman. He didn't really understand what the relationship was, but that evening he's at the bar of the
00:37:16
Speaker
hotel where he's staying in Madrid, drinking his milk, which I guess he does as an opera singer. And one of the guys, the guy that was looking out the window, a guy who introduces himself as Dotto says, Hey,
00:37:31
Speaker
you were on my train and they kept, you know, they engage in a conversation and Dotto learns that the narrator's in the opera, a fellow that's going to be playing in a couple of weeks in Madrid. And Dotto kind of suggests that he and the woman who was asleep on the train, her name is Natalia Manure,
00:37:55
Speaker
start hanging out together. And Natalia is married to Senor Menor. I'm not sure they ever tell us what his first name is. Maybe they do. He was a Belgian gentleman and kind of a banker, a Belgian banker, very, very busy all the time. And Datto explains that
00:38:13
Speaker
He's basically Natalie's handler. He travels around with them and a senior manure is constantly doing business. Hardly has time to say hi to his wife. He's busy, busy, busy all the time, going here, going there.
00:38:31
Speaker
and she's bored so he kind of hangs out with her and he's also in some ways a substitute brother for her because she has a brother Monte who recently moved to South America and so she's missing him and so what we learn is how
00:38:52
Speaker
the narrator and Natalia kind of started doing things together, exploring the city, doing things that the opera singer-narrator really had never done before in all of his travels because he just never feels really comfortable in the places that he travels to, and he's kind of a loner. We learned that back home in Barcelona, he's got a lady friend, her name is Berta,
00:39:22
Speaker
probably, I don't know, that might be the first Berta we hear about in Montereyas, but definitely not the last. And he's not that in love with Berta, but he becomes more and more infatuated with Natalia. And as he learns more about Natalia and her life, he learns what an ogre Senor Manor is. And at one point, Senor Manor kind of confronts the opera singer.
00:39:49
Speaker
kind of like a stay away from my wife, you're becoming way too interested in her and she's mine and hands off. That kind of then culminates in a separation that happens where Natalia goes off with the opera singer for
00:40:09
Speaker
period of time. I think that the novel really kind of explores in a lot of ways how the opera singer feels like he's so very different from Signor Manure but maybe isn't. Yeah, there's in that conversation between Manure and the narrator, there's a
00:40:31
Speaker
He makes a comment saying that the opera singer is not the first person to have begun to get close to Natalia, but that I've waited 15 years for my wife to love me. You've just arrived or something like that. And there's a very.
00:40:48
Speaker
hold and clinical feel to how manure talks and how he engages. But that kind of peek behind the curtain of what he's waiting for, what he's hoping for, I thought was really interesting. And well, I'm just one of those things that
00:41:07
Speaker
I think throughout his books, Maurice is very good at in terms of adding complexity and layers to characters that you may only meet for, only hear from in person for a few pages, but they have, they're a whole person. They have dimensionalities that you'll never fully know or have time to explore, which is quite impressive. I think that, I feel like the narrator kind of at least thwarts my expectations because
00:41:34
Speaker
At first, you think that, oh, what could this cold Belgian banker, Signor Manour, have in common with someone whose life is the arts, you know, and is a very cultured person. But actually, the narrator is a rather
00:41:56
Speaker
cold person himself. And although he is interested in Natalia, there's, until the assignation between he and Natalia, which she precipitates, not him, you really don't feel that there's any lust or passion or, yeah, it's just, it's just very cold and clinical, which, which I thought was a really interesting character study and not what I expected.
00:42:25
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's certainly reflected in his relationship with Berta. I mean, when he describes her, it's very, I mean, it almost feels like he's always describing her from behind, you know, like, this is what she looks like rolled over at night.
00:42:40
Speaker
I mean, Berta appears as more than just his previous love. He eventually gets a letter from Berta's husband, her husband in the last 18 months, that Berta had died. And she'd taken a fall down, he describes a particular kind of building in a Barcelona house that they call towers, and she'd taken a fall down the stairs and was clearly badly banged up, but seemed to be okay.
00:43:08
Speaker
And then a week later, a few nights later, the husband wakes up to find her dead, having bled out through the night clearly of internal bleeding that the doctor had missed, etc. And his reaction to it is kind of bland. Like, he doesn't feel...
00:43:26
Speaker
there's no like, summoning up of old emotion of what brought him and burn her together in the first place now that she's dead. And then there's a later letter from the husband where he's, you know, asking, What do you want done with all these books of yours that, you know, that she still had? Because if you don't respond, I'm going to burn them. And he reflects that the narrator reflects that the husband is trying to get away from
00:43:48
Speaker
what is his responsibility having become her husband, which is just like my guy, like his wife just died. He's trying to figure some things out. That's a really weird response to have.
00:43:59
Speaker
I think that's one of my favorite parts of the book where the widower, Nagur, writes this letter with a huge inventory of stuff that he perceives were part of Berta and the narrator's life together. It's not just books. It's all kinds of stuff in really particular
00:44:26
Speaker
detail, the descriptions, and you just kind of visualize this guy. And I don't know, maybe this part of Nagore is like working through his grief that he's like making this long itemized list of all of his his wife's stuff. But yeah, you're absolutely right. The narrator couldn't care less and doesn't really feel any attachment
00:44:52
Speaker
to Berta, let alone to Berta's things or things that they might have shared or purchased together in their life together. But he's also such a liar because when he reflects on how Berta died,
00:45:07
Speaker
he says you know clearly the husband isn't like me who would have stayed up all night watching her making sure that everything is okay despite the fact that she didn't die immediately so it's not maybe he did do that the first night but this is several nights later when she does die but also later on
00:45:24
Speaker
he reflects the narrator reflects on the fact that he needs to take sleeping drops to sleep because he doesn't get eight hours of sleep and he's no good and all this sort of thing but the way it structured it sounds like he's often had to do this isn't just a recent development so
00:45:39
Speaker
If he needs his eight hours and he and he would be taking something to put him out, there's no way in hell he could have been watching over Berta, making sure she was fine and catching the first instance of her starting to die. So I mean, like, yes, he is cold and he doesn't seem to have much emotion, which, of course, plays into the title of a man of feeling, but he also just doesn't have
00:46:02
Speaker
He doesn't have much self awareness, it feels like as well. There's another time in the book earlier on where he's talking about sleeping with Berta. And, you know, she sleeps on her side. So her back is usually towards him. And he talks about this, like,
00:46:19
Speaker
I'm paraphrasing that the sense of abandonment he feels when someone that you are in bed with has fallen asleep and they're no longer caring about you or conscious of you or know whether you
00:46:36
Speaker
or alive or dead. Yeah, he's definitely someone that seems to have this, the dream and the sleeping in the dream state play a big role here. And I do think that there's a melding between like, okay, how much of this is a dream and how much of it actually occurred? Because there are times when
00:47:03
Speaker
you almost come to believe that the dream was just like almost like an exact memory you know of like what happened and then other times it's kind of like oh well that was part of the dream but didn't really happen so it's I think there's an intentional ambiguity there.
00:47:21
Speaker
Yeah, there are definitely ways in which Marius could have played up some of those elements if he'd wanted to. The staginess of some of it, like the exact movement of from one person coming by to the next person coming by to this conversation, building on that conversation and all of those elements to it. And he definitely, I think he keeps it, like you said, sort of walking in between those two states. So you're never quite
00:47:49
Speaker
You're never quite sure where this is going and how much you can trust what he's relaying to you. I was also going to say that one of the things we've talked about a bit, and this came up quite a bit with regards to Nevinson, is that it seems that this narrator can't read people. He can't see, as it's often put, the way that a tupra or
00:48:12
Speaker
Peter Wheeler or frankly, Alberta Isla could see. And I would even suggest perhaps Maria in the infatuations is able to tease out what someone is and what they might be capable of and also what they will do in the future. He's very much in the moment or even stuck in the past. I mean, there is some talk, he does refer to himself as a poor relation that he was taken in by an uncle after his mother died, but he never
00:48:38
Speaker
he never got anything nice. He had an off-brand toothpaste while everyone else had Colgate. He'd be presented with a bill for expenses, that sort of thing. So there is certainly an undercurrent and some conversation of his eventual rise. I mean, he is an opera singer on the up, but he does talk about during this period that he's relaying some of the older singers and
00:49:05
Speaker
their concern for their standing in the world and a really amazing scene of a singer eventually losing his mind and joining the audience because he must always have a packed house and he's looking out before the performance and there's one empty seat and he lets out a sound that even though all these people are surrounded by opera singers they can't describe what it was and he goes out and sits in the seat and then insists the performance begin which is just a wonderful like just
00:49:33
Speaker
such an amazing scene, like walking this incredible, incredible tightrope between sadness and hilarity that is just, yeah, really, really impressive. He is very much, it seems, surface. And yeah, it's interesting to see that, it's interesting to see that here in this novel and then in the subsequent ones, at least the next run that he got, that Marius goes on, all of his characters, always all of his narrators are, are not that. They all see very deeply.
00:50:03
Speaker
They all think and feel and very complex and almost trying to prognosticate the world. Frankly, prognosticate the past, present, and future. Whereas maybe it's because he's relaying a dream and there's more to him than this, I get the feeling that's not the case. I get the feeling that this is how this person would move through the world.
00:50:25
Speaker
Well, I want to ask you a question about the man of feeling, or maybe more appropriately, the man of unfeeling here. I mentioned the assignation that happens where Datto conveys a note or a message to the narrator saying, hey, meet Natalia at 5 PM at this crummy hotel across the street. She's leaving her husband. And so the narrator does, and they're together for a while.
00:50:54
Speaker
And the narrator talks about that now Natalia is kind of with someone being himself for reasons that are her own and she's got freedom and control and self-will where she never had it with Senor Manure. And then we learn that Senor Manure is quite ill and Natalia runs off
00:51:24
Speaker
and kind of goes to be at his bedside while he's dying. And I'm wondering, do you think that, I don't know, I kind of think that this narrator was just as controlling as Señor Menor, maybe not as cruel, but they just seem so much of a type, you know, dandies and so self-absorbed and not really caring about anyone else and having to have everything their own particular way.
00:51:53
Speaker
I just I thought that was a little bit ironic and maybe a wink when. When the narrator is going through this kind of you know kind of justification almost that you know Natalia is better off with me because you know she's got all this freedom now that she never had.
00:52:10
Speaker
right and then the next four years or so of her life are following him around from city to city to city yes i mean maybe she wanted to travel more maybe that but we don't ever hear that from her this is who she's with now and this is how they they live and and yeah no i mean i think that's more a reflection of what he thinks that
00:52:30
Speaker
he is achieving through being with Natalia, that this is what's next. And it's probably what he thought when he, when he first, you know, linked up with Burda. I mean, there, can you be an emotional social climber? I think, I think in some ways, that's, that's what, that's what he's doing. He's moving from, from what he thinks is the right outward manifestation, representation of where he is in the world to the next, to the next, to the next.
00:52:54
Speaker
Um, though he does seem fairly bereft by a novel's end that Natalia has left him as well. Um, very suddenly with no real warning, just like she did with, although Menorah had the sense that that could happen. The narrator does not present that he necessarily had that sense that was happening. He's not acknowledging it at least. At the very least he's not saying that. And again,
00:53:16
Speaker
I don't know how much we should trust what he says or what he actually thinks or certainly how he presents the series of events. I mean, and Menor does, as I said, state that he is hoping for his wife to fall in love with him. He's married in Natalia, frankly, as a business deal. The marriage was a way for him to bail out Natalia's family's company or basically something along those lines.
00:53:43
Speaker
Yeah, specifically her brother. Her brother Monte was in financial trouble. So it's not a love match, obviously. And when she does leave him, Minoru shoots himself. He misses, but that's what puts him in the hospital, and eventually he dies from his injuries. Do we think the narrator that is what is in his future?
00:54:05
Speaker
I think the novel gives us maybe some suggestion that that could be the case. I'm not so sure. I don't think that that's the type of person he is. I think he will move on to the next person. Maybe that sounds a little harsh, but I'm not. But again,
00:54:20
Speaker
This is all from his perspective from a dream that may be informed by memories that a dream of which is in fact in itself informed by memories. It's all it's so much murkier than so many of Maria's work and and it's not exactly like the other works are terribly straightforward in their in their presentation of the facts of the world.
00:54:43
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting. I can't quite pinpoint it and I was wondering because I read this book for the first time, Tom, to prepare for our podcast today. I'd never read it before. And everything about this book really reminded me of Ishiguro, Akazio Ishiguro work. And maybe it's because of the unconsoled and that's a pianist, you know, a kind of a
00:55:08
Speaker
an artist that's traveling to a different country to put on a concert. And there's a lot of ambiguity between what the dream world of the protagonist is and what's really happening. But yeah, I just I couldn't help think about that novel. But also, you know, just even in this very early work, and you can see that
00:55:32
Speaker
But there are some things that I'm sure if Maria said, if this had been Maria says last work before he died, this novel would be quite different, because he just wrote, I think, differently, we can see over time, but
00:55:47
Speaker
that the ambiguity and the deep complexity of the situations and the characters are all here. The seeds of that career are here even in this very early, maybe fourth book that he ever wrote. I think maybe two of the first four haven't ever even been translated into English.
00:56:11
Speaker
No, they haven't. El Siglo and then Domino Reynard, The Kingdom of the Wolf, something like that. And I believe the next book after this one was All Souls. So that marks a really interesting evolution from one book to the next. But yeah, I mean, certainly his style is already strongly there. I think it gets stronger, the sort of tripping clause work that he likes to do, the meandering down a thought process. It just becomes even more after this one.
00:56:41
Speaker
Now it's, it's an, I think it's a really good novel. And like I said, it feels like the kind of thing that could still be written, could be written today and be felt as very fresh and very engaging. But I think it's also one scene against like his whole body of work, a sign of what's to come. And fun, a fun thing, a great thing for a completist. And also it's short. It's 180 some odd pages. It's one you could actually read beside the pool if you're so inclined to
00:57:10
Speaker
read Javier Marias beside the pool, which is what I've been doing a lot lately because it's summer break and the kids need to get to some activity somehow. But yeah, it's, it's one I think about a lot. It's interesting rereading it after so long. Um, my memory of it was how much I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it a lot, right? At least I enjoyed the character a lot less than I remember the first time around. Um, but that also could have been the rush of excitement of encountering a voice for the first time.
00:57:39
Speaker
It's interesting you use the term completist because I was about to say, I wouldn't put this in that category where people say, this one's only for the moreus completist. I think I would say that I wouldn't start with this book. It wouldn't be the first moreus that I would put in someone's hands, but I certainly think it's, it's well worth the read, even if, even if you're not a completist. Sure. I mean, I think all of Maria's work is.
00:58:06
Speaker
worth the read. So I'm not using, I guess I'm not using completeness in the sense of like, only if you really want to read everything. I think you should read everything by Maria's. But but yes, I was very much agree that like, this can be one of the ones that would come in at the tail end of like, you do not need to get to this one first, you should get to this one, but you also don't. There's also probably shouldn't be the last one you read a few of the other ones should be the last one you read. So
00:58:34
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. Good discussion, Tom. Thanks. Thanks.