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Episode 1: a welcome; backlist spotlist: "John Crow's Devil" by Marlon James; an introduction to Spanish author Javier Marias
146 Plays1 year ago
Welcome to Lost in Redonda from Lori Feathers and Tom Flynn. Over the course of this podcast we will explore backlist gems and discuss the career of the late Spanish novelist Javier Marías, King of Redonda.
In this introductory episode we say hello, spend a good while chatting about Marlon James' debut novel, John Crow's Devil, and begin our discussion of Marías' life and career.
Books mentioned in this episode:
- Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
- Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor
- The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
- The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa
- Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
- The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy
Please subscribe to our Substack to keep up to date with new episodes, a developing catalog of backlist connections, and more.
Music: “Estos Dias” by Enrique Urquijo
Logo design: Flynn Kidz Designs
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Transcript
Introductions and Podcast Overview
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Lost in Redonda. My name is Tom Flynn. I'm a former bookseller, recently published for And Other Stories, publishing out of the UK. And Avid Reader would be one way of putting it, I suppose. And I'm joined by Lori Feathers.
00:00:37
Speaker
Hi, I'm Lori Feathers. I am co-host of the podcast Across the Pond. I'm a bookstore owner in Dallas, Texas, and also the book buyer there. I am chair of a new literary prize for small publishers, the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and just a big reader overall. And Tom, it's really wonderful to join you on this new joint venture we have.
Focus on Backlist Titles
00:01:05
Speaker
Yeah, I'm really quite excited. So Lori and I worked together while I was at another stories putting.
00:01:14
Speaker
One of my people one of my authors and I think we'll you should have another one coming up soon Onto her podcast across the pond. She also hosted the author Robin McLean at her store in Tarabang Yeah, so that's how we kind of really cross paths we also have a lot of friends in common in the bookselling world and
00:01:40
Speaker
Yeah, the the idea, Laurie proposed the idea of us working on a podcast together and we, you know, noodle some ideas around. And now we have this, which you might be wondering, what what is this? And frankly, that's a question we're someone asking ourselves as well. But
00:01:58
Speaker
sort of the long and short of it is this is a podcast about books, but more specifically, books that we think folks need to be paying a good deal, a good bit more attention to, in particular, backlist titles.
00:02:13
Speaker
The structurally, what we'll be doing is each podcast, the first portion will be a discussion about a title that one of us suggested to the other. On today's podcast, we'll be talking about John Crow's Devil, the debut novel from Marlon James. This was Laurie's suggestion to me. And yeah, we'll just be digging into
00:02:36
Speaker
important books that we think folks should talk about quite a bit more. Often translation, often from small presses, and often ones that we think have kind of fallen by the wayside to a certain degree. And yeah, I'm excited for it. We've actually already recorded the conversation around John Crow's devil. And I have to say it was some of the most fun I've had talking about a book in a while. So I hope all y'all listening will agree as well.
00:03:04
Speaker
And then the back half will be a discussion, a longer discussion, a multi-episode discussion of the writer Javier Marias. Yeah. I think that we wanted to kind of highlight
00:03:20
Speaker
backlist titles, Tom, and by backlist titles, if you're not familiar with the bookseller term, it just means older books. It doesn't have to be ancient books, but books that aren't on the front table of the bookstore anymore. But those books often get relegated to
00:03:43
Speaker
not even being on the shelf. They go out of print, frankly. And many times, they just really shouldn't. There's so many great books that just because of the publishing cycle and how many books are published per year, you can't get to all of them. And so they fall by the wayside. They don't get the big publicity or they're not widely reviewed, perhaps, or maybe they were, but
00:04:07
Speaker
for some reason they've just gone off people's radar screen. I think this particularly happens sometimes when an author isn't constantly coming up with a novel every three or four years or more frequently that sometimes you forget about them. We all do. And there are just some
00:04:27
Speaker
many, many gems out there that really deserve to be talked about more. And some of those are ones like John Crow's Devil by Merlin James that have just kind of been eclipsed by his later works and the great publicity and acclaim that they've received. But we thought it'd be fun just to draw attention for listeners to some of those books that we think deserve another look.
00:04:55
Speaker
Yeah, and as bookstore people, and I mean, I was a buyer in my previous life, life at different stores.
00:05:03
Speaker
We know that Backlist forms, in many ways, the spine of the store. I mean, you can go into a bookstore and look at what books you have on the shelf and get a real sense of not only the taste of the buyer and the booksellers there, but also the interest of the community. It's very reflective and a good store. It's very reflective of what the customers want to see, but also what the booksellers want to put in front of them.
00:05:26
Speaker
And, you know, bookselling being retail, there is often a decent bit of turnover within a store. So you actually get multiple generations of booksellers and their tastes reflected in a store. And it really tells the story of a bookstore and the story, a certain story of publishing. And yeah, I mean, Laurie and I are two people who very much value backlist and
00:05:52
Speaker
the serendipity that can happen in a store as you wander their shelves and their stacks and this is one of the ways a good way we think of us.
00:06:02
Speaker
you know, engaging with that and kind of expressing our love for it. And, you know, to be frank, Laurie and I have somewhat, it seems, similar reading interests, but we've already suggested books to one another that the other just hadn't read, had no awareness of. And I think that's fun. I think that sense of discovery is really, you know, one of the best parts of a life in reading. And I'm very excited to dig into it and chat with you about it,
Substack and Book Listings
00:06:32
Speaker
Laurie.
00:06:32
Speaker
Yeah, and Tom, I guess we'll be letting people see not only the titles that we talk about, but a little bit of a preview about what's coming up on our substack channel, correct? That's correct. So that will be in the podcast notes. You'll be able to click there and see what's coming up. One of the other things that we will be doing on the substack is
00:06:54
Speaker
creating something of a matrix of the titles we talk about. As booksellers, it's almost impossible for us to talk about a book without relating it to other books. So as we dig into these various titles, we will also be bringing up the books that kind of come to mind or that we feel resonate with them. And I don't know, I think it'll make for a really interesting
00:07:16
Speaker
an interesting approach and visual way of thinking about books, thinking about how they intersect. And I'm really looking forward to when the same book appears in different episodes and how that then kind of creates a six degrees of Kevin Bacon across backlist titles.
00:07:35
Speaker
Yeah, I love just following some of those rabbit trails that is the most exciting thing about reading, if you ask me, is just kind of how one book will lead to another and you'll just kind of get lost in
00:07:51
Speaker
and perhaps not even remember why you even started reading a particular author or looking at a particular theme because you'll be nine books down the road already. It's just a wonderful serendipitous thing and we thought it would be fun to try to kind of put some plot points on there so that you could maybe follow some titles and see how one title begets another, I guess. Absolutely.
00:08:21
Speaker
Yeah, that's been that's led to some of the best reading experiences of my life, just even knowing that, I mean, knowing that certain writers are friends, and then suddenly you read the other author that, you know, you have an author you love, you read their friends book, it's a wildly different book, but all of a sudden, it's opened up this whole new genre or a whole new approach to writing to you. Yeah, it's, it's a really wonderful experience. And
00:08:45
Speaker
Yeah, I think we're going to have a
Discussion of 'John Crow's Devil'
00:08:47
Speaker
lot of fun on this. I think we're going to go in some interesting directions. I think it'll be very interesting when we come across a book that one of us recommends that the other doesn't really enjoy as much. I think that hasn't happened yet, but it's early days. But yeah, it's going to be an interesting journey we're going to go on. And we're hoping that you all enjoy it and join us for it. Absolutely. Looking forward to it.
00:09:15
Speaker
Alright, so in just a moment we're going to be talking about John Crow's Devil by Marlin James. Talk to you guys in a second.
00:09:39
Speaker
So the first recommendation was mine to recommend to you to read the book by Marlon James. It's his debut work. It's called John Crow's Devil. And I think you read it. So tell me what you thought.
00:09:56
Speaker
I'm actually, in a way, so terribly mad I haven't read this before. So one of the ways we did this was we sent each other a list of just backlist titles and kind of pick out which ones we haven't read or which ones jump out at us. And I mean, frankly, I've always meant to read Merlin James and I just hadn't done it. So this seems like a fantastic opportunity to do so.
00:10:20
Speaker
This is a shockingly good book. I mean, for this to be a debut is really, frankly, mind-blowing. I mean, this ranks among the top debut novels I've ever encountered that I've ever heard of. And yeah, I'm frustrated I hadn't read it before. It's the kind of book that can shape future reading in such a significant way. And I'm pretty much going to be
00:10:50
Speaker
running off to the store to get all the rest of his books. Yeah, it's an incredible novel. Incredibly, I mean, just so assured in its structure. His pacing is phenomenal. He does this really
00:11:13
Speaker
There's so many things to dig into this one, but I mean, one of the things that struck me about two-thirds of the way through is that the novel was speeding up and not just in the sense of the action and the movement and building to a climax, but even how the prose was working seemed to be accelerating.
00:11:34
Speaker
And in some ways, I think he was using a little bit less dialect as it moved along, or that he'd done the balance of dialect and non-dialect descriptive language in such a way that the reader flowed with it that much faster, so that as the action picked up and as more and more was revealing itself, and that in and of itself is amazing, the fact that it continues to peel back like an onion.
00:11:59
Speaker
Yeah, it's a really incredible, really, I'll say this too, really difficult, really upsetting, but really incredible novel. Well, maybe we should back up a little bit and tell the readers the basic premise of the book. So it's a town in Jamaica, which is where Marlon James is from. And they are kind of...
00:12:26
Speaker
I would say it feels like it's an insular town to me, but they have a preacher, they nickname him the Rum Preacher, who is the preacher at the local church that everyone goes to on Sunday mornings, and he's basically a drunk. And he doesn't do a good job of preaching or kind of counseling his congregation or anything.
00:12:54
Speaker
He's always drunk and he humiliates himself too in the community, shows up half dressed and passed out. And then one day this guy came, a self-proclaimed apostle and just
00:13:12
Speaker
comes into the church almost like a superhero, like ultra powerful, and just comes in and takes over the church, kicks out the rum preacher, and really casts a spell on this small community. Yeah. I mean, one of the things in the early part of the novel that is said is that Bligh does not
00:13:41
Speaker
Well, I does not cast judgment upon the town that has, you know, his flock that me, frankly, most of whom aren't coming to church and weren't even really coming to church when he got there. But we're certainly not very much coming to church after he established himself to be an alcoholic. I mean, more than alcoholic. I mean, like a straight up drunk who was showing up to funerals and services, three sheets, falling asleep in the street, et cetera. But
00:14:09
Speaker
He wasn't casting any judgment on them for what they were doing for their infidelities for. Frankly their faithlessness as far as that could be extended and the same way they tolerated ending cast too much judgment upon him it was just more or less an acceptance of a.
00:14:28
Speaker
a really stagnant status quo. I mean, I think to describe this town as a bit of a backwater would be a good way of putting it. And there is that sort of marshy stillness at the outset of the novel that it really starts to change over time. So the pastor's name is Pastor Bly. Apostle York shows up. And it's made very clear that there's something
00:14:56
Speaker
Yeah, supernatural about him. It's said right from the beginning that York wears these red and black robes and has this unkempt hair, but there's no wind and yet his robes are billowing and his hair is wet back.
00:15:15
Speaker
And York shows up, beats the hell out of the preacher, calls an abomination anti-Christ, throws him into the street. And that sort of shocking moment starts to energize and bring people in just to see what this new thing is about. And there is a charisma and a attraction that York is bringing to them. And slowly but surely, he creeps them further and further away from
00:15:45
Speaker
frankly, a belief in Jesus to a belief in York. And the effects on the town, this shift into a much more cult-like atmosphere is really intense, really something. But Bly doesn't just disappear. Bly is in many ways reborn by this and starts to become quite the counterpoint to what York is doing.
Themes in 'John Crow's Devil'
00:16:15
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, one of the neat things about this novel is that it isn't just a examination of faith. I mean, it's also an examination of misogyny, of abuse. I looked at some of the reviews of the novel after I finished that came out at the time. And there's a lot of discussion of this as also an examination of post-colonial Jamaica and the effects of colonialism
00:16:45
Speaker
on a society. And I mean, I don't know enough about that to really speak to it. But I think that points to how much Marilyn James accomplishes in this novel, that it's almost got a little bit of an urtext quality to it, where everything is there. I mean, whatever you want to pull out of it is available to you. Yeah. Yeah.
00:17:08
Speaker
I think that's right. I find it interesting. You've got this bigger than life character, the apostle, and then you've got Pastor Bly, the rum preacher.
00:17:24
Speaker
also a major character, but the depiction of the town as a community and then also individual members, I think is really interesting. There's a sentence early on in the book where it talks about, why did the community tolerate this drunk preacher for so long? And it's something along the lines that
00:17:50
Speaker
Well, if he was drunk and so kind of diminished himself, then he wasn't going to be sitting in judgment of them and what they were doing wrong and some of the sins they were committing or whether or not they were Christian enough or what they were doing with their lives. And you really do get that sense that
00:18:14
Speaker
Like you said, they're not particularly churchy people, but certainly after the Apostle comes and starts really being accusatory of them, talking to them about how sinful they are. Of course, it's a manipulation. It's part of his mind control over them, but they really fall for it.
00:18:40
Speaker
I think are already susceptible to someone like this. And then he just takes full advantage of it. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of ways the apostles offering them. I mean, he's offering them more. I mean, he's offering them something else and something beyond some, you know, just their day to day lives. And that's attractive. And as the attraction grows, he empowers the people he needs to empower to help enforce this new order.
00:19:11
Speaker
It's also interesting in the sense of, I guess on the post-colonial point, there is a bit very early on discussing
00:19:23
Speaker
I remember precisely where I think it's the second or third chapter, where they're really kind of talking about what this town is, where it is, and how it developed, and the shift from master to money as the overriding, controlling force, and that there's one man in town who owns all of it, who attempted to rename the town from Gebeya to Garveyville, his last name.
00:19:49
Speaker
which has so many tones of, what is it, Potterville in It's a Wonderful Life? Yeah. I mean, it has tones of that. Also the fact that Garvey is the man's last name and associations with Marcus Garvey is just really fascinating.
00:20:05
Speaker
But that name doesn't stick because the folks know their term is Gebaiah, which in itself has very specific and very explicit ties to the Old Testament and actions taken in Israel. I mean, these are the rabbit holes that he's inviting you to go down as he's telling this absolutely fantastic tale.
00:20:31
Speaker
Yeah, I'm sorry. I actually took myself down a rabbit hole. That's all right. Rabbit holes are cool. But yeah, I mean, it's it's it's it's also interesting. I mean, I was commenting at the start of how much I wish I'd already read it. But in talking to this book about this book with my wife, she, you know,
00:20:57
Speaker
I'd already said a few things about what was going on in it. And when I started to tell her, frankly, gush about how much I love it, she asked, is it especially interesting to have read this in the wake of the pandemic?
00:21:12
Speaker
And she wasn't even talking just about COVID, but everything associated with it, all the upheaval, everything that we're dealing with and living through now. And the fact that this is a novel about, frankly, someone who becomes more, I mean, frankly, becomes a cult leader when you have a lot of what's happening online among teenagers. I mean, it's
00:21:36
Speaker
It's wild. I mean, in some ways, these are things that have always been with us. But they seem to be becoming even more, at least in my awareness or my focus, more rampant and pertinent right now. Yeah, which is, I think, really quite fascinating as well.
Jamaican Patois and Writing Style
00:22:02
Speaker
There's a, I think that the writing style is great. And if you like the writing style, I think you'll like a lot of James' work because he kind of uses this Jamaican patois that I think has kind of a rhythm to it. It almost has a beat to it. And I think that it carries you along, but it also, it feels,
00:22:32
Speaker
really real, like you get into the setting and into the character's heads through the way that he writes the language. I mean, there is, I'm trying to remember, he wrote the novel. It's a crime novelist, but his novels are always classified as literary fiction, contemporary. Is it Richard Price? No.
00:22:56
Speaker
There's a novelist who's often praised for his dialogue and that his dialogue on the page that you can't simply recreate spoken word as dialogue on the page, it doesn't work that way because it's being read into someone's head. So you actually have to alter it a bit in order for it to really work and really feel natural. And James absolutely crushes that, like absolutely nails that down. He's also really, remarkably good at, you know, the sort of,
00:23:25
Speaker
quick one-liner. So like, about halfway through the book, a mob attacks someone basically. But he has this one line where after they've completed their attack, they're all stunned at what they do. And he follows that up with, while rage can be communal, guilt was always personal. And that sort of
00:23:48
Speaker
movement that he accomplishes from this moment in action where people became a person, a mob, but then they split apart again and just sort of the, yeah, the way that they're exploding outwards in their emotions and reactions is really, really fascinating.
00:24:09
Speaker
I underline that sentence too because it really rings true as you're reading it. There's black magic in this novel too, which James also deals with a lot in his other works.
00:24:31
Speaker
The character of Lucinda, I think, is really interesting. She's a woman that, for lack of a better term, I guess you'd say, she's the church secretary, and she is under Pastor Bly, and she continues in that rule when the Apostle comes. But she also has this sexual attraction to the Apostle, and she's constantly kind of
00:24:57
Speaker
guilty about that on the one hand, but can't help herself on the other. She lives a double life. She's got what she calls the day Lucinda and the night Lucinda. The night Lucinda is practicing
00:25:14
Speaker
black magic that she learned from her mother. And then the day Lucinda obviously is administering to all these things that she has to do in the church to get ready for services and the like. But I thought her character is really interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the primary attractions she has to Bly is Bly's supernatural quality. The fact that like, I mean,
00:25:41
Speaker
We haven't touched on this quite yet, but John Crow is a bird and the hordes of them arrive to mark the arrival of the Apostle. So the supernatural is made clear from jump.
00:25:56
Speaker
When it comes to the apostle and i think we send a season the apostle merger of those two sides of herself the day in the night she sees a man who is. Leading the flock in the congregation who is not just a pastor he's an apostle is something something more but he also clearly command something beyond himself.
00:26:20
Speaker
And throughout the novel there are flashbacks is the wrong way, maybe flashback is an appropriate way of putting it, where it moves back a bit in time to detail some of the characters and their upbringing. Because this is a small town. They all know each other. They've all known each other forever. So there are petty rivalries. There are outright hatreds that aren't even built on anything
00:26:43
Speaker
sometimes quite substantial and sometimes completely insubstantial, but that's just how it is when you know people for that long and you live in that sort of close quarters. As he does that, he really details how Lucinda comes into the church, how she was taught by her mother, and what she herself put a lot of the ceremonies, a lot of the
00:27:12
Speaker
traditions that she was applying in the night time to try and change her life, change her world and how it didn't happen. And I think that's awesome. I mean, Lucinda, in many ways, is a person for whom life never quite took off and never quite worked. Her physical appearance is constantly referenced by other characters throughout the book. Yeah, I mean, she's she's an interesting one. In that
00:27:41
Speaker
She drives so much of the action of the novel, but she doesn't, in some ways, seem to, I mean, at least in the present, seem to have as much agency. She's almost always working on some, for someone else, to someone, I mean, or at least, yeah, in the present day she is. As a young woman, she was trying to change her life and it didn't work, so.
00:28:04
Speaker
I find, yeah, I mean, but this is also just an indication of the richness of the characters outside of this tension between the pastor and the apostle. The widow, Greenfield, is also, I mean, again, getting back into naming, her name's Greenfield, and a lot of what takes place around her has to do with nature, with, yeah, it's a stunning book.
00:28:31
Speaker
I think it's also really interesting and complex, the widow's relationship with Lucinda. They have a history and a past that's quite troubled, and the widow
00:28:48
Speaker
being a widow since her husband died is kind of a recluse, but she takes in Pastor Bly when he's thrown out of the church. She kind of picks him up and cleans him off and takes care of him and tries to help him in some ways get sober.
00:29:09
Speaker
And I don't want to give the ending of the book away, but The Widow also plays a prominent role at the very end of the book, too, which I think is interesting because with all of this talk of sin and retribution and
00:29:28
Speaker
explicit and implicit biblical references. You're thinking about redemption. Who's getting redemption after this horror that's been brought on to this town because it gets very violent. They start killing each other in the Apostle's name.
00:29:53
Speaker
It's something that I feel like the widow does get redemption in the end. So while there's not a lot of happiness in this book perhaps, it's kind of dark. There is some redemption in it too, I find. Yeah. I mean, the widow is also interesting in that. And James makes a point in mentioning this enough times that I think there might be something that
00:30:21
Speaker
he's trying to get across. She owns her house. Every house in town is owned by Mr. Garvey. But when she got married, her husband, who was not from the town, bought the house from Garvey and gave it to her as her wedding gift. So it's interesting that she's a recluse.
00:30:41
Speaker
But she's I mean, she is outside in so many ways. She's removed herself from the society. But she's also not beholden to the landlord the way that everyone else in town, everyone else's house belongs to him on some level. However, he chooses to exercise that right. Yeah. And she's not beholden to the apostle either. And she's not beholden to the apostle. I mean, it's it's really
00:31:08
Speaker
I read a thing this morning that I hadn't seen before.
Persistence and Success
00:31:12
Speaker
The book was rejected like 68 times or something like that. Lori, what in the hell? How is that?
00:31:21
Speaker
I don't know. You hear stories like this all the time about books being rejected. I was reading a review of an Irish writer's latest novel today and they said that his first novel, Donald Ryan's, was rejected a lot of times too before it got published. I don't know. I don't know how these things happen.
00:31:48
Speaker
I'm glad I'm glad James persisted, though, right? I mean, it was absolutely. It was Akashic Press, a small press that that published him. And thank God they did, because, you know, it's it's an important book. He's an important voice. And then, of course, he's gone on to have just a spectacular career. Yeah. And he's with publishers now. So I was wondering,
00:32:12
Speaker
What books jump out at you in terms of interesting comps or things that resonates with for you? I mean, I will say that when I first started it, Catherine Dunn's Geek Love jumped out at me a little bit. I mean, I think there's a little bit
00:32:31
Speaker
I think less so as the novel goes on, but initially there's a little bit of the atmosphere of the grotesque that's playing out in the early part of the novel and also sort of that cult-like feeling. More recently, I think, Hurricane Season by Fernida Melchor, that sense of like perpetual, almost
Literary Comparisons
00:32:51
Speaker
soupy foreboding that like, you know, a really, I was here in Chicago, a really like humid,
00:32:59
Speaker
brutal August day makes you feel like everyone's out to get you and the world's coming down around you and nothing tastes right. That was definitely playing out quite a bit, I thought. At least it felt that way a bit. And the last one that jumped at me specifically was the power and the glory, Graham Greene, especially with Pastor Bly's trajectory.
00:33:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think that that also just really those three just sort of. Yeah, I think I think there's something interesting happening. Like res, I mean, not even like they're not even clean cops, they're just they just resonate well, they're the kind of things that are sort of picking at the same wounds going after the same material. But what jumps to mind for you? I love this question because I seem to really like this type of of big
00:33:59
Speaker
sin and redemption kind of story. So one that really pops out to me is Mario Vargas Losas, The War of the End of the World. Have you read that? I haven't, no. It's about a cult. It's actually historical fiction, a real cult that took place in Latin America. And it's, again, kind of a crazy
00:34:27
Speaker
crazy person like the apostle that just kind of uses religion in a very manipulative way and gets these people in this town to follow him. And it's a really good read.
00:34:44
Speaker
I've got a troubled relationship with Vargas Losa. I like very much some of his older work, some of his more recent I Don't Care For. But another comp and another book that I absolutely love is Faulkner's Absalom Absalom. There's just something about the character of the apostle and
00:35:09
Speaker
and his evilness. And I think James' language is a little bit falconarian as well. Faulkner wasn't usually using Jamaican patois, but there's something about the way I think both men write, and especially how they write about these big issues of good and bad and evil and having
00:35:35
Speaker
just like a very controlling, almost superhuman presence that kind of warps other people and warps a town. So those are two that I thought of. I mean, it's the fucking area a bit like I've seen mentioned elsewhere, the back of my copy. So when
00:35:59
Speaker
When you recommended this one, I ran to Powell's in Chicago, which is actually different from the Powell's out on the West Coast, but connected. Long story.
00:36:11
Speaker
I mean, they're not connected. If I said connected and anyway, it doesn't matter. Just like inside Chicago bookstore, baseball. But so the copy I have is the UK One World Edition. And on the back of it, it describes it with languages taught as classic works by Cormac McCarthy and a richness reminiscent of early Toni Morrison. And I mean,
00:36:35
Speaker
The Tony Morrison bit, I 100% see. The Cormac McCarthy, I actually see far less of, except that, um, did you ever read The Orchard Keeper by McCarthy, his first novel? No, I haven't. It very much reads like someone, I mean, it's good. And I think it's, I don't know, Blood Meridian's amazing, but it's,
00:36:56
Speaker
probably my one of my favorites of McCarthy's work, and I don't like or don't really enjoy a ton of his work. But the orchard keeper is very much him almost doing Faulkner. And that connected like, so that's where I see it being like, early Cormac McCarthy before he stripped ever started stripping and stripping and stripping his language down.
00:37:19
Speaker
and going for more like the occasional explosive pyrotechnic bit. That's where I could see James's language intercepting. And that, I think, kind of ties it back into the Faulkner bit as well. I mean, just stylists, there is something totally very similar across what they're doing. Yeah. You said something just a second ago that, do you think the apostle is evil? Yes.
00:37:50
Speaker
And maybe just because I only just read it and haven't had as much time to reflect on it and I'm still still in the throes of it. I mean, I think a lot, I mean, absolutely most of what he does is evil. But I don't know, there's also
00:38:12
Speaker
It's interesting because he is in fact, I mean, the novel establishes, he is in fact supernatural. Like there are, he is capable of things and he says he, he explains how he learned to do these things. But he's also, he's also a victim at the same time. And that makes it really, I mean, and that's a thing that like, maybe I'm getting a little too much away, but that, that really colors my ability to say where he is falling here and
00:38:42
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, he, it's interesting. I think in a way, maybe he's, he's almost too much. He's almost become too much of a monster or monstrous. Whereas in some ways, I think Bly is almost too human. Um, his frailty, which is also where for me and my head, it connects back to the power and the glory and the failure of that priest to be a priest or most of the novel. Um,
00:39:11
Speaker
I don't know. I don't know. I think that's an interesting one. I'd be curious. I'd be curious for folks who, other folks who have read it or folks who read it after listening to this, what their take is on that and whether I'm potentially, and very much could be, being a way to forgiving of, I almost just wonder whether or not you can call him amongst, whether you can call him evil or not. Well, I,
00:39:36
Speaker
I can call him evil because while you're right, he is a victim and some horrible things happen to him, but he's very intentional about what he's doing. He's out for vengeance with a capital V, and he will pull anyone down whether or not that they were
00:40:01
Speaker
complicit in the original thing that happened to him when he was younger that made him a victim and also induced him to seek this vengeance. So yeah, I don't really see much redeeming quality in him at all. Yeah.
00:40:26
Speaker
I'm probably just going like I'm just probably like tripping myself semantically over it because I also feel like calling him a monster is also which I just did is probably also incorrect and is stripping away too much agency from him of like what he chose to do and what he chose in some ways to become. It's an interesting one, but I think that's also mean that frankly is part of the excitement of a book like this, right? Like it spurs on conversation and contemplation of
00:40:57
Speaker
of that sort of thing of what can we hold people to and why. Yeah. Will you read more of Arlen James? Yes, very much. I mean, yeah, this is this is a hell of a book. And I'll say it again, for this to be a debut is
00:41:18
Speaker
I mean, frankly, a lot of authors' debut novels are not the first novel they wrote. But for this to be the first one that James got published, my God, this is just an absolutely incredible, stunning novel that, I mean, every bookstore should have it on its shelves, I think. I don't think there are too many that shouldn't, outside maybe a kid's bookstore. That might be a bit inappropriate.
00:41:46
Speaker
But yeah, it's it's it's an incredible, incredible book. Well, it's certainly his shortest book by far. He's got some real door stoppers out there. And of course, I think I think I'm correct in saying that he's still probably most famous for A Brief History of Seven Killings. Yeah. And that that is a big book, too. But he's he's a wonderful author. And so I'm so glad that you liked it.
New Book Recommendation
00:42:16
Speaker
Yeah, thank you for recommending it. And I'm hoping that one next episode we discuss the one I recommended. Do you like it as much as I like this one? Otherwise, I'm going to feel like I'm going to have to play some catch up. Should we tell which one you recommended for me? Sure. I recommended Cornwolf by Tristan Egolf. He was a young American writer.
00:42:43
Speaker
This is probably slightly shorter than his debut novel, though it's by no means a short novel. And it takes place in the Pennsylvania country in the US and may or may not involve a werewolf. So maybe slightly different.
00:43:05
Speaker
change of locale and change of pace. I'm excited to talk about it next time and hear what you think about it. I'm really excited to talk about it too. As I've told you, I grew up in Pennsylvania and lived in Pennsylvania for the first
00:43:24
Speaker
21 and a half years of my life. So my family's still there. So I'm really looking forward to talking about his perspective on that area and talking about the book. So until next time, Tom. Take care, Lori.
Javier Marias' Significance
00:43:50
Speaker
OK, Laurie, so now we're going to talk a bit about, or actually, this is the beginning of a lot of conversation about Javier Marias. Javier Marias Franco.
00:44:05
Speaker
Spanish novelist, was born September 20, 1951, and died of pneumonia this past September 11, so just shy of his 71st birthday. In his life, he was a prolific, frankly, novelist, short story writer, essayist, and
00:44:26
Speaker
in many ways, one of the more important writers in my own reading life, which is something that kind of brought us together a bit and a huge part of why this podcast is happening the way it's happening. And not only that, but why it has the name it has. But we'll get to that portion in just a moment.
00:44:47
Speaker
Marias was the son of Gillian Marias Aguilera and Dolores Franco Manera. Gillian Marias was a philosopher, sided with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. He was one of the pupils and kind of cheap pupils of the philosopher Jose Ortega Igacet.
00:45:03
Speaker
Maria's was part of the generation of 36, which is the name assigned to writers, poets, thinkers, that were all working in that period of Spanish history, most, if not all of whom
00:45:20
Speaker
frankly, had to find occupation outside of Spain in the wake of the Civil War. Marius was among those. He taught extensively in the United States, in the United Kingdom, actually taught at Wellesley for a bit at the same time that Nabokov was there, which is a fun little note in literary history that Javier in traveling
00:45:45
Speaker
to visit with his father was at some point a few blocks away from Nabokov, which is just fun. Maurice is also the author of a book, The History of Philosophy, which is still in print, still available through Dover.
00:46:01
Speaker
For those that know Dover editions, they're typically reprints of classics that are pretty cheap. They're made fine, but they're not the best paper in the world. This is one of those rare ones that's actually relatively expensive because it is a brick of a book. But it is a fascinating look at philosophical history through, basically, Ortega Yigaset.
00:46:28
Speaker
Marius's, Javier's, and just a quick note here, Javier Marius is actually born Xavier Marius, and that is something that gets pulled into his association with Redonda, but again, more on that in a moment.
00:46:43
Speaker
but went by Javier professionally for most of his life. Though when he did sign books, and I have a few books signed by him, he would change up how he signed it with almost every copy. That's fun. Yeah, very indiscriminate. It's very neat. One of my favorite things in my collection of books that I'll never ever get rid of.
00:47:08
Speaker
Marius' mother Doris Franco Manera was a translator, also people of Ortega Yigaset, which is one of the ways in which she met Gillian. Her brother Jesus was a prolific filmmaker in Spain, and he's someone we'll actually talk about later on in the series as we get into some of the
00:47:32
Speaker
Well, some of the film based film based novel that Maria said does, because I think there's there's quite a bit that he's pulling from his pulling from, but like referencing in his uncle's life there. He also worked for his uncle at one point.
00:47:49
Speaker
Doris Franco Manera lost two brothers in the Civil War. One was killed, another disappeared, assumed dead. This part's going to be tricky. So when I say Marius, let's simply assume I'm talking about Javier and not Julian. Marius writes about when his father was arrested towards the end of the Civil War and that it was his mother with whom
00:48:19
Speaker
Julian was not with yet. They were friends, but they were not in a relationship at this point. Delores showed up and basically demanded Julian's release. And at that point in the war, it could have been just as likely that Julian Marius would have disappeared, never been heard from again. And everything we're talking about now would not have taken place.
00:48:44
Speaker
This is sort of a theme in some of, or a lot of Maurice's writing, the happenstance, the randomness of life that walking down one side, the sidewalk on one side one day can lead to outcomes completely different from doing it on the other side. So they're a very interesting couple in that respect.
00:49:10
Speaker
Maria's had five brothers, two of whom, I believe it's two, died quite young, which had a significant impact on his mother and shows up throughout Maria's work.
00:49:26
Speaker
So Maria started writing very early. He began his first novel, The Age of Seventeen, Los Domingos del Lobo, translated to The Dominions of the Wolf, though it has never been officially, it's never been published in translation. He has a few books like that. This one came out when he was 20. And between the age of 20 and
00:49:47
Speaker
Shortly, like posthumously, his last book, you know, or last written book, he wrote something along the lines of 16 novels, three short story collections and novellas, and numerous, numerous essays, most of which appeared in El Pais and were published over here in the States in the three-penny review, The Believer, frankly, all over the place.
00:50:10
Speaker
Yeah, I think he kept that column up for the Spanish newspaper. I think it ran like every Sunday for several years.
Marias' Career and British Influence
00:50:22
Speaker
for how he writes and the style in which he writes, even his essays have a little bit of that meandering, you know, self-reflective, reflexive style to it. For him to be able to churn out on a weekly basis an essay, I don't know, I'm someone who doesn't even write, who struggles with the idea of writing. So just to produce work like that is really
00:50:45
Speaker
I mean, it's quite something. He had a very active, very fertile mind and tons of interests. He writes a lot about film, which again, I think dovetails into his relationship with his uncle. But also, frankly, I mean, that's also not an unusual European writer thing, right? I mean, lots of European writers spend a lot of time, especially from that generation when film was
00:51:10
Speaker
and still I mean still is perceived as such an important art form but it was there was a vibrancy to the criticism the discussion around it that I'm not sure where at least isn't as present in
00:51:22
Speaker
I'm probably talking myself into a pretty, I'm getting it pretty hard for this one, but I don't think it's quite as present. I mean, it's certainly not in the mainstream American criticism, or even to find a tackling of film in the same way as I think happens to a degree in Europe. I mean, it certainly is there, but on the scale of it, it's very different.
00:51:45
Speaker
I think you're more likely to find a major American novelist writing for a small journal or the occasional piece in the New York Times than have a regular column that often brings up film and other art forms.
00:51:59
Speaker
Yeah, a lot of these pieces that were in the Spanish newspaper are collected in translation between Eternities and other writings, which I've been enjoying a lot. And that's also readily available in the US. And I believe it's also translated by Margaret Joel Costa, who's translated almost all of his work in the US.
00:52:25
Speaker
Yeah, that's something that we'll be talking about, I think, down the line a little bit, is translation as practice. Marius was an incredibly well-respected translator, won a major prize in Spain for his translation of Stern's Tristam Shandy, which shows up quite a bit in his novels even.
00:52:47
Speaker
Have you read Tristan Shandy, Laurie? You know, I have not that every time that I read about, uh, Maria sore, you know, think about him and think about the translation work that he did. I always say, I need to read Tristan Shandy. Have you?
00:53:04
Speaker
So I've dipped into it. I have not read it in its entirety. I can see why someone like Maria would absolutely love it. And I could also see what a beast of a project it would be to move that into any other language.
00:53:19
Speaker
But yeah, it's frankly, given how much of Marius I've read and how sort of obsessive I am around him, it's a really weird gap in my knowledge. And maybe something that I'll tackle in the course of this project in the background is actually getting through Tristan Shandy. Did you enjoy it, the parts that you read? Yeah, no, they were very neat. I really did like it.
00:53:45
Speaker
I think I was moderately intimidated by the size of it at the time. And it was just a very different way of reading. And I don't know that my brain was quite ready to take that on and frankly derail all my other reading projects at the time.
00:54:04
Speaker
Being a buyer for a bookstore, you're often reading so much and trying to read across so many genres that larger projects, at least when I was a buyer and doing that, I just couldn't commit to too many huge books. I just didn't feel like I had the time.
00:54:21
Speaker
That's probably a failing on my end. Not a failing of practicality, but I'm always impressed with what a big role this book seems to have played in Marius's life. It's his book of books, basically. Yeah. Very pivotal. I don't know. Maybe it is a project we should take on.
00:54:51
Speaker
Yeah. Well, at least at least one of us, so maybe we'll flip a coin after this to figure out which one of us has to bear the brunt of that.
00:55:01
Speaker
I think that's a pretty good quick hit on his life, on some of his work. As I said, his first book published at 20. He published extensively throughout the rest of his life. A few of his novels have not been translated into English. He gave a few interviews in which he said that he did not want them translated. He did not think that they were necessarily good enough or just that he just wasn't quite
00:55:26
Speaker
He did not think that they needed to be translated in English, that they could stay where they were. And these are the early novels, right? The three earliest novels or earliest novels. Yeah. Right. Just a quick look at my notes.
00:55:44
Speaker
So, but Maria spent most of his life living in Madrid, and Madrid plays a major role in his works. I mean, to call him a Spanish novelist, it's not just that he was writing in Spanish. I mean, he was writing about Spain, even when his characters were in another environment, particularly the UK.
00:56:07
Speaker
they were in many ways defined by where they came from almost, I mean, almost always major lands, almost always, you know, referring back to some aspect or the effect of the Civil War. And that plays out across his, across his works. I mean, he, we just mentioned his translation practice, but
00:56:30
Speaker
almost all, I mean, up until some of the more recent novels, even there, there are translators. Typically, the protagonist is a translator, often in some sort of fish out of water scenario to a certain degree. But they're also sometimes, he's sometimes writing spy novels.
00:56:52
Speaker
Even the ones that aren't expressly a spy novel have a level of intrigue and a consideration of the spoken word versus the written word and what we reveal or don't reveal about ourselves to the other.
00:57:08
Speaker
It's really interesting, and I think a lot of that has to do with his parents' experience in the Civil War and, frankly, the Spain that Marias grew up in and what you could say, what you couldn't say, which makes for an... Sorry, go ahead.
00:57:23
Speaker
No, sorry. I was just going to say, can I push on you a little bit about the Spanishness of Moreas? Because I think you're absolutely right. I haven't read him quite as thoroughly as you have. But the history of Spain, and from a more autobiographical standpoint, some of the facts of he and his parents' life, it definitely
00:57:52
Speaker
is found in the novels, but I also feel like Moreus may have been a bit sensitive to this, well, I won't say it's criticism, but that he was a very English writer, that he was, you know, kind of preoccupied with all things British and English, and I wondered what your thoughts are on that and how you'd balance the two.
00:58:23
Speaker
Yeah, I do think there is a real anglophilia to Marius's thought and his interests. I mean, I think part of that comes from his experience teaching at Oxford for a time. I think it also just I think it also comes from where
00:58:48
Speaker
how he was tackling writing and thinking. I don't know. I mean, you kind of caught me on that one a little bit, Lori. I'm trying to process it. Sorry. We can talk about it later.
00:59:07
Speaker
Absolutely. Marius is pulling or engaging with Britishness in a very specific way. Probably his seminal novel, Your Face Tomorrow, it's basically taking place under the auspices of a British spy agency, which is interesting for a Spanish writer to be writing about, right? So there's definitely a lot there.
00:59:35
Speaker
And yeah, in a later episode, I'll have much, much cleaner thoughts on that specific point. I think about it too. It just came to mind when you're talking about how very much Spain, you feel it in all of the books, but then
00:59:52
Speaker
You know, I can't remember exactly in what places I've read it, but it did. It does feel like that I've read that that a lot of maybe mostly people in Spain felt like he was not that he was he liked the Brits more than he liked his own country. I don't know. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, it also comes into some interesting things with writing writers in Spanish like
01:00:22
Speaker
I mean, like Bologna, like Frasan, who are from Chile and Argentina respectively, but lived a good chunk of their adult lives in Spain and saw themselves as being of their countries, but also writing in this larger Spanish context. I don't know that Marius would ever make such a claim for himself, but there is this very strong connection to Englishness and the world outside of Spain.
01:00:52
Speaker
that permeates his work. So yeah, that's a really interesting point. Well, I mean, so I think this is a good point for us to kind of talk about how we came to Marius and why we are devoting so many episodes to his works. So I guess to clarify that point, the back end of this podcast, the second half, is going to be a discussion of Javier Marius.
01:01:21
Speaker
pretty extensive breakdown across episodes, where it's more or less going to take us about 10 to 12 episodes to dig into his work. We'll be jumping around a bit. We're not taking chronologically. It's a little bit more thematic. So for instance, next podcast, we'll be talking about his novel, All Souls, and his false novel, Dark Back of Time, and digging a little bit more into Redonda.
01:01:47
Speaker
And from there, we'll be kind of grouping some of the novels and collections, novellas together. Yeah, tracing, and once we get to a certain point, it'll get a bit more chronological, especially with the more recent novels. But yeah, we are spending a lot of time talking about Javier Marias. And I mean, from my part,
01:02:13
Speaker
I came to read Javier Marías when I first began bookselling back in 2004. I came across an article, I believe it was in the Guardian, talking about the first volume in this Spanish novelist who I'd never heard of.
01:02:29
Speaker
his major work that was coming out across three volumes over the next few years and was fascinated by the idea of what he was doing, went into the bookstore's fiction section, found all souls, took it home, and was immediately just blown away.
01:02:50
Speaker
it was like, I mean, yeah, I think it's fair to say it was like nothing I'd read before, or at least it affected me in a way that very few things had affected me quite like that. And I immediately started ripping through his catalog at that time, all published by New Directions. And yeah, to this day, it
01:03:11
Speaker
It's a foundational part of my reading life. He's an author that I continually compare other writers to, be it their project, their goals, what they're attempting, which is also just, I think, a fascinating thing about Marius. He had something of a project going on. He was writing
01:03:31
Speaker
He was writing great fiction, but there was a consistent set of ideas that he was exploring, that he was trying to get at in different ways through his novels, building up to Your Face Tomorrow.
Personal Discoveries of Marias
01:03:49
Speaker
Yeah, so that's how I came to Marias. That's why I think he's worth spending so much time on because I think about him all the time. So let's spend a lot of time talking about him, I say. But how about you, Laurie? How did you come to Marias?
01:04:05
Speaker
Well, it wasn't in any kind of logical way, and I guess it was probably about 10 years after you did. I had started becoming interested in small publishers and writing some book reviews on some small press books, and somehow I came to know that
01:04:32
Speaker
the great publisher New Directions had this three-piece little trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow by Mireas and I purchased it but it sat on my shelf for
01:04:48
Speaker
at least 12 years, I think, before I picked it up. I only read Your Face Tomorrow for the first time last year, but I did read Moreus before that. I think the first book that I picked up and read by him was Thus Bad Begins, which I love that book so much.
01:05:09
Speaker
And that was when I started bookselling. So similar to you in that respect. And just fell in love with this world that he creates. A world of really kind of interiority where you really, really get inside the character's heads. And I can't really think of anyone that does that
01:05:35
Speaker
quite the same as Maria's, but maybe the closest comparison I could say in a skillful way would be Henry James, who I know that Henry James can be. Some people hate him and some people love him. I'm more of the love camp, at least for most of what he does, but it's that kind of just taking
01:05:56
Speaker
taking apart the way someone's thoughts evolve and the way that they can change their perceptions. And you see the characters, the reader does, as the perceptions change. And I think that's just really, really a unique thing. You get the sense that
01:06:22
Speaker
that everything kind of slows down, at least for me when I'm reading Mereas. I feel like my pulse slows down in a good way. It's not like I fall asleep, but you're just moving through
01:06:37
Speaker
Someone's perceptions in such a way that it really kind of makes sense and it's almost addictive I find I mean his books a lot of the books especially some of the later ones are quite lengthy and they're quite dense.
01:06:54
Speaker
but they're not difficult to get through. You just have to like surrender yourself to them. So yeah, after Thus Bad Begins, I started kind of reading just randomly through his catalog and some of the shorter earlier works like Heart So White, and we did the infatuations for my book club at the store, and then Berta Isla, of course,
01:07:23
Speaker
And so yeah, it's just been a wonderful experience and I feel very lucky in a way because I still haven't read all of them. So I still have some treats to look forward to.
01:07:36
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, on the on that particular point, I actually I mean, this is I got I was I'm a huge belonging fan as well. But my sales rep gave me a arc, one of those old craft paper covered arcs of 2666 that are so rare now. And I refuse to read it, because I did not want it to be over. I did not want the experience of really belonging to be over. So I'm, um,
01:08:02
Speaker
I'm very pleased that we have at least one more of Marius to come in Thomas Nevinson, which is publishing in May, which was another kind of put in mind to us that may be talking about Marius now and the lead up to his final book being published in English made some sense. One of the things I wanted to loop back to, though, was the way that you were describing how he writes about thinking and how he writes about perception.
01:08:31
Speaker
he writes these incredibly long, meandering sentences that whip you all over the place. Although whips try the wrong way, just gently guides you through the protagonist thought process. And what's amazing about it is you can read, I don't know, 30 pages that go into history, go into reflections on the arts and
01:08:58
Speaker
at the end of it, the protagonist makes a decision. And this has all taken place in the second, in the narrative time of the novel. So he's really kind of almost trying to pull out all of the disparate threads of what
01:09:14
Speaker
you know, what influences what we how we think and how we decide things and just write it down on a page, which is a wild thing to attempt. But it's even welder that he can do it and just
01:09:29
Speaker
do it beautifully. I mean, his prose is gorgeous, the way he structures everything, and with such an incredibly tight hand. I told you this previously, but when the third volume of Your Face Tomorrow came out, he did an event in New York. And I was at the time the Events Coordinator for Bookster in Chicago and was
01:09:53
Speaker
was no way he was coming to Chicago. So my pregnant wife and I flew to New York simply to see Haver Maria speak at the New York Public Library. And I mean, so this is also giving you an idea of the mania I possess around this guy's writing. But in the conversation, in the interview, he
01:10:14
Speaker
he did he was asked about the length of the sentences and how he does the how he approaches this thought process and his response was that he believes that time does not give time the time to be and.
01:10:29
Speaker
There was a combination of gasping and laughter in the audience when he said that, but it perfectly sums up what he's doing. He is using the relative nature of time to really rip time apart and rip apart what someone is and how someone comes to be and then put it all back together and move them forward. And even if it's the most irrational action that happens next, the one that seems just completely bonkers,
01:10:57
Speaker
it makes sense somehow because of all these disparate threads that he has highlighted, that he has undone and then rewoven together. And it's this constant act of recreation that I think is so fascinating in a lot of his work. Yeah, I think that perhaps one of the best examples that I can think of in terms of
01:11:27
Speaker
letting time have time is the first volume of the trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow, where there's that scene at the professor's house one night and there's a very long, digressive conversation with the professor, but then the professor goes to bed and the main character is
01:11:52
Speaker
is left alone in this house with the professor's library. And there were some things from the conversation that intrigued him. So he just decides to start looking through some of the books in the library. And that night goes on in that book, probably for maybe 250 pages that one night, you know, maybe it's a seven hour period of time. But
01:12:17
Speaker
You don't really notice that time hasn't moved forward because there's so much happening in this character's mind that he's trying to put his head around, the connections that he's trying to make about the professor's past and what that guy's been doing and how he himself has been involved in it. It's just mesmerizing. It's brilliant.
01:12:43
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And that's one of the, I mean, that is one of the amazing things is that you go through those 250 pages and at the end it wraps and you realize, what did I just read? I just read 250 pages of a guy looking through a study. Like that's basically what you did. And that is, but it's,
01:13:05
Speaker
It's marvelous, right? It gives you this moment of, I mean, for me, it gave me this moment of almost irrational joy that he was able to pull this off, that he did this amazing thing, and I loved every moment of it. And now, because of how he wrapped it, it's making me go back through and think through everything I just read. Yeah, he's a remarkable writer.
01:13:33
Speaker
And while there are obviously some very strong themes across all of his work that he's consistently dealing with and addressing, each one's different.
Themes of Secrets and Identity
01:13:43
Speaker
He is doing some very different things, or at least structurally, almost genre-wise, doing different things across his novels, which I think also will make for a really fruitful discussion as we dig into them.
01:13:59
Speaker
I guess if I had to say, you know, one thing that I think, and just generally that kind of, when I think about what his work is about, it's, in a general sense, secrets. There's a secret or multiple secrets, I think, in every book of his that I've read, perhaps without exception, and it's kind of
01:14:26
Speaker
what that secret is and what the existence of the secret does to the people in the book that he just explores so wonderfully and in so many different situations and nuances that I've never felt like I'm reading the same book twice, but there are definitely some themes that are
01:14:50
Speaker
unmistakably mores in the book. And he absolutely plays with what size or scale or type of secret you're talking about. Sometimes it's just the interpersonal. Sometimes it's the political. I mean, he just really, yeah, he has a really interesting and
01:15:12
Speaker
quite, quite facile way of addressing that. Like you said, in ways that never feel like he's going back to the well, that he's doing the same book again and again.
01:15:25
Speaker
But one of the things I want, so we are going to spend a lot of time talking about his books.
Podcast Name and Redonda's Significance
01:15:31
Speaker
But I also want to, and we will get into this in the next episode in more depth, but we do need to address sort of the elephant in the room, which is the name of this podcast, which is Lost in Redonda.
01:15:43
Speaker
Redonda is a something of a nothing spit of land in the Caribbean, very near to Montserrat. It's small. It's rocky. It has no value other than all the guano all over it that is at least in the 19th century made it somewhat useful for phosphates and the like.
01:16:08
Speaker
It does matter quite a bit in, well, at least to me. I don't know how much really ultimately mattered to Marius. I think a fair bit, but I'm not going to speak for the man. Marius was the king of Redonda. Now, that obviously makes very little sense. We will go into a lot of the ins and outs of this next episode. But in a very brief summary, in the 19th century, a British writer claimed that he was
01:16:37
Speaker
made the King of Redonda by his father. This writer eventually passed along the kingship to his literary executor, who eventually passed it on to another man, who eventually passed it on to Marius after something of this story gets included in his novel, All Souls.
01:16:58
Speaker
Again, it's meandering, it's weird. It's also weird because there are actually several rival kingship claims to Redonda.
01:17:08
Speaker
But what I think is fun, or one of the things I think is fun, is the idea that this Spanish writer styled himself as King Xavier, the first of Verdanda, that he would give out a prize for a while, the award of which was a duchy in the kingdom of Verdanda. So you have people like Arturo Perez-Riverte, Alice Monroe, Guillermo Cabr-Infante, who are dukes and duchesses of Verdanda.
01:17:38
Speaker
I mean, imaginary literary kingdom that exists nowhere really, but yeah, is connected to this writer who is just
01:17:53
Speaker
Ah, that is part of, I think for me, reading All Souls and encountering this idea of redonda and then looking into it a little bit and be like, wait, what the hell is going on here is a huge part of what influenced me to just really dig into his work even further. So much so that when I thought I would eventually write something, which is unlikely to happen,
01:18:16
Speaker
I thought I would write a novel about the Kingdom of Redonda. And I thought I would call it Lost in Redonda, playing off of Lost in La Mancha. And it never happened. But when we were talking about this podcast, I threw that name out as an idea. And Laurie very generously said, that sounds great to me. Let's go with it. So here we are. We are
01:18:40
Speaker
We are creating Lost in Redonda in podcast form and digging into Javier Marius's work and how Redonda plays into that to a certain degree. Yeah, for a man who spends so much time digging into identities and secrets and the things that you leave out of conversations to also be the king of this
01:19:03
Speaker
imagined island, I think is pretty neat and a pretty fun little extra bit of a literary history almost. Yeah, I think that, I don't know, I like the name. I think it fits. Not only are we keeping your dream alive, Tom, but given that we're going to be getting lost in Mireas, I think that it's a perfect name for the podcast. Yeah.
01:19:31
Speaker
So that is what we'll be doing on the back half of these podcasts moving forward. Next time, we will talk about All Souls, Direct Back of Time, and get a little bit more into Redonda, how precisely this all came to be. And then we'll let you know what the next set will be after that. But yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I think we're going to have a lot of fun
01:19:59
Speaker
celebrating and discussing a really, really important writer. So I'm looking forward to it, Lori. Yeah, me too. Thanks, Tom. Thank you. Bye.