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Episode 6: backlist spotlight: "Gob's Grief" by Chris Adrian; "Thus Bad Begins"
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In our sixth episode we discuss Gob’s Grief by Chris Adrian for our backlist deep dive. In the Marías portion we dig into Thus Bad Begins (spoiler alert: it’s phenomenal). This is a doozy of an episode, so stay hydrated and do be a hero: listen to the whole 2+ hours in one go!
Books mentioned in this episode:
Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States by George R. Stewart
The Stammering Century by Gilbert Seldes
The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death by John Gray
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America by Garry Wills
Click here to subscribe to our Substack and do follow us on the socials, @lostinredonda across most apps (Twitter and Instagram for now; we’re coming for you eventually #booktok).
Music: “Estos Dias” by Enrique Urquijo
Logo design: Flynn Kidz Designs
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Transcript
Introduction to Lost in Redonda
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I'm Tom Flynn. I'm Lori Feathers. And welcome to Lost in Redonda.
Admiration for Chris Adrian's Gob's Grief
00:00:27
Speaker
So this week, we are discussing for our backlist focus, one of my suggestions, Gob's Grief by Chris Adrian. This is Adrian's debut novel. I don't remember precisely why it cropped up on a radar. I kind of suspect it was because of his book, The Children's Hospital. But maybe not.
00:00:54
Speaker
Either way, I ordered this book into 57th Street Books back in 2007, read it, and just absolutely devoured it, loved it, loved everything about it. It was stunning. The writing is gorgeous. His approach to historical fiction, which isn't, I mean, you can barely call it historical fiction in many respects, is incredible.
00:01:21
Speaker
And much like John Crow's Devil, we're talking about a debut novel again, which we haven't done too many of these podcasts yet, but there seems to be a bit of an emerging theme of falling in love with debuts and wanting to make sure that folks continue to pay attention to them. But yeah, what did you think of it, Lori? I thought
00:01:44
Speaker
It's an extraordinary work, but I should I should ask a question. Just kick us off. I am admittedly confused about the proper pronunciation of the main character's name. I want to say that it should be Job, but I don't know. Maybe I've not heard the author mention the title. It's the spelling is G.O.B. So what do you think that? What do you think, Tom?
00:02:15
Speaker
I mean, it's a good question, and you raised it before we started recording, and I've been kind of thinking it over since you said that. I mean, I've already said Gob, and that's just how I've always referred to it. But Gob is a nickname for the character whose full name is George Washington Woodhull. So if you're shortening George Washington to a G-O-B, it probably is more of a joke.
00:02:41
Speaker
Sound giving the given the george the the the jet in there. I just thought maybe because of like joeb from the bible which you know there seems to be some analogy there it very it very much makes a lot of sense in fact.
00:03:01
Speaker
a character who starts reading the book of Job at one point in the novel. You're probably right. It probably is Job. Having said that, after 16 plus years of calling it gov, you'll forgive me if I continue to fall back into that pronunciation of it. Yes, yes, for sure, because I sometimes say gov too.
00:03:28
Speaker
All right, but I will try to start and continue with Job.
Unique Narrative and Historical Context of Gob's Grief
00:03:33
Speaker
My reaction to the book, a remarkable debut. I just read this for the first time for this podcast. I had read Chris Adrian's novel, The Children's Hospital, previously and was quite amazed by that book.
00:03:55
Speaker
And it could be because I read it a little while ago, several years ago, but the power of his writing just amazed me, just knocked me in the mouth again this time around reading him.
00:04:14
Speaker
Some of the descriptions are just so powerful. Job is a doctor, and also one of his best friends will as a doctor. And I'm just going to read, if you don't mind, Tom, just really briefly this description of an autopsy. I will say as well, which we should mention, Chris Adrian is one of those Renaissance men that is a pediatric oncologist,
00:04:43
Speaker
With a successful medical career and obviously a fantastic writer I'm very jealous when people have like that kind of multi-talent in their bodies, but This is on page 168 of my copy and it's describing an autopsy. Yeah
00:05:04
Speaker
When the organs were all removed and there was nothing left in the late person but watery blood pulling in the gutters alongside the spine, Dr. Ghouli would stare lovingly into the body and put his hands into the pink fluid, lifting it and holding it in his palms until it ran through his fingers.
00:05:26
Speaker
My boys, he would say, do you see how we are vessels? I don't know. I underlined that. It just blew me away, the description of the watery blood pulling in the gutters alongside the spine. I mean, who writes like that? That's wonderful. And there were so many passages. I underlined a lot of this book.
00:05:52
Speaker
You know, it's a compelling story for sure. And just the amount of historical reference and some of the things that were going on in the country at the time that he brings up and some of the fantastical elements as well.
Job's Mission and Historical Figures
00:06:08
Speaker
The way he was able to combine all that, totally impressive. But I think for me, the writing is even more impressive.
00:06:17
Speaker
I would agree with that. We'll launch into a little bit more of the plot as it were in a moment, but one other quick in my turn to do a little bit of story time from the book. But it's from page 142 and Will, Job's friend, while Will is fighting in the Civil War and assisting a French photographer who is
00:06:42
Speaker
Well, who's attempting to capture the image of the soul leaving the body as someone dies. So he's attempting to very quickly develop a plate. And so this is just a description of Will doing that. Will removed the plate from its holder. He held it over a pan and poured developer over the glass.
00:07:18
Speaker
I mean, again, that there is a
00:07:24
Speaker
three-dimensional nature to Adrian's writing, where you're not just in the scene and feeling the wind and smelling that the cocktail of vinegar and blood is such an incredible, succinct, but generative description. But I mean, you're even feeling like there's an emotional resonance that he's pulling you into that's really,
00:07:50
Speaker
really quite amazing and really probably quite necessary for this book. So Job's Grief takes place, I mean, the timeline is real, not super long, about a 15-year period, but it begins during the Civil War. Job is 11 in 1863 when he and his brother are planned to take off and join the Union Army.
00:08:21
Speaker
They just, his brother, now here's their pronunciation question. His brother's name is T-O-M-O. I've always just had Tom-O in my head, but that might be my own like preference given my first name, but that sounds about right to you. Yeah, it does. Okay, cool. Yeah, Tom-O is the
00:08:40
Speaker
the kind of insider to this. He wants them to go join up. And at the last minute on the night they're leaving, Joe backs out and Tama goes off and dies, is shot through the eye. And Joe never forgives himself. And over the intervening years, he decides to
00:09:04
Speaker
basically put an end to death. And that is what this novel is, that is, in many ways, the the action of this novel is Job's efforts and his grand plan to end death. And in the process, Walt Whitman is pulled into it. Major historical figures are brought into it. I mean, someone whose name is continuing to haunt us to this day
00:09:29
Speaker
Comstock makes an appearance whose act is being invoked in many of the attempts to legislate against reproductive health in this country in this day and age, which is also a wild thing given some of the other events that come up in this novel, which I guess in some ways to say that a lot of this stuff is something that we've never moved past, never really truly reckoned with, but yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean,
00:09:58
Speaker
Job says at one point when he's talking to Will that he needs Will's help. He needs Will's help to lick death. And it's truly an obsession with him. Job has a very large home in the middle of Manhattan, which Manhattan I think was a lot smaller than it is now.
00:10:27
Speaker
And it's full of his efforts, his mechanical
00:10:33
Speaker
experiments to try to somehow devise a machine that will be able to defeat death. And it's motivated by the loss of his brother when both boys were quite young. And Job says or thinks over and over again in the book that
00:11:02
Speaker
He's ashamed because he was too afraid to go with his brother to war. And so he let his brother go alone. And there's a real, there's kind of a synchronicity here about the people that Job enlists to help him on this mission to lick death.
00:11:26
Speaker
a lot of people whose brothers are deceased. And I was interested in an interview that I read of Chris Adrian that he said that his own brother died in a car accident in 1993. So that was a little bit of, I think, the idea for kind of having these siblings that can't
00:11:53
Speaker
really get over the grief and the mourning of a lost brother and trying to do something about that. As you said, the people he enlists are all marked in a similar way to Job, but what's interesting as well is that the people that are pulled into Job's orbit, and that's really what happens.
00:12:18
Speaker
They all find him in very unusual and different ways, but once they find him, he realizes Job almost immediately recognizes that they are there to help him in his great work, that they were called to him. But on top of that, all of them are in contact in some way with their deceased loved ones.
00:12:43
Speaker
So I mentioned Walt Whitman is a character in the novel. And a soldier that Whitman was caring for, and for those who don't know, Walt Whitman spent a good bit of time in the Civil War working as a nurse at field hospitals, caring for the wounded. And a man that he comes close with who dies, his voice recurs throughout the first part of the novel. In Whitman's head,
00:13:13
Speaker
encouraging him, prodding him, and when Job is discovered, almost an olation saying, here he
Spiritualism and Technological Change Post-Civil War
00:13:21
Speaker
is. Here's the one at last. Will can see the dead. He is
00:13:28
Speaker
I mean, overwhelmed by the spirits that he sees around him, including a young boy with one angel laying holding a bugle, which is clearly Tamo. Tamo was a bugle for the company that he ended up joining. And Macy, Job's eventual wife, is doing a version of automatic writing with her left hand, completely involuntary, but purportedly
00:13:56
Speaker
it's letters from her deceased brother guiding her and pushing her into Job's orbit.
00:14:06
Speaker
all of this could be manifestations of a person's grief, just like in a psychological sense, right? Like this could just be how people are coping or not coping with these losses, but they end up in the orbit of someone who can't speak with the dead, can't see them, can't hear from them, can't communicate, but is building something that the dead seem convinced will bring them back. I mean, this is also part of the craftsmanship. I mean, setting it
00:14:36
Speaker
setting aside the gorgeous writing, this is a very tightly written novel. This construction is really quite impressive as well, I find.
00:14:47
Speaker
Yeah, it is. Because we kind of go through each of these main characters' relationship with their dead sibling and then kind of how they're trying to cope with the grief of it all. But we probably should talk a little bit, Tom, about
00:15:10
Speaker
the atmosphere in the country while this is going on because in a lot of ways, I mean, Job's idea to build a machine to bring back the dead is all kinds of crazy. But there was a spirit, no pun intended, at the time, a whole spiritualist movement that was very much seriously considering
00:15:39
Speaker
communicating with the dead, you know, seances, trying to, trying to make the dead appear to the living. It was kind of, there was a lot of, I feel, I feel like more acceptance of that kind of supernatural element at this time, um, maybe like between the civil war and after world war one, then there certainly is today. No, absolutely. I mean, the spiritualist movement, um,
00:16:08
Speaker
I believe it was beginning a bit in the lead-up to the Civil War. There were elements of that always in Christianity, in various Christian denominations.
00:16:23
Speaker
One of the other things that this novel does do is it pulls at the various beliefs that the people's have brought with them into the country. Job and Tomo's family on their mother's side, the Claflin side, were a combination of scam artists claiming to speak to the dead for a bit, but
00:16:46
Speaker
their mother apparently could speak with the dead as could their aunt. So these things were already circulating and in the wake of the Civil War and the calamity that that just inflicted upon society with so many dead and so many wounded and in many ways the wounded counted, some of the wounded counted among the dead, they were so damaged that yeah, it absolutely took off.
00:17:09
Speaker
And it did carry forward throughout the rest of the 19th century. A lot of people are probably most familiar with it from seances and the like, and Arthur Conan Doyle's association with it in the late 19th, early 20th century. The Julian, I think it's Julian Barnes' novel, Arthur and George, about Arthur Conan Doyle and a railway man, George, whose last, this is an actual historical event, where Arthur Conan Doyle got involved in
00:17:38
Speaker
freeing a really man who then accused of
00:17:43
Speaker
mutilating sheep in the English countryside. And he was mostly accused and then convicted of this because he was half Indian. Julian Barnes wrote a novel that was quite interesting, but the spiritualism component really gets discussed and he dives into it pretty heavily. But it isn't just spiritualism that Adrian is summoning. Apologies for the bad pun.
00:18:11
Speaker
I mean, he's also digging into the rapid technological changes that are taking root in the US after the war, which is, I mean, frankly, often the case, you know, war breeds innovation, which then after the war settled, what was most useful or was most useful from that, that you can be applied in peacetime takes off and takes off. And in the wake of death, people often want to create something new. So you have these advances in medicine, you have
00:18:38
Speaker
these advances in technology, but they're taking place against these massive social movements and social changes. Another historical figure that Adrienne pulls in here is Victoria Woodhull in the novel, Job and Thomas' Mother in Our World in Real Life, a suffragette, an advocate for free love, later in her life a genesis, unfortunately, but a
00:19:08
Speaker
breathing, real breathing person who is, you know, one of the driving forces behind what became the the Comstock Act, etc. So there's so much.
00:19:19
Speaker
up for grabs in this moment and so much that is changing so radically that in a certain sense, why wouldn't someone at this moment where you're bridging the gap between some versions of superstition and an agrarian society that's moving into a world that's more industrialized, more tech-driven,
00:19:43
Speaker
but deeply unrooted spiritually at the same time, why wouldn't someone try and build a machine that would just completely upend the natural order of things?
00:19:52
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it's interesting too that not only is the social environment welcoming or open to this kind of talking and obsessing about the dead, but Job has a really eccentric family as well that the Woodalls and the Claffins that kind of
00:20:20
Speaker
They don't really think it's so weird what Job does or what Job thinks. If you'll indulge me to let me read just a short passage on page 185 at the bottom, which I thought was hilarious.
00:20:40
Speaker
It's another sign, said Mrs. Woodall, that you've returned to your family. She's speaking of Job. Isn't it so good to be together again? All of us. Now we'll all be together forever. Come, everybody. Come and embrace our sweet, lost sheep. Miss Claffin hurried down to the other end of the table and threw her arms around Job. I could squeeze you till you popped, she declared.
00:21:03
Speaker
Blood, it's Colonel Blood who is Mrs. Woodall's second husband. She never divorced the first, but Blood put his hero's arms around him and Anna slipped her withered stick limbs around his belly. Utica knelt down and clutched his leg, overcome suddenly with emotion and drunkenness. She wept against his pants. Big Malden put his long arms around them all and squeezed.
00:21:32
Speaker
Buck sauntered down and made as if to walk by the affectionate heap. He stopped and considered it for a moment. Then Will thought he would join the Embrace, but instead Buck turned and backed his ass into the great heap of bodies. Job had disappeared entirely, and Will did not know if he should join them or quietly slip away. They chattered and squeezed and wreathed and cried and began to quarrel among themselves.
00:21:56
Speaker
It's just like a very weird scene that, um, but that, yeah, it's, um, it's, I guess eccentric is the best word that I can think of of this kind of family that, that Job has grown up in and kind of a, a permissively, um, I would say imaginative group that, you know, don't
00:22:20
Speaker
kind of are seen by a lot of people as rather weird, especially Mrs. Woodall's sister and kind of weird or strange things really don't appear to them as being, you know, and a lot of families, I think Joe would have been packed off to a mental institution, but by his family, but here it's just kind of seen as, oh yeah, we all believe that, you know, the spirits live among us. And so, you know, what Joe was doing makes sense.
00:22:49
Speaker
Well, and to a degree, I mean, a lot of them didn't know precisely what Joe was doing, and they even comment at one point that science is Joe's religion, and they referred to him as being electrified, which is, I mean, he's the weird one within the family for being relatively modern in that sense, that he can't see the spirits they find actually not strange, but a little bit disappointing, I suppose.
00:23:15
Speaker
Yeah, it's in some ways the way they're described. I mean, Tomo I think mentions early on in the opening portion of the novel is describing Tomo's trip to join the army and his
00:23:30
Speaker
time in the army leading to his death. He mentions that they would read Shakespeare, he, Job, and their mother. And this is on a farm in Ohio in the 1860s, 1850s and 1860s. I mean, there's so many different things clashing all at the same time that, of course, is going to produce a really interesting tumult of a family.
00:23:59
Speaker
Yeah, when you were reading that aloud just now, Lori, it very much sounded almost like, I don't know, a comedic depiction of bears all piling up on top of each other in a den, you know?
00:24:12
Speaker
Yes.
Morality and Symbolism in Gob's Grief
00:24:14
Speaker
Maybe we should kind of address the purpose of inserting the character of Walt Whitman into this story because as we were preparing for this episode, I think that you raised a good point.
00:24:35
Speaker
I was questioning whether the machine is evil. There's an angel with two wings, unlike Tomo with just one, that Will also sees. And she kind of chides Will a few times. She doesn't speak very much, but she says, you know, this is an abomination. Why are you participating in an abomination?
00:25:02
Speaker
So I raised the question, is the machine like pure evil? Should we see it as evil? And I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I got the sense that perhaps you thought it was more emblematic of science and technology, whereas Whitman, I think just based on his poetry and his reverence for the natural world could be seen as representing nature versus science.
00:25:32
Speaker
So the machine that Job begins to construct takes a few different forms over the years. It starts out in one specific shape that's very primitive. And all it can do is communicate with the other side and leads to a pretty important turn in Job's life story. But we'll cover that when we cover his master, educator, however you want to refer to him. We'll get to that character shortly.
00:26:00
Speaker
And then it takes another form that produces functionally a homunculus, and then it takes a final form, the form in which Walt Whitman is to be the centerpiece. Whitman is the, so the structure of the novel, the novel is basically broken into three parts, each part focusing on a different important person to Job's undertaking, Walt, Will Fye, and Macy Truffant.
00:26:29
Speaker
We meet Walt first in his relationship with Hank, the soldier who eventually, after Hank's death, takes up residence in Walt's head. And it's very much suggested that Walt falls in love with Job. And Job
00:26:44
Speaker
is interested in Walt as he sees Walt as a necessary part of his grand plan. So I think when you pose the question whether or not the machine is evil, the machine that he constructs is evil. I don't think it's evil. I think, though, that as the angel continues to say, it's an abomination. It's an attempt to undo the natural order.
00:27:10
Speaker
The angel isn't appearing and saying, you know, don't learn how to do medicine better or don't learn how to better use lead to injure and mangle your bodies. That's just human intellect advancing in different ways to heal and to harm. What Job is attempting is
00:27:33
Speaker
to completely unmake creation as far as the angel sees it and as the angel understands it. I think even calling it an abomination isn't even saying that it's evil per se, it's just something that shouldn't exist.
00:27:54
Speaker
is an affront to creation. But I don't think there's necessarily, I mean, probably the angel would put maybe something of a morality judgment on it. I think it's just, you know, it's a daemon to use like sort of the Greek, you know, the ancient Greek sense of it. It's something that's acting upon the world that is from outside the world, and that shouldn't happen from humans, I think.
00:28:20
Speaker
And Whitman's role is, as you said, as someone who's able to take in the world and its surroundings and his openness of mind, but ability to then re-express it. He's something, I mean, I think, I mean, it's never made entirely clear, like the machine in some ways doesn't make any sense. It is a complete mishmash of technologies and devices.
00:28:48
Speaker
But I think Walt is supposed to be that bridge. I think Walt is supposed to be creation and bringing back to life all those who have died and remaking the world as it is currently constructed. Yeah, and I know we'll have to speak about it now because I'm kind of bringing it up as well. There's this
00:29:14
Speaker
otherworldly creature that at least Job sees. I don't know whether anyone else sees him, but he calls him at times his master and he's like a motivation for Job.
00:29:29
Speaker
Persisting year after year i mean this goes on a long time that joe's trying to like create this this machine and the master which is called the your face he says that the that the machine is lacking the crucial element of desire.
00:29:54
Speaker
and you know maybe that in as well as being like a symbol of nature or speaking for nature maybe Whitman is supposed to because I mean his his poetry is very sensual maybe he is maybe he's to be the desire but it's also kind of
00:30:16
Speaker
very odd in a way to think about like an inanimate machine, supposing to have like or needing to have the human emotion of desire in order for it to function. Well, and it's also I mean, it's the merging of
00:30:32
Speaker
man and machine in a way as well that we're talking about here, which could in itself be an aspect of the abomination that the angel is referring to, that it's going too far to put the human inside the machine. I mean, without even trying, we're getting really good at picking novels that are talking about a lot of things that are percolating across the internet and the world at large these days.
00:31:00
Speaker
Maybe it's just because we're picking good novels that are always addressing such concerns. I don't know. I want to think we have good taste, Tom. I mean, I think good taste. I think we'll ride with that one. Do you want to explain the urefficed? Sure. But before we get to that, since you brought up the angel, I just want to quickly flag what ever since I read this novel, this one exchange has stuck with me. And I think it's just one of the more
00:31:29
Speaker
remarkable images in the book. It's on page 202. You actually flagged it in an email that you sent Laurie when we were chatting about this session. And this is when the angel is talking to Will and trying to basically convince him not to work with Job. When the angel says,
00:31:49
Speaker
You'll fail, was what the angel said during her rare and brief visits. And she repeated her question. Why do you participate in abomination? He had gathered eventually that by abomination, she did not mean his dalliance is on Green Street. She meant the machine. Do you think God is against our work? He'd asked Job after one of her visits. He is indifferent, was the reply. When Will told about the angel, he thought Job might laugh at him and say that those spirits walked all around us on earth. There was never any such thing as an angel.
00:32:18
Speaker
But Job had only nodded and said, as if it were the most ordinary and sensible statements, oh, yes, the angels, they're very much against us. That's. God, because I would like to know what it feels like just to write a paragraph like that sometime, you know, like that is just a hell of a thing, but. Yes, agreed, agreed.
00:32:42
Speaker
And I think that that paragraph is part of what laid the thought in my mind that the machine is evil. Because if the angels are against it, then how can it be anything but the opposite of good? I don't know.
00:33:03
Speaker
Well, I mean, later on, Job does also say that angels lie all the time as well. So, I mean, it's really a question of what you think the role of angels in all of this is, especially if God is indifferent. There's a little bit of a deist sense of the universe as a clockwork machine that God sent moving forward and then walked away from going on in here.
00:33:31
Speaker
Which would make sense if you're trying to build a machine that will alter it. You would kind of need the universe to function as a machine in the first place. Oh, so the the earth iced.
Job's Mythical Encounters and Abilities
00:33:42
Speaker
So after Tamo dies and Job is inconsolable, he eventually decides that he must, you know, defeat death. And he seeks out the Urphyst. And the Urphyst is this creature that everyone knows about, all the kids know about.
00:34:01
Speaker
They're all terrified of, that lives near their town, off in the woods. He's basically a boogeyman type, but is apparently real. And Job seeks him out, finds him,
00:34:17
Speaker
At the last minute, tries to run away. I wish time that Earth Ice hunts him down, rapes him, and then bites off most of, I believe on his left hand, his little finger, right? Not his ring finger. Wish week later,
00:34:37
Speaker
We are later informed that Job's grandmother is also missing the same amount of the same digit. And the Ur of Ice even says to Job, did your grandma send you to find me? And this was an exchange. In exchange for going into the Ur of Ice service, the Ur of Ice will help him learn how to defeat death.
00:35:02
Speaker
Their advice takes him away. They go off to New York City. Very interesting exchange where they go from buggy to wagon to ferry to train. So this almost movement from the past into the future as they approach New York City.
00:35:20
Speaker
and take up residence in the Urfeis mansion on 5th Avenue. And in New York, he is, I think, Dr. Oberst, something like that, has a German accent and sees to the wealthy and
00:35:38
Speaker
the wealthy and respected and the wealthy and disrespected among New York society. And the man, whatever the creature is, starts teaching Job, puts all sorts of
00:35:52
Speaker
information in front of him, the ancient Greeks, the Magi of medieval Europe, just starts throwing more and more information and teaching him different languages, exposing him to modern scientific thought as well as alchemical thought, and even says that
00:36:12
Speaker
The Urphice spirits had told him that one day a boy would come to him that would help him, the Urphice, achieve a great work and that he thinks that's what Job is. But the Urphice is also
00:36:27
Speaker
also occasionally retires to a chamber in this mansion where he puts back on the animal skins that Job met him in and looks once again like this boogeyman. He periodically takes children from orphanages and feeds them up and then takes them into that same room where they are disappear and a few days later the earth ice re-emerges energized. I mean so he
00:36:51
Speaker
He's the witch from Hansel and Gretel. He's Rumpelstiltskin. He's all sorts of monsters at once. I think we both did the same Google search and found that the earth ice is actually, the only place I saw it come up was as the name of a sea serpent and an Irish legend.
00:37:08
Speaker
Which is also fascinating, because here he is with a German accent, but he has the name of an Irish demon, as it were. This mashing of cultures and beliefs and superstitions all at the same time happening in this country. Yeah, it's a weird character.
00:37:29
Speaker
It is a very weird character. And in that interview with Chris Adrian, I mean, he says that he took the creature out of Irish mythology. Even its name though, Erfeist, if I had to guess, I would have said, oh, that's something out of German fairy tales or something. It sounds like a very German name as well. It doesn't particularly sound Irish to me or what that's worth.
00:37:56
Speaker
No, I assumed it was German, but then also I looked up and I just broke it up a bit and Feist has a meaning of like mongrel or small hound, small dog. So, I mean, this is the over mongrel, the over dog, I guess, which is, I mean, given how he's portrayed physically,
00:38:17
Speaker
would make a certain amount of sense. He's portrayed as small and yet impossibly strong, dirty yet elegant. At his dinners, he has the who's who of mid-19th century New York society at his table.
00:38:38
Speaker
but they're all engaging in acts out of decorum. After dinner is completed, everyone, including the women, stay at the table and smoke cigars and drink brandy and engage in talk that wouldn't be considered cooth otherwise. So, I mean, he's representing a character that
00:38:58
Speaker
is welcomed but also allows a certain kind of a breach of protocol, a way out of society. And in his powers and his knowledge, I mean, he's not that dissimilar from the Apostle, from John Crow's devil at all, especially with what he has Job learn and what he teaches Job along the way. What's also incredible about this is that
00:39:27
Speaker
Tomo dies in 1863 when he and Job are 11, and one of the final actions of this novel takes place in 1872. So Job's only 20 at this point. When he meets Will, he's barely 18, and yet that
00:39:48
Speaker
that doesn't make sense given how much Job learns and how much he covers in that time. I mean, he learns a lifetime's worth of information, that there's something out of time taking place there as well, which is, I don't know, it's a very quiet magic trick, I think Chris Adrian is doing there, where the dates
00:40:13
Speaker
don't quite make sense. It doesn't really work that he would be able to accomplish all of this or even just learn all of this in the time that he's given according to the chronology of the novel, but he does. I just think that's a neat nod to
00:40:36
Speaker
both how fast things are changing in society at the time. I think it's reflective of that sort of argument, but I think it's also just sort of the forces at play in Job's grand project.
00:40:52
Speaker
Yeah, I guess I kind of saw Job as somewhat supernatural. I mean, the things that he does seem, you know, not of this world in terms of the amount of information that he not only consumes, but is able to then apply. And, you know, there's a scene where when he finally shows Will his house and the makings of the machine and
00:41:22
Speaker
The house is just chaos and there's metal parts and different scraps all over the place. But then there's also just books, piles and piles of books just laying all over the place. And at one point, when Job successfully recruits Will to help with the machine,
00:41:46
Speaker
he starts loading books up into a wheelbarrow and he says, here, you need to know about this and this and this and this. Will takes the books home and it's overwhelming because there's just so very much to try to learn and absorb and it's just not really physically possible or mentally possible to be able to do that. Well, it's also interesting too because I would agree with all that, but what's also fascinating is that Joe doesn't
00:42:17
Speaker
in a novel full of people who can see spirits and talk to them or have their hands directed by them, he has no connection to that other world, other than wanting to tear down the walls between his and that world. He can't talk to his brother. The angels don't appear to him and warn him. He's, as he said, accomplishing something supernatural with supernatural levels of understanding and knowledge, and yet
00:42:46
Speaker
He doesn't have any of the traditional markers or what we would consider to the traditional markers of the supernatural, you know? And I think that's kind of an interesting bit about him as well. Very quickly, there was a specific line, oh yeah, page 245. What you were saying made me think about this. This is from
00:43:09
Speaker
There's, after we get more time spent with Job's life with the earth iced, there are periods where the earth iced sort of goes off on tangents, or like a paragraph, sort of all sorts of random information, sometimes cogent, some, you know, or coherent, sometimes not. But in one of them, he starts talking, he, he's belittling Job at the same time describing him.
00:43:33
Speaker
And he goes, I think you must be made from your brother's leftover material. There must have been something extra, but not enough for a whole proper boy. God made you a half thing, a well-intentioned, but poorly executed gesture. Perhaps it was your brother I was meant to teach, but you're a sweet in your own way. We will have to make do. But this idea as Job being just extra material and himself something of a, frankly, like a homunculus, not unlike Picky, who appears part of the way through the novel.
00:44:03
Speaker
Yeah, Picky is this waif, this child that Job kind of picks up. He says that he found him, I think, in Central Park, you know, left alone and abandoned. But you do get the sense that there's something that's like,
00:44:25
Speaker
Also not quite a hundred percent human about picky as well that he's
00:44:34
Speaker
that he's something other. But I also wanted to raise the issue of the character whose point of view we see most in part three, Macy, who becomes Job's wife. And she kind of has an ambivalence about the machine up until the very end. And I don't think I want to tell people how
00:45:02
Speaker
how the book ends, but there's a point where they're kind of staging, ready to like, you know, turn the machine on with Walt Whitman in the little, I don't know, compartment of it and, you know, ready to bring back the dead. And Macy thinks
00:45:27
Speaker
About the machine, she thought that mechanical competence would indicate supernatural competence, and her doubt would shrivel. But the thing was roaring away gloriously, and still she thought it was folly, just an enormous monument to Job's grief that was beautiful and complex, but no more likely to raise the dead than an ordinary lover. I just thought that was, especially because it invokes
00:45:55
Speaker
the title of the book for sure, but it kind of it kind of gets you inside her her head a little bit because so much of the book is taken up by these, you know, by Whitman and Will and Job. But but Adrian also paints a pretty nuanced picture of Macy as well.
Character Relationships and Themes of Grief
00:46:18
Speaker
Yes, absolutely.
00:46:21
Speaker
And on the point of grief, earlier in page 204, in an argument between Will and Job, Will says, it won't bring them back to merely complain. But at Will, Job said, don't you understand? What's grief if not a profound complaint? It's what the engine will do. It will complain. It will grieve with mechanical efficiency and mechanical strength. Again, this is back to just how tightly written and constructed this novel is, these sorts of occurrences.
00:46:52
Speaker
You're getting so many different angles on the effects, both expressions of grief and the effects the war had on the people affected by it, right? I mean, Whitman, through his nursing, through his family ties, but we get up close with his relationship with Hank, the soldier who eventually dies under his care.
00:47:14
Speaker
With Will, it's through Will's. Will loses his brother and then joins up, and then we see Will as he moves through battle, moves through the war, survives it, and comes out the other side a completely different person. He began
00:47:31
Speaker
Will initially was hated by the company he joined because he wouldn't let anyone drink or use foul language or any of those things and by the end of the war He he's drinking quite a bit and in his days in medical school takes quite a liking to ether so he changes quite a bit and then and prostitutes to Quite a bit with the prostitutes. Yes and then But then and then Macy Macy has
00:48:00
Speaker
a whole host of things going on there in addition to the death of her brother during the war. Her mother becomes, I mean, when we were first, the beginning of Macy's section and the first paragraph and a half, Macy's mother becomes obsessed with the idea of only eating beans to the point that she eventually dies of malnutrition. Her father becomes increasingly unstable.
00:48:29
Speaker
which is part of what inspires her brother to join up, to run off, is to be away from everything that's going on. But then we follow Macy as she's exchanging letters with her brother, and her brother turns out as a gifted artist, is drawing pictures of one of his friends in the company who happens to be a Vanderbilt, of course, because what novel about
00:48:58
Speaker
the 19th century that intersects with New York wouldn't have some Vanderbilt's in it. And eventually her brother dies as well. And she gets the news of that from his friend, George Washington Vanderbilt, another recurrence of a name.
00:49:14
Speaker
After she hears of her brother's death, she eventually leaves her father and takes off, and eventually throws herself into causes, specifically women's suffrage. And she becomes quite taken with the woodhalls and what they stand for, writing for their magazine, doing research for them, and eventually goes to New York to join them, which is what begins to draw her into Job's orbit.
00:49:42
Speaker
Prior to this, after her brother's death, is when the automatic writing with her left hand begins, where she's writing letters supposedly from her brother, telling her what heaven is like, telling her that there's a grand plan. In some ways, I would almost say that her writing
00:50:00
Speaker
sounds, I don't know, there's something about the way some of what's written, it sounds the most like her grief made manifest and in a way even stronger than Will's seeing spirits or Walt's hearing Hank in his head. It's just so much more directly addressing Macy's life and world and what her role is supposed to be. I thought
00:50:30
Speaker
That even the first reading that stuck out to me a little bit and I wasn't quite sure if it was because it was written. It was in a written format if it was so much more explicitly visible. I mean, Will seeing spirits, he attempted to drown out and he just kept hidden from other people.
00:50:48
Speaker
Walt could try to ignore the voice in his head. He didn't need to say anything. But Macy's actually writing something down for others to see. And if someone were to read one of the letters from her brother, it'd be a very strange, like, well, what is this that you're writing? Like, this isn't like any of your political tracks. This sounds like someone writing to you from the beyond. And that and that ability of hers eventually is what allows Job to finish his machine.
00:51:14
Speaker
Yeah, I think you can't overemphasize the rule that the mourning for the brothers plays in this book. And in fact, again, I'm referring back to the interview that I read, and we'll make sure we include that in the show notes, Tom. But Chris Adrian,
00:51:39
Speaker
said that he knew the story that he wanted to write, a story about people grieving the loss of their brother and that inspiring them to try to bring him back to life. And he didn't quite know what setting he was going to use for this book, but then
00:52:04
Speaker
He said it became so clear to him and thinking about it that, well, of course, the Civil War, because what American experience has so caused brothers to lose brothers, both literal brothers, but then also figurative brothers, like in the case of Walt Whitman and Harry.
00:52:29
Speaker
Right. I mean, and it's the war... Or Hank, sorry. Right. And it's the war that's described as brother against brother between the two sides. And Job is not planning on only bringing back the Union dead. I mean, he's planning on bringing back everyone. He's planning on bringing back everyone who has ever died. So there is no distinction of who counts as family in this great plan that he has.
00:52:56
Speaker
I'm just chewing over a little bit the different manifestations, how the different manifestations of grief are then pulled into this gritter plan by Job, how they all feed into the creation of the final form of his great machine.
00:53:16
Speaker
I mean, part of the machine becomes photographic negative plates that will provide eventually in the form of the wings of an angel, which is, of course, its own nod to what they're possibly doing here.
00:53:37
Speaker
In some ways, you have the mind, the hand, and the eye all combining across the three characters to provide throughout Job with the means to accomplish his task. It's a brilliant book. It's brilliant, and it sticks with you. I mean, it's stuck with me all these years.
00:54:01
Speaker
It is one that I constantly, I mean, I think about a lot. Its ending is really searing. It's incredible and heartbreaking in a very particular way. I think we'll save that for you, dear listener, to experience. If you want to find out, you got to read it. We're not letting you off from that.
00:54:30
Speaker
Right, right. What other books does this call to mind for you, Tom?
00:54:39
Speaker
So when I was trying to pull that together a little bit, three books immediately jumped to mind for me, but not one of them is actually fiction. The first one is Names on the Land, which is a NYRB reprint, which is really just about how different areas in the country got their name. But I think it's just such a fascinating sort of look at
00:55:05
Speaker
It jibes well with this mishmash of cultures and overlaying of ideas and peoples and groups' existences across the country. So I think it's kind of interesting and works with it that way. The Stammering Century, which is also available as an NYRB reprint,
00:55:28
Speaker
which is something of a social history of religious movements across the 19th century in America, covering the various great awakenings, but the social dynamics that birthed them, the consequences, and then how they
00:55:43
Speaker
led to the next one, which very much ties into the spiritualism, the questioning of social mores that runs throughout this book, especially from Job's family's perspective. And that's just a really fascinating book and one I think that, I don't know, I feel like if you're trying to understand why the US and why US politics function the way they do, that's a pretty essential read to my mind.
00:56:13
Speaker
But then also on the spiritualism front, the immortalization commission by the philosopher John Gray. It's a weird one. It's basically split in half.
00:56:25
Speaker
And the first half covers the spiritualist movement and pays special attention to Conan Doyle and his circle. The second half is about the Soviet attempts to defeat death. And it's really gray kind of exploring these different tacks all within about
00:56:44
Speaker
50 to 60 years of each other to fundamentally alter our understanding of life and human life, which, I don't know, there's some mentioning when we're talking about this book, I think. And plus, I think Gray's just, he's a really
00:57:05
Speaker
good stylist. His prose works really, really well and is really interesting and engaging. How about you, Laurie? Well, I wish I had some of the nonfiction background in this area that you have because I'm sure that your recommendations are pretty
00:57:22
Speaker
Pretty specific in terms of themes and content. I guess, I guess for me, just in terms of the feel of the book, the one that jumped to mind right away was George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardot. I love that book. I think most of our listeners have probably either read that book or know of it. But another brilliant writer and just, you know, just talking about
00:57:52
Speaker
The grief that Abraham Lincoln went through when he lost his son and it was in the context of this spiritualism, this kind of spiritualist movement in that people thought that it was possible to communicate with the dead and
00:58:14
Speaker
in Lincoln and the Bardo, it really is a lot of dead people communicating with each other and then communicating with the living. And so that's the one that came, I think, most relevantly to mind for me.
00:58:28
Speaker
That also makes me think of Lincoln at Gettysburg. Gary Wills's, I think it won the Pulitzer, examination of the Gettysburg Address. What's interesting about that in this context is that the Gettysburg Address was a complete aberration for its time. This very succinct speech made absolutely no sense within the standards of the age.
00:58:56
Speaker
And he really dives into that, dives into the social history of how one mourns and how it was totally appropriate for a father to spend hours a day grieving at the headstone of
Historical Influences and Themes in Gob's Grief
00:59:09
Speaker
their child. Obviously, this is usually reserved for a certain social class, but that, yeah, it really kind of digs into that, which I think, again,
00:59:19
Speaker
gives some other context to some of what Adrian's playing with here. I'd be really curious to know what his research looked like for this novel. I'd also be curious to know how much sci-fi and steampunk he had read, because the machine that Job constructs is 100%. I mean, it's not run by steam. Actually, some parts of it are run by steam.
00:59:45
Speaker
But it looks like what you would imagine a steampunk contraption to look like. And it's taking place in this era of magic and technology and faith in traditional religions and the complete rejection of the social constraints, those religions and force. He's doing a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot in this book.
01:00:13
Speaker
I mentioned at the top that, of course, he's a physician. So he's got a doctor's degree, but he also has a degree from the Iowa Writers Workshop. And then I'm embarrassed to say that I forgot that
01:00:33
Speaker
at the time, but your discussion just now reminded me that he also has a degree from Harvard Divinity School. The guy has a lot of knowledge, but there's no doubt that this had to have required quite a bit of research, particularly about the personages of the time.
01:01:01
Speaker
He makes no kind of bones about the fact that his depiction of Walt Whitman, I think he he says something like
01:01:08
Speaker
of anyone that might be rolling in their grave about how I depicted them in this book. It's probably Walt Whitman because there's so much about how I wrote him in this book that is not factually accurate about kind of his temperament or his belief system or anything like that. But yeah, I think that he's definitely a necessary element of the book, I think, to make the whole philosophy of the book kind of stick together. Absolutely. Yeah.
01:01:38
Speaker
yes and and yeah i mean he is
01:01:41
Speaker
Joe continues to describe his machine as an engine, but Walt is the fuel. Walt is what the engine makes the engine go. I mean, his blood plays a pretty important role in a character's appearance in the novel. And I mean, blood is a consistent element brought up throughout. I mean, very early on, it's mentioned that
01:02:09
Speaker
all the blood should require a great work be done in reference to the blood spill during the Civil War. That's not the first time nor the last time that's said in the course of the novel. There's a lot going on there. I have not read The Children's Hospital. I probably will assail it again. You must. You must.
01:02:35
Speaker
But I also machine to Laurie, The Great Knight, Adrian's, I guess it's, I mean, I would say it's his most recent novel he co-wrote when I think with Eli Horowitz in 2015 or something. But The Great Knight is a version of Midsummer Night's Dream. And
01:02:55
Speaker
It opens with probably the most heartbreaking 10 pages I've ever read. I wish we had more from Chris Adrian. I think since I read this novel, I've been quite convinced that he's one of the more important writers around right now. So it would be wonderful if another something came our way soon.
01:03:24
Speaker
Yes, if any friends of Chris Adrian are listening, please, please beg him to write something else. Although we do, it's selfish because we do realize that he's helping a lot of very sick children in his pediatric career. Right. We've been talking about this before we started recording and I was like, oh man, wish he wrote more. But then, you know, you kind of
01:03:51
Speaker
Kind of shitty to demand that he write more and let kids suffer, but selfishly, if he could do both, that would be... Give up everything else, Chris. Help the kids and write the books and have no time otherwise. That'd be just fine by us.
01:04:08
Speaker
I don't even, yeah, including no time to sleep. He's definitely an indispensable human being. But thank you, Tom, for recommending this book to me. It was a sheer delight. And I really hope that for our listeners who don't know about Chris Adrian or have not read Job's Grief that you'll run out to your independent bookstore and purchase a copy. Absolutely. Thanks so much, Lori.
01:04:43
Speaker
you
01:04:51
Speaker
So we are going to be talking this segment about one of my very favorite Javier Maréus novels, Thus Bad Begins. And I don't know about you, but when I dug into this novel for the second time to prepare for this conversation with you, I just, I feel like this novel perhaps even got better with the second read for me.
01:05:20
Speaker
I would very much agree with that. I was remarking before we started recording that, I mean, in the course of reading any author's work, you kind of don't necessarily fall fully out of love, but you might not always jibe with it the same way. And I think this came out during a period when I wasn't as much jiving with what Marius was doing. And I must have been insane during that time because reading it now, or maybe it's just,
01:05:50
Speaker
different of a person from when it came out, which is entirely possible. It's just, it's a stunning, it's an incredibly well put together, intriguing, fascinating novel, incredibly successful. Yeah, you'd previously stated that this is probably your favorite. Like we kind of put your face tomorrow to one side because it's such a capstone to a career in a way, even though it was in the middle, someone in the middle of the career.
01:06:19
Speaker
And I might still side with a heart so white, but it might be a 1A, 1B situation. This is a really, really remarkable and very distinctly Marius novel, the kind of book that I think only he could have produced.
01:06:40
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, we have some of the same themes here, although none of the, well, I can't say none, but we're a little bit further removed from the British Secret Service or like actual intelligence people. This book is primarily about a filmmaker and his young apprentice or assistant.
01:07:08
Speaker
But there's still the same wonderful, complex, naughty themes that Maria has just loved to dive into. Betrayal and lies and secrets and a little bit about, I don't know, reparative justice, I guess I would say, in a way. Just trying to figure out whether crimes from the past need to be
01:07:38
Speaker
need to be brought to the fore and addressed and people made whole afterwards or whether it's just best to lead the past in the past. Yeah, which is a really interesting, I mean, it's interesting for us to be discussing this one after Berta Isla and Tomas Nevinson, especially Tomas with such a focus on the idea of justice and putting accounts right, that sort of thing.
01:08:07
Speaker
those considerations that were running through it. And there's a lot of discussion in this novel from different characters of their opinions on those things. And it's situated set five years after the death of Franco, when Spain is trying to sort itself out, figure out
01:08:27
Speaker
figure out what from the past gets carried forward, what is punished, what is ignored, and largely, most things go unpunished. And that seems to be, at least as Maurice presents it, where most of the society is falling, whether people feel that way in their personal lives or not, which is, again, one of his recurring considerations that you just brought up, the idea of what does the
01:08:54
Speaker
What does the state worry about as far as justice goes and what do people consider in their own private lives? Yeah, I think that what I think is most intriguing about this one, and it's a very explicit kind of conundrum that is set out. We've got the filmmaker here, Eduardo, and the novel is very much about his life and the circle of people around him.
01:09:25
Speaker
But you've got this very public past crimes that he feels uncomfortable with. But then you've got the hypocrisy of Eduardo's personal life.
01:09:42
Speaker
that he kind of feels like he can't forgive, he can't forget, he can't let bygones be bygones and kind of turn a new leaf and just get on with his life. So it's this juxtaposition with in one man's kind of moral universe of trying to reconcile whether or not to, I don't know, is D friend a word?
01:10:09
Speaker
This is well before social media, but whether or not to defriend someone because of what they may have been implicated in in the past vis-a-vis Franco and Spain versus something very personal in his own marriage. It's a really fascinating exploration of that.
01:10:35
Speaker
Yeah. So maybe just a quick scene setting would be useful. That would be good. Right. So the narrator for the novel is Juan de Ver. Once again, we get a very strange Spanish name that Maria is so I mean, not the only one in this novel, there are quite a few very odd foreign influence Spanish names. So this one,
01:11:02
Speaker
They actually, there's a very funny bit where they go into exactly how Juan's family came to be known as Dave there. And it's what you kind of might expect someone in the past deciding to put on the errors and make the name sound a little bit more refined by just changing up some of the letters and then someone else changing it a little bit more back when
01:11:24
Speaker
I mean, this is something that Maurice likes to talk about in his other novels back when you can kind of take whichever name you wanted. Things weren't quite as set in stone. So Juan is 23, just finished with university, and through his family gets a job working for Eduardo Muriel, who I'm probably butchering that Spanish name, so be it, who is a film director and is known for
01:11:51
Speaker
He's known for making some very artistic, well-regarded films. He's also known for putting out less so, you know, kind of the whole one for you, one for me sort of approach to filmmaking back before that was I think formalized by some jokes in Kevin Smith movies as spoken by Ben Affleck, which is a
01:12:15
Speaker
Yeah, probably a very strange illusion to bring up, but there might be a lot of strange movie illusions brought up in this episode. And one very quickly becomes somewhat essential, is referred to both by Muriel and his wife Beatrice as something of an extension of Muriel. And at the opening of the novel, Muriel is laying on his back on the floor, which he often does when talking or
01:12:45
Speaker
thinking aloud in Juan's presence. And basically, yeah, it brings up this idea that there's something that was done in the past that he would like to know more about, that he would like to have verified, and that what was done was unforgivable in a way, and specifically to do with the treatment of women. But he doesn't
01:13:14
Speaker
Muriel isn't totally assured that he wants to go down this route. And that is one of the threads that launch eventually launches one on a certain kind of investigation. Always a certain level of subterfuge and peering into other people's lives in all of Maria's novels. And again, sorry, go ahead. No, I guess I was just going to say that
01:13:40
Speaker
And part of the conundrum here is that Eduardo wants to know and then kind of doesn't want to know. And he feels, I think some justified scruples here in terms of
01:13:55
Speaker
Asking it asking Juan to dig into this Because he heard it he heard it, you know third hand It could be a rumor. It could be just some malicious slander against this this friend of of Eduardo and his family dr. Von Vetchin and so, you know, he doesn't want to
01:14:23
Speaker
He doesn't want to make any investigation or inquiries obvious or known, but he thinks very, well, more than disappointed. He keeps talking about this thing that Dr. Von Vetchen has been accused of as being indecency toward women or a woman.
01:14:52
Speaker
And so he thinks that if it's true, it's horrible, but if it's not, he doesn't want any damage to come to the doctor based upon wondering about or thinking about or inquiring with others about whether or not this rumor or this story is true.
01:15:19
Speaker
Right. And in a way, what he really specifically wants is for it to come from the horse's mouth, as it were. I mean, he wants one to – I mean, this is set up a little bit. We're kind of moving the timeline around a little bit in terms of when these things happen with the novel. This is probably like – this official, like, final, like, it's Van Batch and I want you to look into and this is how I want you to do it probably happens about
01:15:41
Speaker
roughly a third of the way in after what I've seen setting and character description, which is all delightful. We'll get back to. But yeah, he wants
01:15:54
Speaker
He wants Lon to get close enough to Van Vachon for Van Vachon to drop his guard and let him know, say, this is the sort of thing that I once did, or still do, or would have you. Which also ties back in a lot to notions or discussions of rumor that run throughout this novel. And this is a particular consideration of Maria's is that
01:16:20
Speaker
You should be very careful what you say out loud, that once you say something out loud, it has a life of its own, you have no real control over it, and that it can go to places that you would not expect.
01:16:34
Speaker
The specific instruction is to get close to the faction part of the way to do this is that maybe this is a quick moment to say one is 23 Muriel is what approaching 50 at this point in the novel. This is all taking place in 1980.
01:16:52
Speaker
And Vatchan is approximately 10 years older than Muriel. So he's 60, maybe just passed, maybe just approaching 60. And Vatchan clearly likes to go out, likes to be about town. And as kind of fits with Muriel's concern, clearly enjoys women and the presence of women and, you know,
01:17:19
Speaker
basically trying to, whether it's just the seduction, whether it's actually sex, he clearly wants that sort of interaction. And so in Muriel's mind, it should be pretty easy for Juan to invite, invite a six, for a 23 year old to invite a 60 year old man out on the town in swinging Madrid.
01:17:40
Speaker
because Madrid was swinging at this time. This is, as we said, post Franco. This is when the society is opening up. Everyone's expecting divorce to be made legal within the next however long. There are some pains made to mention that AIDS had not arrived yet, or at least knowledge of it had not arrived yet. So, you know, there's a certain free flowing sexual encounters taking place. But Eduardo was absolutely right, though, in terms of
01:18:09
Speaker
Juan's ability to get Van Vetchen to hang out with him and his 23 or 20 something year old friends because it's kind of right up Van Vetchen's street, I guess, to kind of flirt with these much, much younger girls, women, and to try to, you know, I guess one could say make conquests out of them, more or less.
01:18:39
Speaker
I mean, it's interesting in that Eduardo clearly
01:18:45
Speaker
He's concerned, when he receives this information about the invasion, that concerns him so much from a source that he trusts enough that he then dispatches his assistant to try and suss out this information. I mean, it read to me, and by the end of the novel, I think it's pretty clear, he knows it's true. I think that what he wants is confirmation. He wants to hear it.
01:19:10
Speaker
maybe secondhand through Juan, but he wants to hear it from Van Vetchum that this is what took place so he can take the final step to end the friendship, separate himself, whatever. But he wouldn't be asking Juan to do this if he didn't already have a pretty good idea that this was a likelihood, if not a certainty. Well, that's really interesting because a good part of the book is spent on this
01:19:38
Speaker
equivocation by Eduardo because once Juan starts getting close to Van Vetchen and Van Vetchen starts confiding in him, Eduardo on a number of occasions says, you know what, I'm glad you're having fun with Van Vetchen. No need to report back to me. I don't even want to know anymore.
01:20:00
Speaker
I don't even want you to tell me whether or not this rumor is true. I'm willing to just put it behind me and move forward.
01:20:13
Speaker
The character of Eduardo is a complicated character. I mean, he's described throughout by multiple characters as being incredibly morally upright, as being like a good man fundamentally, really interesting, engaging, all these things that make him sound, you know, like
01:20:36
Speaker
Frankly, a pretty good person. He's certainly regarded as a good artist, as a director, worldly, all these things. He also has a tough time getting his movies made, which is sort of an interesting wrinkle to all that. But I think
01:20:58
Speaker
where he lands with invention, which will be kind of a nice counterpoint to how he behaves in his personal life, is that, I mean, I think in a way, he's adopting a lot of what Spanish society at the time was doing, like, knowing that there's a lot of crap in the past that people behave badly, even criminally, but
01:21:24
Speaker
justice as such, writing all those accounts is not really possible at this point, and he'd rather just continue forward. Certainly by the end is where he's at. I don't think he's there when he first asks Juan for this. I think over the course of the novel, the events that take place convince him to be more in that position. But
01:21:54
Speaker
Yeah, I get the feeling that in a way, I get the feeling that in a way that Eduardo probably kind of always knew on a certain level what his friend was and might still be, but sort of rolled with it until he heard more than just the rumors that flew around in the early days or just before his time.
01:22:24
Speaker
There's, there's
01:22:28
Speaker
pain made to talk about how long Van Vetchen has been in Eduardo's life. So this is someone that he's known for a long time. He certainly knows that Van Vetchen is kind of a lecherous dude. That's why he has no doubt that young Juan is going to be able to lure Van Vetchen out.
01:22:57
Speaker
to drink and smoke and flirt with all of Juan's pretty young friends. And he also knows that Van Vetchten has this very
01:23:14
Speaker
reputable reputation, not only as a pediatrician, but also as kind of a humanitarian during the Franco years, that he was administering healthcare to a lot of persona nongradas during the Franco regime and not asking them for payment or
01:23:39
Speaker
doing work without being compensated just because it was the right thing to do, even though these people were political outcasts or worse, with respect to how the regime looked at these people. There's a sense that he's seen as someone that was actually brave during the Franco years in doing this. Absolutely. He has this sterling reputation of being
01:24:09
Speaker
willing to work with both sides. And as you said, support the folks who were being ground down and oppressed and had no real way to support themselves or certainly pay for health care. Ben Vachon is a pediatrician, so it's made even more so that he was taking care of children. And the children, of course, are innocent. They don't deserve the punishments their parents receive, even if their parents can't pay for the health care.
01:24:41
Speaker
Obviously, he has to be in good with the regime to have a medical practice, to be who he is in general, but he's in good enough and he comports himself in such a way that he's also viewed as someone who takes care of children, takes care of whoever happens to need help.
01:25:03
Speaker
This is also the source of rumors about him and the rumors and one of the, I mean, one of the clever things that I think Maria's is doing in this novel, but bye.
01:25:16
Speaker
Juan being 23. Because of the age gaps, and all the age gaps are taking place here, there's so much life that happens before Juan's awareness. There's so much in the world that's taking place. And not only just in the context of this family that he joins, he ends up practically living with Eduardo and Beatrice's family in their apartment, working there, taking care of things.
01:25:43
Speaker
he becomes almost a body man as well as a secretary, you know, like always there. But even for Eduardo, he's 10 years-ish younger than Van Vachon. So whatever Van Vachon was getting up to as a young adult, he was still a child. He might hear
01:26:03
Speaker
maybe he overhears something at the dinner table or late at night, but he wouldn't be as aware of some of the rumors that are flying around about Van Vetchen at that time. Instead, he'd be much more familiar with and comfortable with the legend that builds up around him as the pediatrician who takes care of any child who goes and helps the oppressed and the downtrodden, as well as having a strong
01:26:31
Speaker
a strong relationship with the regime. Maybe he was a nationalist, but really, he wasn't that strong of a nationalist. It's like anyone. Some people fought for the Republicans, some people fought for the nationalists. We're all just Spanish now sort of thing.
01:26:47
Speaker
Yeah, he comes across as being at least I think in Eduardo's memories and I think those memories carry into how Eduardo kind of still sees him or wants to see him in the present day of the novel is he's kind of this
01:27:07
Speaker
kind, generous, bon vivant kind of guy. He mingles with all the artists in Madrid. Everyone knows him. He knows everyone. He's a debonair kind of guy that is always in a social setting and people kind of gravitate toward him.
01:27:35
Speaker
Yeah, it's just interesting, this kind of ambivalence, I think, that Eduardo has toward him that he wants to continue to like him. He wants to continue to respect him, but it's like a
01:27:55
Speaker
It's like a pebble in his shoe, right? He's heard these stories and he just can't shake it and just say, well, I'm going to deal with this man fully based on what I factually know about him. He's unsettled by what he's heard. And so in one way, he wants one to uncover the truth and in another, he kind of
01:28:24
Speaker
He even tells one, you know stop. I don't want you to tell me anymore He almost he almost at some point I feel like becomes a bit of an ostrich He you know, he kind of has second thoughts about what he's done in terms of setting one loose to To figure out whether these these stories these rumors are true. He also when he tells one to not
01:28:51
Speaker
not tell him anything. He also doesn't, but he also doesn't tell one to stop investigating. He basically said, like, if you want to find out for yourself, that's fine. I don't care. I don't want to hear it. Do not tell me anything about it. Um, which is, I think a really interesting, um, tension there. Cause it's almost in a way setting it up that while, I mean,
01:29:09
Speaker
If you told Juan not to do it anymore, then maybe nothing ever happens. More likely, right? But by letting this possibility be there, you really think that if Juan finds out something really true, that really confirms your suspicions, he's not going to want to try and tell you, which is what happens. Juan does find out what
01:29:32
Speaker
what Van Vetchen was doing and has been doing pretty much his entire adult life, and tries to tell Eduardo, and Eduardo will not hear him out, which leads to the second revelation that's driving a lot of this narrative forward. But to maybe put a little bit of a bow on the Van Vetchen, or at least that aspect of the Van Vetchen piece,
01:30:00
Speaker
I mean, it's worth saying what it was he was doing. Van Dachen was more of a Francoist or a nationalist than was maybe recognized by others and became an intelligence officer towards the end of the war and gathered lots of intelligence about people.
01:30:21
Speaker
Um, and specifically the folks on the other side. And after the war was finished, she became a doctor and started to prey upon all these, these oppressed people that he was helping, that he was uplifting by offering free medical care. Medical care wasn't free.
01:30:38
Speaker
He was demanding sex from the wives, if the daughters were old enough, from daughters. And he wasn't the only one. There was another Dr. Arans who was doing the exact same thing and they would pass the win back and forth.
01:30:56
Speaker
And interestingly, Dr. Arons appeared in an earlier work of Maria Sis when I was mortal. The short story, which is the title of the short story of that collection, Dr. Arons' activities are clearly laid out. So if you've read that story, as I kind of did, when I first read this and this time again remembered,
01:31:21
Speaker
you kind of clock maybe what Genvashin is. I mean, I don't think it's hard to clock what Genvashin is at any point in this. You kind of get a clear sense of it. And Juan is told this by a family friend who's just a couple years older than he is, who's a doctor. And this also, I think,
01:31:39
Speaker
There's a lot of discussion and a lot of play with the sort of intersecting social circles in Madrid at this time and the social milieu that Muriel operates in, that Van Vachon operates in, but also how those things are siloed a bit. It's some even open secret in the medical community what Van Vachon and Dr. Aran's are and what they've done, but it's really more a question of, are you going to talk about it? Who's willing to talk about it?
01:32:06
Speaker
And do you talk about outside of your circle? And this is one of those moments where that intersection took place, where it just so happened that this family friend who views himself and who wand uses something of an older brother type, had seen one at Van Vetchen and was like, what the hell are you doing with this guy? This guy is scum, and then goes into it. But yeah, that's what Van Vetchen is. And again,
01:32:37
Speaker
I don't know, I get the feeling that Eduardo knows. At the very least, the person who told Eduardo this, who he trusted completely, was pretty clear about what Venvatian was doing. What Eduardo wanted was confirmation from Venvatian, which he knew he was never going to get, so he really
01:32:56
Speaker
In a way, he was setting this up for failure from the start, because even if Juan came back to him with this information, it would still be another instance of hearsay. Maybe it's corroborating hearsay, but it's not confirmation from Van Vachon himself. Van Vachon was still using the threats.
01:33:17
Speaker
It wasn't just that he was offering health care in order to sleep with the women of a household. He was also making threats of, I know who you are. I know you wrote this editorial. And frankly, I don't even need to know who you are. I can just say that I heard you do such a thing, and we all know how that's more than enough for the police to do X, Y, and Z.
01:33:41
Speaker
So he's still doing that to this day. He clearly did it to at least one of Juan's friends that after a late night of partying, he was driving people home. She was the last one in the car and they had a sexual encounter. And it's pretty clear that he threatened her. Like he threatened to expose that she took drugs. He threatened something. Use his position as a 60-year-old well-respected doctor who is out on the town with these young kids to get sex of some kind out of it.
01:34:11
Speaker
I think that, that you make a really good point though, because it's almost, it's almost a wink, wink by Marais or maybe a wink, wink by Eduardo Muriel. But, um, so Eduardo knows, but he doesn't know. And in telling Juan, I don't want you to tell me anything else that you discover, you know,
01:34:39
Speaker
just don't come to me anymore with these evidences that you're finding out. But it would be unfair for me to tell you that you can't continue because now I've spurred your curiosity and you can go and take this wherever you want. There is, I think,
01:35:07
Speaker
a really strong level of faith, I guess you would say, that Eduardo has, that young 23-year-old Juan is going to continue this mission and he's not going to be able to keep silent about it. He's going to spill the beans and insist on spilling the beans to Eduardo, whether Eduardo is protesting too much or not, that he doesn't really want to know.
01:35:37
Speaker
Yeah, and there's a way in which this is also, maybe it's a little bit of Eduardo trying to teach something. I mean, that's an overstatement, but there is an element of, we've already discussed how much rumor plays a role in this novel. I mean, rumor and words spoken aloud in all of Maria's work, but especially in this one, it's lots of rumor. It's a lots of conversation about this person may have done this or been involved in that.
01:36:08
Speaker
Well, I think we'll circle to how the internet actually shows up in this novel, which is a remarkable thing for a Maria's book, confirming some rumors that the young Juan had been told. They call him Young de Vere, if I remember correctly, constantly throughout as a kind of ironic way of setting up the fact that he's so much younger than everyone else he's interacting with, quite frankly, and also as a sort of
01:36:38
Speaker
Yeah, a little bit of a pet name, I think. It's certainly an overstatement to say that Muriel is trying to teach one anything. But for Muriel, keeping quiet and holding in what you know matters. You don't just say things unless there's a purpose to it, unless there's a way of making it count for something, especially if something is damaging.
01:37:06
Speaker
You don't just throw things willy-nilly to the wind, things that matter deeply. And this is, I mean, so this is the second element of the novel that kind of drives things forward. We've talked about Eduardo Muriel as being, you know, clearly driven by a strong moral impulse to understand what his friend is until he decides he's not, doesn't want to know. But in his personal life, he is absolutely
01:37:36
Speaker
repulsive in his treatment of his wife, constantly denigrating her physical appearance, never a kind word,
01:37:47
Speaker
pointedly ignoring her to the absolute best of his ability when they're in private. And he got so used to Juan being there. And again, Juan being an extension of himself that the mask that is present when they have dinner parties or in public drops. And Juan hears him say that she's as fat as the cask of the Monteado or just a pile of lard. And just in general be incredibly cruel when no one other than Juan
01:38:16
Speaker
frankly, or maybe the housekeeper Flavia, but when no one else is around. And those are two things that Juan clearly is having a hard time reconciling. This strong moral impulse, this man for whom he has quite a bit of respect as an artist, as an interlocutor, as a well-read
01:38:41
Speaker
very intelligent man of you know of carriage who's just a complete prick and more than a prick just a monster to his wife whom Juan is quite fond of and also things it's also like she's I mean not that not that it undercuts anymore but she's very clearly described as being quite attractive so why so why that it's it's really setting up like that there's
01:39:09
Speaker
something really critical occurred to cause Muriel to be like this to a wife whom he clearly at some point loved and now just can't even stand the sight of to the point that it's distorting reality around him.
01:39:27
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's pretty clear that young Juan has a bit of a crush on Beatrice and really maybe kind of who wouldn't being in Juan's position. By all accounts, except Eduardo's, I guess, she's an extremely attractive woman. There's descriptions of her as being voluptuous, but she's
01:39:53
Speaker
But she's very pretty and perhaps most attractive and for me and I'm sure most readers reading this it somewhat really heartbreaking is her.
01:40:09
Speaker
just seemingly unwavering love and devotion to Eduardo, no matter how nasty he is to her. And there is some discussions that are set forth in the novel between she and her friend Gloria. And Gloria is kind of
01:40:28
Speaker
talking about, God, why don't you divorce this guy because divorce is going to be legal in Spain soon. They're about ready to pass some laws and he treats you so bad. Just leave him.
01:40:43
Speaker
And she says, well, I know that underneath this monster that my husband has become, at least in his relationship toward me, is still the man that I love and the only man that I can ever love.
01:41:01
Speaker
so if i leave him i'm just going to be further away from that colonel of the person that i fell in love with. And while it seems quite hopeless as long as i stay with him there's there's some even minutes skill. Here's breath chance that he will once again become the person that.
01:41:25
Speaker
that I knew that I fell in love with and who fell in love with me. And it's really very poignantly, I think, set out by Marais in the book. And yeah, it's just really heartbreaking. Yeah, he returns to that theme a number of times and it's
01:41:47
Speaker
It's made very clear by Wan's observations of them that she is holding on to hope. Like you said, the hope of her husband returning to his love for her that keeps her there, that keeps her trying. There's a scene earlyish on where
01:42:10
Speaker
Juan has begun to sleep at the apartment and he observes late at night, Eduardo and Beatriz are sleeping in separate rooms as you might expect given the relationship we just laid out. And Juan observes Beatriz pacing late at night in the dark in just a very thin nightgown in front of Eduardo's door and eventually knocking on it. And this is one of the main points of
01:42:40
Speaker
information, for one, about the relationship. As there's more than a bit of an explosive from Eduardo's end, where he's pretty much just like, why don't you stop this to Beatrice? I will never go back with you. I will never love you again. But also some almost moments of tenderness between the two of them, indicating that there was something there before. And a firm rejection by Eduardo of Beatrice again. But
01:43:10
Speaker
suggestion, again, of hope that there was a moment of tenderness, that maybe that possibility is still there, whatever it was that caused this rupture. But Beatriz is a fundamentally unhappy person who wouldn't be when living under those circumstances. And
01:43:33
Speaker
about two-thirds of the way through the novel, right before our good friend Peter Wheeler makes an appearance. Of course. Of course, the Oxford Don, who's in Madrid and has been invited over for a dinner party with any number of film types, which we will definitely get to, because film plays such a huge role in this novel, not just because of Muriel's profession,
01:44:02
Speaker
This dinner party is supposed to take place, but it doesn't because Beatrice checks herself into a hotel and cuts her wrists and attempts suicide. At this point, Juan is not only attempting to spy on Vumbactin, but is taken to following Beatrice around a bit. Her unhappiness is palpable. He's kind of curious as to what she's getting up to, and he does observe her go to a very
01:44:29
Speaker
random building and have sex with Thynbactin. And it seems almost mechanical in a way, but this kind of keeps him following her around. And the night of the party Beatrice leaves the apartment for a moment. He pops out. He sees her check into a hotel. And then when the party is about to start and she's not there yet, and he mentions this, a look of
01:44:55
Speaker
I wouldn't say it's horror, but, you know, absolute moral concern goes across Eduardo's face. And Eduardo, Van Vechten, and Juan take off running for the hotel to find her. Van Vechten is able to stabilize her and save her. And it comes out that this is her third suicide attempt. It's more or less stated that at some point she will be successful, that she
01:45:24
Speaker
she likely will succeed in killing herself because of her unmooring and depression from the relationship and the relationship with her husband and the life that she is living. This almost feels like an exile within her own home. Yeah, I think there's some interesting
01:45:46
Speaker
scenes in the last third or last quarter of the book when Juan just confronts Eduardo and says, listen, I've witnessed and overheard some horrible things in this house, and I think I deserve an explanation as to why you are so beastly and horrible to your wife.
01:46:16
Speaker
At one point, Juan says, I really don't understand it because when we raced to that hotel and we saved her life when she slit her wrists, you were very visibly upset. You were
01:46:37
Speaker
you were very concerned about her and your love for her kind of shone through. And Eduardo makes some paraphrasing here, but some kind of comment like, Oh, well, I really no longer care how
01:46:54
Speaker
Beatrice lives, but I very much care about how she dies because that affects me and that affects our children. Yeah, she probably will succeed in committing suicide one day.
01:47:09
Speaker
But I need to try to make that not be the case because that will affect me in some way that just this horrible living situation doesn't. I found it to be kind of a weird kind of comment to make.
01:47:34
Speaker
There is a real almost clinical edge to Eduardo. I mean, he can make these pronouncements and statements that almost seem bloodless. And not just cruelty, just they seem, and I think just like hyper-logical, they just somehow seem so divorced from
01:47:55
Speaker
kind of almost a standard emotional resonance that they feel very strange, and that's one of them. But that was also tied into his personal sense of justice. And it also is worth pointing out that Van Bacten's help in saving Beatriz's life
01:48:15
Speaker
and his help throughout their lives, bringing all their children into the world. They had a first child who died very suddenly at two. They think of a menica galaca, like one of those awful to pronounce. Brain infection.
01:48:34
Speaker
Brain infection. Thank you. That makes it so much easier. Who died at two years old with brain infection very suddenly, which incidentally is what they believe that Maria's eldest sibling died of at pretty much the exact same age. That popped up in dark back of time. Also, the picture in the apartment of Beatrice holding Javier, the two-year-old, looks almost
01:49:01
Speaker
At least in my mind, it looks almost exactly like the description or the cover images of most of the editions of Dark Back of Time with the mother or someone, Knight in the case of New Directions Edition, holding a young child looking back over the shoulder.
01:49:19
Speaker
I mean, as has been well-established, Marius loves to just blend so many different things in. Not even Easter egging, I just think it's how his brain worked.
Eduardo's Choice and Relationship Strains
01:49:30
Speaker
But because of Van Vakten's assistance, and I think the reminder and the renewal of that assistance, that's why Eduardo doesn't want to know anymore. He's decided that, you know what, whatever the hell the man was,
01:49:43
Speaker
whatever. I know who he is in my life and I am not willing to cross someone else off the list. And Juan trying to tell Eduardo what Van Vakten was and is,
01:50:01
Speaker
And Eduardo's refusal to listen is what then directly leads to one demanding information, demanding to know why Eduardo is as cruel to Beatrice as he is. And so should we talk about why Eduardo has crossed Beatrice off the list? Before we do that, let's talk about the movies for just a second. Because I think talking about
01:50:31
Speaker
What happens to Beatrice is going to propel us to the conclusion the conversation, at least, is going to be emotionally exhausting.
Cultural Reflections and Muriel's Career
01:50:38
Speaker
So let's talk about the movies. So as discussed, Muriel is a director. He has some fame within Spain. There is a really fun discussion that Marius does. And this is one of the reasons why I think this novel is so successful, especially as compared to Berta and Tamas, is that
01:51:00
Speaker
It just has the asides and the one-liners and the thought processes that are so much a trademark, I feel, of Maria Sis, especially his earlier work. And it's interwoven here in a much more expansive plot with a much larger cast of characters. Maybe not your face tomorrow, but certainly of Tomorrow on the Battle or A Heart So White. But they're here.
01:51:27
Speaker
in a way that they weren't in Tomas and a little bit in Berta, but not quite as much. And they're just fun. They're just fun to listen to. So he has a little bit of a thing about how in Spain, it's first names versus last names. When you become known by your first name, it's because you've penetrated the culture in a certain way. But last names might actually connote a certain level of respect. But Muriel is sort of in the last name category, but not quite.
01:51:57
Speaker
And he's fading. He's best known for his work from five or six years ago. And it really matters when proximity matters. It's also interesting that his best work was taking place during the Franco regime. And now Spain is different. And it's harder for him to get his work made or to be as well respected. But as a working director, he's also done some not so great work.
01:52:26
Speaker
Can you remember off the top of your head the full name of the producer that he works with a lot? Towers is the last name. The full name is just remarkable. I don't remember it, but yeah, I know the character you're talking about. Harry Allen Towers.
01:52:47
Speaker
Harry Allen Towers was a British film producer. The man lived a long time. He made a lot of public domain schlock, as it were. And this is a real person.
Real-Life Influences and Narrative Complexity
01:53:03
Speaker
who also interacted with another real person, the film director Jesus Franco, who is Javier Marius' uncle, and for whom Marius worked. And Jesus Franco is also a character in this novel, almost set up something as Muriel's foil. When the film that Eduardo is working on, when Beatrice attempts suicide,
01:53:27
Speaker
When he was able to return to it, Towers is funding it and eventually fires him from it and is going to bring in Jesus Franco to finish it off. Jesus Franco, who at the time is in the middle of working on four other films, somehow produced. IMDb practically comes up in this novel.
01:53:46
Speaker
where Juan running from the future says, a quick internet search indicates that in the 1980-81, Jesus Franco, also known as Jess Frank, had 13 film credits to his name or something along those lines. That part's fun. And that part's really just sort of like this blending of
01:54:12
Speaker
of real people into his narratives in a lot of interesting and different ways that I feel like he was doing, that Maurice was doing more in his later work than he certainly did in the earlier. This is all fun. I wanted to quickly point out a couple of the books that, a couple of the movies that
01:54:34
Speaker
that Towers is involved with, specifically the fact that Towers is also the producer of the Christopher Lee Count Dracula, which
01:54:45
Speaker
as a piece of just sort of, I don't know, pop culture ephemera is remarkable. Oh, also Jack Palance. Yeah, that Jack Palance happened to be a good friend of Eduardo Muriel's and appears a couple of times in the novel as hanging out the house coming by.
01:55:07
Speaker
It's just wild how he's blending in all these characters, all these real people and turning them into characters. Last of whom is Herbert Lomb. Now, Herbert Lomb is a Czech-British actor. He also was in Christopher Lee Count Dracula. He also played Chief Inspector Dreyfus, Inspector Clouseau's immediate superior in the Pink Panther movies.
01:55:33
Speaker
He also lived for an incredibly long time. Towers died in 2009 at the age of 88 and Loem died in 2012 at the age of 95. All the people that he's bringing in, all the associations are just so wild. And Loem is a character in the novel who tells Muriel and Juan about some of Towers' checkered past.
01:56:02
Speaker
for a long time could not enter the United States otherwise he'd be arrested because he took flight when he was charged for running a vice ring or was about to be charged for a vice ring at the UN. He also was perhaps the pimp or at the very least the procurer for a woman who was
01:56:23
Speaker
sleeping with JFK, with Bobby Kennedy, just down the list. So Lum's telling this story to kind of give some flavor to Towers, which also gives some flavor to who Muriel is willing to put up with or not put up with. But in the way that there would be these sort of weird asides or these characters that would sort of go into their life story, and it felt very, as we discussed, bogged down in Thomas Nevinson, this was just exuberant. It was funny.
01:56:53
Speaker
fed the narrative in really interesting ways. It pushed things so much further forward and also had such, there were so many recurrences and recursions through this novel from the one as an extension of Muriel to
01:57:10
Speaker
One of the parties that Towers was throwing in New York that JFK was at when he first met this woman, who I feel very poorly that her name is escaping me, was ended because another actor had brought his girlfriend with who had slashed her wrists. And Muriel makes a comment about how, oh, that's just a thing women will do, you know, and they usually don't cut it just right.
Character Dynamics and Thematic Exploration
01:57:35
Speaker
And about 30 to 40 pages later, not even, his wife does the exact same thing.
01:57:40
Speaker
It's just such a tightly structured novel. I mean, it's really impressive on that level too.
01:57:52
Speaker
Yeah, the cameos are really fun. And, and we were talking before we started recording, Tom about I think, I think we both feel like this book has a momentum to it. That as you as you stated that Thomas Evanson doesn't quite quite
01:58:19
Speaker
Get to the same I think ideal level nor does nor does Berta Isla they feel a little bit Sloggy in places where this just kind of this just kind of clips along I mean, it's a big book. It's almost 500 pages, but you really don't You really don't feel it. It's just It's got a good pacing
01:58:42
Speaker
Yeah, it doesn't feel like there's very much wasted space here. It all ties together. It all moves you towards the various beats that are necessary. Each part feeds and forms the other one. Yeah, it's just a really well-constructed novel.
01:59:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think it is different from some of his earlier work. Again, just that it does have some of the same levels of interiority and leading into thought leading to the next statement or what have you, but with a much larger plot. Larger plots along with putting it. Expansive, maybe, of a plot.
01:59:28
Speaker
I don't know. I think he's telescoping more in this novel.
Ignorance and Consequences in Relationships
01:59:32
Speaker
He's going from the sort of macro national level into the interpersonal, into the deeply personal, into a real interiority. And I don't know that he always did that in the other ones. They hung around a specific person and a specific person's head and their choices and their actions, but he didn't play out the ramifications
01:59:56
Speaker
in quite the same way. Yeah, it just makes it a bit different that way. And of course, there's the inevitable Shakespeare that shows up throughout the novel. And I guess this is me, I really
02:00:15
Speaker
loved this novel. Full disclosure, our original plan was to talk about the infatuations and thus bad begins for this bit. And we made an audible and decided that there was no way we could do anything but talk about thus bad. Thus that bad begins deserves all the time in the world it can get.
02:00:35
Speaker
So this is maybe me postponing the final denouement. Well, not quite the final, but one of the final denouments of the novel. Well, the title is interesting and referenced
02:00:52
Speaker
in different parts of the novel, thus bad begins. And I think the piece, the Shakespearean quote is, when bad begins, but worse remains behind. And this is brought up in the context about halfway through the novel, when Eduardo is equivocating about whether or not
02:01:17
Speaker
whether or not he really wants to know about Van Vetchen and whether or not, you know,
02:01:29
Speaker
he wants Juan to tell him whatever Juan is discovering, because there's this idea that maybe it's just better not to know, or maybe you should give up trying to know what you really shouldn't know.
02:01:55
Speaker
I feel like this is a recurring theme throughout Moreus as well, the kind of idea that are you better to have not ever known than to someday discover something that is going to ultimately make you more unhappy? Right. And also, what is the responsibility of the person that makes it known in the first place? And that ultimately is Eduardo's
02:02:24
Speaker
break with, uh, with Beatrice, um, is that she does something, but then she tells him about it. And that is what he can't forgive. I mean, what she did, he found abhorrent, but he would have been happier not to have known. And frankly, that's what he's choosing. Yeah, exactly. What he's choosing than that. And he probably, he does know he doesn't have confirmation.
02:02:45
Speaker
But he doesn't really want confirmation. He doesn't want to hear it for sure, because then he has to do the next thing, and the next thing that comes after that. And it comes specifically from Hamlet, and it's right after Hamlet kills Polonius, basically saying, well, this is just
02:03:08
Speaker
This is the first thing and more is yet to come because of it. And so, do you really want to kick it off? Do you really want to get that thing moving or not?
02:03:21
Speaker
I just briefly wanted to mention that Juan's last name, Devere, gets brought up, and the fact that it's addressed, that it's such an unusual Spanish name, is brought up by one of the characters in the novel, who's probably one of the, I don't know, stranger but most fun side characters Maria's has ever introduced, Professor Rico, who's this loud-mouthed,
02:03:48
Speaker
borderline crude, also sort of a lech, but not to the same degree as Van Vachon, academic, specialist on all things Renaissance. His goal in life is to be part of the Spanish Royal Society, the real academia, which Marius actually was a part of until his death. Fun thing about that grouping is that
02:04:14
Speaker
you're assigned a seat based on the alphabet. So it can only have so many people in it. And so Marius was the R-seat, I believe, which I don't know. This is random. But Professor Rico, and this is Rico attempting to impress and steal
02:04:35
Speaker
the girl that Juan is dating at the time, goes into this whole thing about, where did your name come from? And it's interesting because Davert actually also has some French roots, but it also has some English roots. And he brings up Edward Davert, who is one of the supposed
02:04:55
Speaker
real Shakespeare's. So, Marius, who constantly is quoting Shakespeare, brings up one of the, frankly, weaker theories about Shakespeare as having not been Shakespeare. And not only that, but later in the novel, Juan thinks about the fact that, actually, Eduardo has the first name of the fake Shakespeare, and I have the last name, and it just occurred to me, well, shit, maybe that's how Marius came up with their names.
02:05:24
Speaker
He decided to split up Edward de Vere, I mean, Eduardo Murillo and Juan de Vere. I mean, probably stranger things have happened in how he's created characters. But yeah, so that was just one more fun little digression. I hope it was fun. I enjoyed it. It was fun. It was fun. It is always interesting. I mean, you know, you read the story and
02:05:49
Speaker
You know of course the plots are fun and the consciousness of the characters are
02:05:56
Speaker
are complex and nuanced, but then there's just all of these things sprinkled through that you can read the novel very enjoyably and not really dwell on any of those little gemstones that are scattered about, and that's probably how I mostly read it.
02:06:22
Speaker
You bring up some really interesting ties that make it just fun to think about how his mind must have worked. I've never been in the same room with him like you have.
02:06:38
Speaker
I just imagine someone sitting at their desk and starting to rub their hands together when he gets this idea about, ah, that's what I'm going to name this character. Or this is who I'm going to have Eduardo Muriel star in his next film, just these fun things.
02:06:57
Speaker
Yeah, I've always kind of thought that in writing, he must have at moments have just gotten either a small little smile that those who knew him were probably like, ah, what did he do this time? Or I think he could have been a giggler. I think he could have given out a little bit of a giggle when he hit upon something that he really, really thought was funny, which maybe no one else picks up on, but it just delights him, no end.
02:07:27
Speaker
All right, Beatrice. Beatrice. Yeah, Beatrice. Okay, so Juan basically leverages what he knows, what he doesn't know, and what Eduardo doesn't want to know about Van Vetch and to get some answers as it pertains to Van Vetch, about Eduardo and Beatrice's relationship. And what basically comes out, and this is a very like,
02:07:52
Speaker
I mean, of course, it's a winding digression and want to ask questions at moments that really tick off Eduardo and almost derail the whole conversation. But what pretty much comes out is that Beatrice and Eduardo
02:08:10
Speaker
were in love. He goes, Eduardo goes to some pains to say there wasn't very passion there, but there was love. And they're engaged to be married. She has to go to America. Beatriz mostly grew up in the States for quite a while. Her father took her as a baby. Supposedly her mother was dead, but it later comes out that she was not.
02:08:37
Speaker
and fled when the war ended or just after. Went to Mexico and then ended up in Wellesley and working in New England colleges as a translator and professor. And so Beatrice mostly grew up in the States and then spent summers often in Boston and back in Spain. She meets Eduardo. She falls for him almost immediately.
02:09:05
Speaker
Eduardo eventually comes around. They're engaged to be married, but she has to go back to take care of her father who has fallen incredibly ill. And while she's gone, it's kind of an indeterminate stay. He meets someone else and he falls deeply passionately in love and he feels passion. He feels that this is the person that he is supposed to be with. And he attempts
02:09:29
Speaker
you know, basically to break things off. He sends a letter, a telegram to her, or a letter to her, sends an express. He then, within a couple days, receives a telegram from her saying that her father is dead and she's coming home. He telegrams her to, you know, that there's an urgent letter coming, and then she telegrams that she, when she's gonna be at the airport.
02:09:52
Speaker
That letter was him breaking it off. But because she's coming back to Spain, and the only thing that's bringing her back to Spain is him, he feels, and they were already engaged, he feels duty-bound, honor-bound, that he has to go through the marriage. And so he ends things with the love of his life, which is exactly how he described her earlier in the novel.
02:10:16
Speaker
He and Beatrice marry. They have children. They're together for 12 years. It is a loving marriage. They are in love, but Eduardo says there is no passion. And then in an argument, I think specifically if I'm wrong correctly, because of an actress he brought around that she, you know,
02:10:37
Speaker
She wasn't happy about how he behaved around her, that sort of thing. She walks over to a bookshelf, pulls down a book, and pulls out the letter he sent her. Still in the envelope, opened. She'd read it. She knew what he was doing. She sent the telegram, and she rushed her way back to Spain to lock him up. And that was the breach. Yeah. The presumption is that she never received the letter because
02:11:05
Speaker
He meets her at the airport pursuant to the instructions in her telegram. And she never mentions anything about a letter. And in fact, he asked her, did you receive the letter?
02:11:23
Speaker
And she says no I can't I don't know what must have happened and he knows there's a problem when when he gets the telegram saying you know I arrived tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Please meet me at the airport because she says I she closes with I love you more than ever so obviously not
02:11:45
Speaker
not what someone would telegram after they read a letter breaking off an engagement. But she's just been pretty much bluffing him for 12 years about the fact that she was unaware that he had fallen in love with someone else and intended not to ever marry her.
02:12:10
Speaker
And that I guess to Eduardo is just like an unacceptable betrayal and has kind of changed his whole way of seeing and reacting with his wife for years afterwards.
02:12:33
Speaker
When he is telling Juan sort of his thought process as to why Eduardo felt that would be wrong for him to marry Beatrice, being passionately in love with this other woman,
02:12:45
Speaker
But when Beatrice is returning with her father dead, or only, you know, her wife as it were in the US over, and returning to Spain, where, you know, the only thing she had was, was Eduardo, that, again, duty-bound, honor-bound. But he also had this moment where he talks about, you know, one does one's best not to do harm to others.
02:13:09
Speaker
against everything, within the context of him being a moral and good man, he also has clearly this sense of propriety. And so she did harm to him, but then she did further harm, and this is the point he made in their nighttime argument,
02:13:25
Speaker
really more him just shouting at her, that she did him wrong once and she did him even more wrong the second time. And the second time being when she couldn't keep it to herself, she said it and she didn't think it would cause this rupture. She was just trying to kind of tit for tat him, not realizing that
02:13:49
Speaker
In his estimation, as soon as he gets his information, she ended his life. She ruined his life. He could have been with the love of his life, and instead he's been with her whom he loves, but he does not love the same way.
Emotional Turmoil and Betrayal in Marriage
02:14:07
Speaker
It's not just what she did, it's the fact that she threw it in his face, that she brought it up, that she didn't keep it to herself. Again, saying it aloud, saying it to him, not just keeping it to herself was in some ways an even greater breach than simply misleading him all those years ago.
02:14:31
Speaker
I can't help but think there's something very extraordinary about the stamina of both of these characters, Beatrice and Eduardo, to keep living in this situation and being consistent in the way that they live in this situation. Beatrice,
02:14:50
Speaker
just always insisting to Eduardo how much she loves him and living through this abusive relationship day after day and Eduardo in just kind of
02:15:13
Speaker
I don't want to say that he is holding a grudge, but that would make it sound like I think almost like it's not justified because she did force him basically to live a lie until he found out about her lie.
02:15:32
Speaker
But yeah, they just keep and you know, they do have three kids, but they just keep staying together, living together day after day, year after year in this really what would seem to be an extremely untenable situation. I mean, I would I would find either side unbearable. Like I don't I don't know how.
02:15:57
Speaker
I do not honestly know how folks and there are folks who do function within these kinds of relationships or always like maintain them and I just don't I I personally would not be able to accomplish either side either holding a grudge the way and grudges again you're right not the right word both being as angry and as
02:16:19
Speaker
anger as his state of being for Eduardo, setting aside the cruelty, just feeling that sort of emotion at any conscious moment with his wife would be just with his partner is just
02:16:40
Speaker
I don't know how, and yeah, endurance and stamina are just the right ways to put it. And then for Beatrice to continue to hold on to that hope. I mean, it's especially sad because one must think then that
02:16:53
Speaker
the passion he didn't feel for her, she felt for him. He is the love of her wife, and that's why she's just as unwilling to let go of her love as he is of his anger and hate for pretty much the exact same reason. And that's really tragic in its way.
02:17:11
Speaker
Yeah, he just has this enduring resentfulness toward her and she has this, and I don't know that it's fueled by guilt on her part for this
02:17:28
Speaker
this betrayal that she committed against him. I think you're right. They talk about the fact that she was quite a bit younger when she first met Eduardo. She was an adolescent, I think maybe 13, and he was like 20 or 21. So she kind of had that girlish crush on him, and then it just kind of grew into this steadfast love.
02:17:59
Speaker
I guess you could. It's not right to say that it was a it was a correct motivation, her her undying love for him to lie and betray him like she did. But maybe it explains why she, you know, she did what what she did because she couldn't imagine life without him. Yeah.
02:18:25
Speaker
Like I said, that part's a little bit emotionally draining and rough. The relationship with their children throughout is made clear that Eduardo, when he's there, is a good father, pays attention to his children. The children certainly seem to have their own lives right at school constantly. There are some pains made to say that they all are clones of Beatrice, both girls and the boy.
02:18:55
Speaker
that there's almost no, that Muriel almost doesn't factor into what they look like, which is kind of played with a little bit throughout the novel, especially when it comes out what Venvetian and Arans were doing that perhaps they also left behind some children through their nighttime predations on vulnerable families. Well, Wands,
02:19:24
Speaker
I mean, he uses the thus bad begins as a way of framing it, but maybe his first sin and then the secondary one. You already mentioned the fact that Juan definitely has a crush on Beatrice. We've also already established that Beatrice was having physical affairs, not remotely emotional.
02:19:47
Speaker
and with Van Vetchen and probably also with Arons. At one point after her suicide, when Muriel goes to Barcelona to try and pick up the pieces of the film that he had to put on hold before he's fired, Muriel asks Juan to stay at the house, always sleep there and try and keep an eye on Beatrice. And one evening during this,
02:20:13
Speaker
Beatrice is up late, Juan encounters her, and they have sex.
02:20:21
Speaker
Juan, I mean, he kind of at moments considers whether or not he's taking advantage of a woman who is in extremis, who had just attempted suicide, who's in not the right mental state. He decides in some ways that it's acceptable that this is just, it's a moment in time. It doesn't need to be weighed against all other moments in time in the future.
02:20:46
Speaker
some self-justifications, a lot of things that are in keeping with a lot of the other considerations of the novel. And obviously he does not tell Eduardo this, but at one point, at one point when they're first starting to have sex, he hears footsteps and he thinks that maybe when the kids are up and the door is closed, but it is cracked, but he doesn't think anyone could see in. And either way, he's going to continue to have sex with Beatrice.
02:21:15
Speaker
A few weeks later, he finds out about Van Vetchen. He tries to tell Eduardo. Eduardo then tells him about Beatriz's betrayal. At this point, Juan is already moving on and planning to no longer work for Eduardo. And within the next year, Beatriz, who liked to borrow Eduardo's motorcycle on Sundays and go to the racetracks, which is just
02:21:41
Speaker
earlier in the novel that made for a really delightful sort of like additional character trait, dies in a motorcycle accident. That's what they tell the children. She runs into a tree. Pretty much all the adults assume that this was her final and successful attempt at suicide. Within a year of that, Eduardo remarries. So just to quickly say, one is sex with Beatrice. This is a betrayal.
02:22:10
Speaker
Even if it doesn't mean anything, and even if Beatrice never acknowledges it after the fact, and there's really no change in the relationship, I mean, he did have sex with his employer's wife, with this woman who is, in some ways, not just an employer, but a friend of his. It's all very complicated, it's all very messy, and he feels any number of ways about it. Eduardo remarries, dies five years later, and at
02:22:37
Speaker
And at this point, Juan is kept in touch with the professor, Professor Rico, who we talked about earlier, who went into the whole Shakespeare bit, who lets him know when the funeral is. And at the funeral, Susanna, the oldest child, is scanning the crowd and sees Juan and runs over and takes his hand and brings him up to stand with the family.
02:22:57
Speaker
And he stands with the family, and the chapter ends, and the very next chapter begins that he and Susanna have been married ever since. That they have now been married as long as they are—what was the phrasing?
02:23:16
Speaker
they've been married as long at that point as Beatrice lived or something along those lines that they've been pretty much out, they've certainly outstripped the length of time that Beatrice and Eduardo were married.
02:23:28
Speaker
Beatrice is now, or the time is something like that. Beatrice is, Susanna is now Beatrice's age and is looking even more like her mother. And it's looking like her mother at the time when Juan slept with her. And there are moments where he wonders whether or not Susanna was the one who saw them, who saw Juan having sex with her mother. And it's not, and
02:23:58
Speaker
they both look away from each other. The novel basically ends with them both saying or repetition of a phrase that continues throughout, no words, no kisses, no words. We don't say anything about this. And I mean, Lori, damn.
02:24:20
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's such a complete novel. Yeah, I think that's a really perfect way of summing it up. There are no loose threads. There are threads everywhere. There are so many lives you could follow and so many interactions you could
02:24:50
Speaker
could continue onwards with. And it's woven into his other works with the appearance of certain characters and whatnot. But it is such a tightly, beautifully written woven tale. It's really just remarkable as hell.
Complexity and Richness of Javier Marius' Work
02:25:08
Speaker
And yeah, I don't know what I was thinking when I read it a hour long ago, when private first came out. But this is
02:25:20
Speaker
Yeah, this is absolutely one of his, by far, one of Maria's finest works. And I think in the later part of his career, probably, almost certainly, yeah, certainly his best work post, Post Your Face Tomorrow, I would say.
02:25:37
Speaker
Everyone, go out there, buy a copy of Thus Bad Begins. It's totally worth your time. So entertaining, so smart, so complex. And yeah, just read it. To read it is to believe it. Absolutely. And this is, I think we've spoken about recommending Maria's and where people should start or shouldn't start.
02:26:07
Speaker
I don't know. I think you can start with this one. I absolutely think you can because if this does not confirm for you that you're reading one of the great writers, then nothing will. So you may start with this one and just be absolutely thunderstruck by it, I would say. Totally agree. Thanks for a good discussion, Tom. Thanks, Lori.
02:26:36
Speaker
you