Thus Bad Begins<\/em> offers his customary ethical tangles and astute mulling over human behavior. At its most fluid, the reader drifts through the familiar density and detours in something like an intrigued torpor.<\/p>\nThe focal point is the uneasy marriage of Eduardo Muriel and Beatriz Noguera. Juan de Vere, the narrator, is looking back on the period when, in his first job as an assistant to Eduardo, a well-known film director, he lived in the former maid\u2019s quarters of the couple\u2019s apartment. He was drawn to them, they relied on him, and this configuration made him a privileged voyeur. Provoked by rambling conversations with Eduardo and the titillating episodes of spying and eavesdropping Mar\u00edas luxuriates in, de Vere wrestled to understand their union that was marred by unkindness and physical rejection on the part of Eduardo. This puzzling lack of intimacy appeared to stem from a perceived betrayal. Furthermore, Eduardo had entrusted de Vere with the mission of getting close to the shady, lecherous Van Vechten, family doctor and friend, to evaluate whether he could have behaved in an \u201cindecent manner\u201d toward women. To say more of the plot might spoil its teasingly deferred revelations, and in Mar\u00edas seductive teasing is much of the point.<\/p>\n
This is one of his most overtly \u201cSpanish\u201d books, its \u201ctenuous . . . story\u201d of a marriage set insistently within the frame of Madrid circa 1980. This was the time of the Movida, a countercultural movement and scene that emerged energetically in the capital in the wake of Franco\u2019s rule of almost forty years\u2014though it had been brewing and starting to manifest even before the dictator\u2019s death in 1975. The city was heady with \u201cpermissiveness and freedoms,\u201d vigorous nightlife (\u201cno one slept in those years,\u201d an impression you might still have there today), supposed sexual liberation, and the playful anarchic energy of artists such as Pedro Almod\u00f3var. However, as Mar\u00edas emphasizes, shadows lingered. Crimes and suspicions were being silenced, personal histories rewritten, cleansed of collusion with the old repressive regime. The new democracy was accompanied by a political decision (\u201cthe pact of forgetting\u201d) reflecting a controversial but broadly upheld general conviction that it was better to avoid seeking retribution for wrongs perpetrated under the regime, as this would have caused chaos. Legal divorce was impending but not yet an option, and this is stressed, with the implications for both genders empathically considered. The novel feels both soaked with patriarchy and\u2014at least intermittently\u2014concerned with its particular oppression of women.<\/p>\n
Mar\u00edas\u2019s fiction has invoked Shakespeare on several occasions and Thus Bad Begins<\/em> lifts its title from Hamlet<\/em>. The extended quote from Act III<\/span>, scene iv, \u201cThus bad begins and worse remains behind\u201d is interpreted for de Vere by Muriel as describing the need to renounce at knowing what cannot really be known and thereby move on. (He seems to take the line against the common reading, to mean that the worst is in the past\u2014rather than yet in store.) We are left wondering about the implications of Muriel\u2019s philosophy both for history and personal relationships. Mar\u00edas returns repeatedly to the phrase, a technique he favors for building cumulative resonance and suggesting shifting shades of meaning. He is engagingly preoccupied with the rhythmic and chameleonic properties of language.<\/p>\nMusing on Hitchcock\u2019s films, de Vere reflects that only a gaze is required to produce suspense; watching itself is dramatic. Perhaps, but especially when the watching is piquantly colored with mystery, desire and death. Mar\u00edas is as exquisitely conscious of this as Hitchcock was, yet plentiful doses of all three don\u2019t prove as consistently absorbing here as they did in novels such as Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me<\/em>. Mar\u00edas\u2019s prose often has a hypothetical aura, a sense of the exercise of modeling a possible reality. This is of course inherent to fiction, and can effectively be latent or more explicit. While in Thus Bad Begins<\/em> Mar\u00edas brings his usual virtuosic meticulousness to the exercise, I found my awareness of it a little distancing, the protracted conjecture and penchant for aphorisms sometimes cumbersome and emotionally flat. The use of _Hamlet_\u2014though the works do both brood on hard-to-credit mortality via characters enmeshed in their own psychological webs\u2014seemed a somewhat mechanical device for injecting passion.<\/p>\nThis said, emotional distance or a certain flatness of affect is frequently apposite and subtly explored in Mar\u00edas\u2019s novels, which are very impressively substantial with ideas and moody mood. Alienation snakes through them, accompaniment to the recurring perception that reality is unreal. More broadly, he is fascinated by the potential for art and life to intersect, and the impossible task of cleanly demarcating the two. And always emerging persuasively from his prose is the haunting notion that consciousness is a roundabout, cryptic story we tell ourselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thus Bad Begins\u00a0by Javier Mar\u00edas translated from the Spanish\u00a0by Margaret Jull Costa 464 pgs. | pb |9781101911914 | $16.95 Knopf Reviewed by Kristel Thornell Following The Infatuations, Javier Mar\u00edas\u2019s latest novel seems, like those that have preceded it, an experiment to test fiction\u2019s capacity to mesmerize with sombre-sexy atmospheres and ruminative elongated sentences […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":404602,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67456],"tags":[206,6006,64946,13566,6516,64956],"class_list":["post-304966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","tag-javier-marias","tag-knopf","tag-kristel-thornell","tag-margaret-jull-costa","tag-spanish-literature","tag-thus-bad-begins"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304966"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":404802,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304966\/revisions\/404802"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/404602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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