Interview with my other writer

What made you become a writer?

I think I began writing to find a place of solitude.  I craved silence where I could be away from the battles I felt were going on all around me, and the war, the great war, that had ended as I was born and which no one talked about but which I could sense was still in the bodies and minds of the adults in my life.  My parents fought various silent battles with other family members.  I felt in the middle in ways I could not name and could not comprehend.   I remember reading James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans when I was ten years old, and I didn't understand much of it, but I still finished it.  I remember reading Hudson’s Green Mansions and being enthralled by the mysteriousness of it, even while, again, I understood little of it.  In my father’s store when I would go into the large meat locker, turn out the light and stand in the black super cold air for as long as I could among the hanging carcasses of beef.  Then when I turned the lights on I would see the slabs of fat, bone, red flesh and muscle, very dark pearls of dried blood, those cows had been cut in half and I could see inside their rib cages as they hung upside down by legs tied together and hung over big metal hooks from the ceiling.

Like everyone born in 1944. I am a child of WWII.  We could feel that “something had just happened” although no one would or could talk about.  Later, when we were about thirteen, we saw photos of the concentration camps in Life magazine.  I can still see those black and white images of bodies piled high.  Only many years after that did I see Goya’s whole series on the horrors of war from an earlier century. 

How do you work?

I work by stealing any chance I can find to sit and write more on what I’ve started.  But starting is difficult because it is so easy to imagine what you want to create but not so easy to find the right way into it.  After I feel started, what comes next plays on my mind all the time and I need to get it down when and as soon as I can.  If I have a big stretch of time for writing I will try to write steadily but this may involve stretches of pausing, even long stretches, to feel my way into what needs to come next.  I often also write things that I hope I might be able to patch in to the work later on after I get a sense of how the whole is shaping up.  There then is a back and forth effort in drafting and redrafting.  I never can write for more than a few hours at a time because my attention fades. 

Do you know the end of your novel when you start writing?

I know only the beginning.  Or an image of a person in a specific location.  From there I wonder about the situation and how it might unfold.   I just start writing to see where it will take me.  I have often wanted to use a murder story as a framework for finding what I really want to have develop.   It gives people gravitas that they, otherwise, might not have. I’ve not yet done this but the notion appeals to me.  I never know the end until I’ve reached it.  But finding that point can be a tricky question.  Knowing how to cut yourself off becomes crucial.  

What inspires you?  Who or what is your source of inspiration?

I have to see a place in front of me. A place I imagine or remember from which I can then continue dreaming. One of my stories starts with the memory of a time I was in Buenos Aires and the hotel room has stayed clearly in my mind.  The room, the lobby and the street.  From there I imagine my character engaging in an action that sets the story going.  

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers? 

Everyone makes it up, so advice is difficult to give.  Write what you want to write, how you want to write it.  Use anything that helps you find this.  Use everything, use nothing, find whatever keeps you going.  There are lots of difficult moments that are typical for all writers so you need encouragement to keep going.  Ultimately your work becomes so precisely yours that no advice is helpful.  

The following question appear in Patrick Modiano's novel Paris Nocturne.  

Would you prefer to be part of the revolution or contemplate a beautiful landscape? 

​  

         Always I have wanted most to contemplate a beautiful landscape.  ​The revolutions seem interesting enough but from a great distance, great enough to see the landscape that frames them, either the fields or the perspective of history. 

Which do you prefer?  The depth of torment or the lightness of happiness?

​         In my earlier years I thought I preferred the depth of torment but that was a mistake I learned to see through and correct and now I know that the lightness of happiness is what I prefer and have always, really, wanted to prefer.  ​

Do you want to change your life or rediscover a lost harmony. 

​   Again, there has been an arc or trajectory over the years, from the illusion of wanting to change, through the experiences of what that entailed and how those attempts never quite panned out, to the sense that the ever elusive lost harmony continues to pull me forward into some unknown.  ​

What could a lost harmony really consist of?

​     Not knowing this is what makes the loss so appealing and the harmony so meaningless and meaningful, as if both possibilities could somehow co-exist in a paradise of paradoxes.  ​

Phil had noted a contradiction in the book---this passage on page 135

“Once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with.”

And a second version on page 233  “ What happened is the least of it.  It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten.  What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.”  

Maria Dolz is reporting this now as something she remembers Javier having told her when she had asked what happened to Chabert back on 135 of our novel.  But now Marías has Maria add “That isn’t true, or, rather, it’s sometimes true, but one doesn’t always forget what happened, not in a novel that almost everyone knew or knows, even those who have never read it, nor in reality when what happens is actually happening to us and is going to be our story, which could end one way or another with no novelist to decide and independent of anyone else . . . “  

But we know by now that Marías can allow his character Maria to disagree with what Javier told her about the nature of novels because by now we know that Javier’s claim is true, or rather his theory of why novels are important is by now firmly lodged in our consciousness as true and so now we can disagree with it a bit---enjoy hearing Maria disagree with it a bit as a way of emphasizing her reality to herself and her own meditations on her reality versus novelistic reality, all of which further underlines the great reality we have been giving to the novel we are still reading, whatever our own personal real lives are like.  

I looked up the idea of contradiction in The Infatuations and the first piece it found is a review in the Times by no less than Edward St Aubyn.  NYTimes August 8

He describes the novel so well and knows Marías’s work so well that I now despair saying much about it because if I do I will produce a very poor work of envy---the very motive and emotion that the novel depicts.  St Aubyn points this out so well:

quote  Few things attract evil’s indignation more than a Perfect Couple, whether it’s Adam and Eve or Miguel and Luisa. The particular form of evil that preoccupies Marías in “The Infatuations” (as it did in “Your Face Tomorrow”) is envy turning into betrayal. The definition of “envidia,” or “envy,” in Covarrubias’s dictionary of 1611 is quoted three times in “The Infatuations” (the reappearance of the same blocks of prose is another signature effect of Marías’s novels: prose aspiring to the condition of music, bringing back a theme, not in a vague or allusive sense, but in exactly its original form): “Unfortunately, this poison is often engendered in the breasts of those who are and who we believe to be our closest friends, in whom we trust; they are far more dangerous than our declared enemies.”  unquote

He notes too how Marías conveys great empathy toward the characters and great emotional generosity.  

quote

Such a high level of reflection and digression (let’s not even get into the amount of literary allusion) might easily become too cerebral, but Marías’s powerful awareness of indecisiveness and delusion is born not only of a speculative frame of mind but of a penetrating empathy. At one point the narrator gives voice to Miguel’s bereaved possessions, the clothes hanging in his cupboard and the novel with the page turned down and the unfinished medication in the bathroom cabinet, to consider what they might make of his death. This feeling of emotional generosity tempers the literary thinking, as do the scenes of pure comedy, like the Oxford high-table dinner in Marías’s novel “All Souls,” with its Buñuel-like degeneration of absurd formality into violence and contempt. 

unquote

Marías’s line about the possibilities a novel infuses us with could be the epigraph for every novel.

The musical style of the work St Aubyn notes well too :  “the reappearance of the same blocks of prose is another signature effect of Marías’s novels: prose aspiring to the condition of music, bringing back a theme, not in a vague or allusive sense, but in exactly its original form”

It is so good an essay-review I could just copy all of it out--one more big quotation for how it describes his style---

quote

Marías has pointed out that the Latin root of the verb “to invent,” invenire, means to discover or find out. His special gift is to bring these two processes, inquiry and narration, into a conjunction, making things up as he discovers them and discovering them as he makes them up. He never works to a plan, and so his prose stays close to the thought processes of a writer working out what to say next and responding to what he has, perhaps mistakenly, just said. “The Infatuations” goes on to explore the narrator’s relationship with the widow and with the best friend of the murdered Miguel. At first he appears to have been killed by a stray madman. The plot, several times changing our perspective on the murder, works very well as a thriller, but it is essentially a pretext for advancing the skeptical worldview embodied by the style.  

unquote

Skeptical worldview embodied by the style.  Seems a perfect characterization.  

Now we could privately debunk a bit just for the exercise.  If Marías is making fun of himself in the portrait of Garay Fontina, the obnoxious writer who is waiting to give his speech for the Nobel Prize, it could be further proof that he is, after all, one of those laureates whose whole trajectory is to win the laurels, in other words the star pupil driven to be the star-of-stars by-the-book, to win the A+ from the teacher, and not by genuine creative brilliance.  What he provides as high entertainment for this generation of readers may not be great literature at all but high-highness of entertainment---yet another variant of masterpiece theater---visible precisely in the supreme command he displays for doing the literary sort of thinking his father the philosopher would have both admired and thought not quite adequate for being not fully philosophical but a fallen literary form of philosophicalization.  Marías may have to suffer winning for literature and not philosophy because I guess there is no Nobel for philosophy.  

“Whatever else we may think is going on when we read, we are choosing to spend time in an author’s company. In Javier Marías’s case this is a good decision; his mind is insightful, witty, sometimes startling, sometimes hilarious, and always intelligent.”   StAubyn

I don’t know if St Aubyn knows that the Spanish consider envy to be their trademark deadly sin.  With that in mind, I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what games Marías’s novel might be offering to his countrymen.  “Yes, I might get the Nobel, so I know you envy me or will envy me for this, even though you tend to think that I’m not really a Spanish writer but more of an English writer in Spanish costume.”  “If I don’t get the prize, you will envy me nevertheless simply because of the rumors that I might win.  So here is a set of tales of infatuations, or envies, to show how well I understand our national character and how much I count myself prone to the same dominant sin as the rest of you.”  No doubt there could be much more to it than this.  I need to consult with some Spanish friends who have read the book.  And who know the kinds of games Marías likes to play with his native readers.  

Also we must remember that Marías could have written the novel to the Swedes, to give them a game while everyone waits.  “Well, if you give me the prize, I just want you to know that I’m of good humor about it and not at all as conceited or obnoxious as that terrible writer of my own creation in the novel, Garay Fontina, would be.”  “If you don’t give it to me, rest assured I will not indulge the envy we Spaniards are so prone to, but will celebrate the winner with generous and intelligent goodwill.  After all in this novel I have shown how much fun we all have with even the rumors of Nobel prize-dom.”