“A mist often descends over Ruán, or perhaps rises up from the river, I don’t know,” observes the eponymous narrator of Tomás Nevinson, “but it does hover on the surface of the waters, mingling with them or wrapping about them or almost replacing them, and then you can hardly make out the people crossing the bridge and it becomes hard to tell whether they’re heading north or south, if they’re facing you or turning away, if they’re moving off or coming closer.” The image provides a motif to which Javier Marías returns repeatedly in his last novel – published in Spanish in 2021 and now in a magnificently evocative English edition by Margaret Jull Costa, his longstanding translator. Spain’s greatest modern writer died on 11 September last year. In more senses than one, his legacy is one of mists.
Marías spent much of his life in the spotlight. Born in 1951, he was the son of Julián Marías, a celebrated philosopher who supported the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and, subsequently betrayed by his best friend, narrowly escaped Franco’s firing squads. At 17, Javier ran away to Paris to live with his uncle and began writing his first novel, The Domain of the Wolf (1970), which he published aged 20. But his breakout success – besides a national award in 1979 for his Spanish translation of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy – was the novel All Souls (1989), based on his spell as a lecturer on Spanish literature in mid-1980s Oxford. That time in the “city preserved in syrup”, as he called it, cemented a lifelong Anglophilia. Several of his books take their titles from Shakespeare quotes, like his next work: A Heart So White (1992), a phrase uttered by Lady Macbeth. It was this novel, interweaving themes of marriage, death and memory, that definitively propelled Marías into the literary stratosphere.
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