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BOOKS I READ: Berta Isla by Javier Marías (2017) translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (2019). Tomás and Berta are high school sweethearts in Madrid. Tom, whose father is English, goes off to study at Oxford. A dalliance there snares him in a compromising situation, wiped clean when he agrees to join one of the crown’s secret services. Their agents find his acumen for mimicry and languages promising. The two marry, and Berta’s life becomes one of waiting for him to return from duty, his assignments getting longer and longer, and with no explanation possible, everything is top secret. When Argentina attacks the Falklands and Tomás disappears, Berta is left to raise two children in Madrid with no word about her husband.
Marías shows us the turmoil in Berta’s head as she attempts to handle the difficult circumstances of being married to a spy, a missing spy, while attempting to keep a stable home for her children without showing despair. Her equanimity is tested when she gets a visit from possible counter agents inquiring on the whereabouts of her husband. “… Nothing exist without the imagination. Even when things are happening and are present, they, too, require imagination, because it’s the only thing that highlights certain events and teaches us to distinguish, while they are happening, the memorable from the unmemorable,” Berta asserts, as she imagines possible eventualities for her husband. We get numerous references to Melville, Shakespeare, and others—Berta teaches English literature—but none gets quoted as much as T.S. Eliot, Tomás’s namesake, and the line, “This is the death of air,” from his poem, Little Gidding, repeatedly—apt given their suffocating lives.
See my Bookshop.org stand; and my reading log. The previous book in the log is below:
