The Enchanted, by Rene Denfeld

Wow, this was a hard read.  Not the writing or the language, but the subject matter: death row inmates.  The protagonist is a woman, referred to only as “the lady”, who researches and defends people on death row, not to exonerate them but to try to save them from the ultimate punishment.  These are not nice people.  They are vile, violent, sick, repellent, dangerous, hateful, ugly, nasty, dreadful people.  They are mentally and/or emotionally ill.  They could be called evil if you believe in that sort of thing.  They have committed hideous crimes.  If you were a loved one of one of their victims you would likely want to see them dead, if even with your own bare hands.  And yet.....

These are people, human beings.  They were born naked infants just like the rest of us.  What led them to the acts for which they have been condemned to die?  That is the question that drives “the lady.”  She starts with the assumption, the belief, that something in their past, made them into what they are, or at least the part of them for which they are to be punished.  Maybe the father or mother, maybe a grandfather or an uncle, or a neighbor, maybe a complete stranger.  Someone.  Someone else who can be blamed.  Not to entirely shift the blame, and punishment, onto someone else, but to lighten the weight of responsibility on the inmate.  To create an opening for understanding and sympathy for the person whose hands have committed the depraved act.  

Her task is not pleasant.  It takes her deep into the ominous prison, in a private room with the inmate in an ancient wooden cage, for conversations in which she patiently waits for crumbs of memories--names, places, events.  It takes her to places of the inmates’ childhood, lonely and sometimes dangerous places, to interview people who may have known.  As I said, it’s a hard book to read.  No bedtime story.

The author, Rene Denfeld, based her writing on more than a decade of work with violent offenders, including some on death row.  According to her Wikipedia page, “...her life and writing revolves around preventing and healing trauma.”  She seems to believe that even the worst of us has value and deserves a chance at redemption.  WWJD?

Coincidentally, the New York Times Magazine, in its annual issue of short tributes to important people who died in the previous year, included Scharlette Holdman, a woman sometimes credited with developing the field of “death penalty mitigation.”  Her clients included Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, Jared Loughner, the shooter in Tucson who killed six and wounded others including U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords, and her last, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.  Over a fifty-plus year career she held to the belief that her clients were not monsters, just “terribly flawed human beings.”

On reflection, I am reminded of the enduring “nature versus nurture” debate.  These defenders of the accused tilt heavily toward the nurture side, believing that the inmates were not born as felons, but that circumstances in their lives molded them badly.  It’s an optimistic viewpoint in that it argues that if society could be improved, innocent babies would no longer be transformed into the types of flawed humans who commit horrible crimes.

I am reminded also of Anthony Burgess, a lion of twentieth century literature and a personal favorite of mine, who argued that we have the ability to choose good or evil, that we can recognize an opportunity to do good or to do evil, and choose evil.  “If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange--meaning that he has the appearance of an organism, lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.”

Perhaps society, with its boundless capacity for good and for evil, is the clock winder.

Talk, Talk, by T. C. Boyle

I’ve enjoyed another novel, Tortilla Curtain, by this writer, and Sue has read several, so I decided it was time to revisit him.  His writing is very modern in its subject matter and style.  This story portrays a clash between very different worlds, and a reckoning, a detente if not an embrace.

Dana is a deaf woman, educated, honest, hard-working, in a promising new romance.  Bridger, her boyfriend, is a tech worker, also honest, and headlong in love with Dana.  Peck Wilson is a criminal, ex-con, living the high life on his latest scheme, identity theft.  Peck steals Dana’s identity and, besides binge spending with her credit cards, lets his own history become hers.  So when she is pulled for a minor traffic violation, the cop sees a record of assault, robbery, and other assorted misdemeanors and felonies, he approaches with gun pulled and arrests her.  She endures a long weekend of rough treatment and insult, made incalculably worse by her deafness.  After release, her righteous anger moves her to pursue the thief.  Bridger eagerly joins her.  

The collisions of worlds--between the law-abiding and the criminal, between the hearing and the deaf--is well developed, revealing a rich combination of research and Boyle’s fertile imagination.  I do worry about identity theft.  With the hacker attacks on Yahoo, Uber, even the government, I’m sure much of my personal data is out there.  Just yesterday at a doctor’s office I was asked to sign an insurance authorization that showed, on hard copy, my name, address, date of birth, insurance group number, and my Medicare ID, which happens to be my Social Security Number, a fact that even the lamest of identity thieves would know.  Uber data included a credit card number.  I feel vulnerable, and reading this book certainly did nothing to allay my concerns.  

Perhaps years from now technology will have all but eliminated identity theft.  But the sound wall that segregates the deaf from the hearing, the disabled from the non-disabled, will endure, and the insights into that separation offered by this book will have lasting value.  

This was a good read.  Boyle’s writing sparkles, careens, booms, rumbles, and flashes, in his descriptive passages as well as the plot lines.  Highly imaginative and enjoyable.

Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust

I’ve been meaning to read something by Proust for a long time.  His name gets dropped in various writings, literary writings I suppose, as if the name alone is enough to convey a world of meaning.  Like Charles Dickens or Yogi Berra.    “Proustian, you say?  Oh my, I know what you mean!” So annoying.  Finally now, I do have a sense of what that means, and it’s actually a pretty potent image.  Reading a little something by Proust isn’t easy because he never wrote a little anything.  This book was just over six hundred pages, two long chapters and one short one.  It’s Volume I of a six volume work, In Search of Lost Time, known commonly as his masterpiece.  In France he’s something of a national hero, up there with Victor Hugo, Voltaire, Dumas, Balzac, and Sartre, known I suspect, more for the reputation fashioned for him by the serious literary critics, the intelligentsia, than for pleasure or enlightenment enjoyed by a large number of readers.  Proust wrote and published in the decades before and after the turn of the twentieth century,  more than a hundred years ago.  I’d wager fewer people have read a whole book by Proust in all that time than have read a John Grisham book in just the last ten years.  Definitely not mass market material.  

What’s my take?  I’m not really a fan.  I find a lot to respect and admire in his work, but I can’t say I enjoyed it, or that I was enlightened by it, other than that I learned something of what ‘Proustian’ means.  I’m not eager to run out and pick up Volume II.

A word about the plot: there isn’t any.  No, that’s not fair.  There was in fact a plot to the second chapter, “Swann in Love”.  In short Swann fell in love, she dumped him, he got over it.  The first chapter, “Combray” was two hundred sixty pages of the author’s rapturous depictions of his childhood home, its inhabitants, trees, flowers, routines, buildings, steeples gardens, and more flowers, their colors, shapes, fragrances, seasons.  For Proust the real is just a springboard for his imagination which multiplies the length of the narrative through endless flights of fancy.  He goes on for pages about a simple flowering hawthorn tree he encounters on one of his many walks. 

The difficulty of the reading is magnified by Proust’s use of extremely long, complex sentences in which he inserts multiple asides in the form of thoughts set off by dashes or enclosed in parentheses, some of them running on for half a page in which it’s hard not to lose track of the point of the parenthetical insertions, let along the thrust of the sentence itself.  Many times I returned to the beginning of a sentence and re-read, taking pains to not let myself get drawn in to what’s between dashes or parentheses so that I could avoid getting lost in the asides.  I’m tempted to say it’s like the rambling of thoughts when I’m lying in bed unable to fall asleep and they run from one thing to another and another and another until at some point I arrive at some frightening or unpleasant notion and become aware of the aimless wanderings and ask myself ‘How did I get here???’  But Proust is not like that.  Proust’s wanderings are not aimless.  Invariably if I read carefully I’d find that every aside is relevant to the narrative, and every long winded simile, every memory called up in vivid detail, is wonderfully apt to the circumstance.  

I need to offer an example, and would love to select a short one, but that would not be representative of Proust’s style, and besides, I can’t find a short one.  So here is a paragraph from “Combray”, the memory evoked by a taste of tea.  “And as soon as I had recognised the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me, immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents; and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine.  And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.”  I ask you, reader, to read that again a time or two, and see the richness of the Japanese paper analogy.  It’s a good example, good in its fullness, and good in that it is representative of the way Proust treats memory, time and again.  His recollections are so vivid, so much like a reality, that at times a memory of a place is more important, almost more real, than the present.  It occurs to me how horrid Alzheimer’s would be for a person like Proust for whom memory is so consuming.  

There is a lot of breathless romanticism in the writing, mooning and fluttering over relatively minor events, magnifying them into happenings of great consequence.  Here is an example, when Swann, who has fallen in love with Odette, and even more in love with the glory of being in love, is about to kiss her for the first time.  “And it was Swann who, before she allowed it, as though in spite of herself, to fall upon his lips, held it [her face] back for a moment longer, at a little distance, between his hands.  He had wanted to leave time for his mind to catch up with him, to recognise the dream which it had so long cherished and to assist at its realisation, like a relative invited as a spectator when a prize is given to a child of whom she has been especially fond.  Perhaps, too, he was fixing upon the face of an Odette not yet possessed, nor even kissed by him, which he was seeing for the last time, the comprehensive gaze with which, on the day of his departure, a traveller hopes to bear away with him in memory a landscape he is leaving for ever.”

One final point I’ll make about Proust’s writing: it reveals an obviously broad and extensive education.  He deploys a vast vocabulary, choosing just the right word to convey a particular meaning.  This printing that I have read, of course, was a translation from the original in French, which suggests to me that, notwithstanding the claim one occasionally hears that the English language is the richest there is, the French language is no slouch.  Proust also drops in from time to time a Latin phrase always apropos to the moment in the narrative, never overbearing.  

I’m glad now that I took the time and persevered in reading this book.  At least I’ll get the reference when I hear someone mention the name Marcel Proust.  I’m sure there are useful, or at least interesting, insights to be gained from the other five volumes of Proust’s masterpiece, but I think I’ll move on to try and learn from another author.  To quote the Nowhere Man from Yellow Submarine, 

“Ad hoc, ad loc, and quid pro quo!

So little time, so much to know!”

Money, by Martin Amis

After reading London Fields, I was eager to consume more of Martin Amis’s supercharged writing.  I think I got more than I bargained for.  While London Fields inhabited the sleazy underworld of small time theft, cheating, and sex, more suggestive than explicit, Money is filled with pornography, big time cheating, drunkenness, and more pornography.  To be sure, the book isn’t pornographic itself.  It’s more about the debauchery that can be accessed with money.  Obviously, from the title, the book is about money, but mostly about money and sex, and, it could be said, about power in the sense that money is power to access sex.

Now, with that disdainful opening, let me hasten to give credit where credit is due: the writing is absolutely supercharged.  A couple of illustrations.  But first I should set the stage.  John Self, the narrator, is a British director of commercials, an ad man who’s had some success, supposedly specializing in sexiness to sell stuff.  He has connected with a New York producer, Fielding Goodney, who wants him to direct a feature film, a big step up for an ad man.  

There’s a major con going on here and I won’t expose it in case anyone who reads this review decides to go for the book.  In fact there are multiple cons at work.  Not surprising, as the movie business lives in a world of belief, faith, hope, desperate hope, that a movie turns a profit.  Investors, producers, directors, actors all invest money, time, their reputations, their fortunes in the hope that the movie doesn't bomb.  Or get caught up in litigation, as London Fields has.  Starring Billy Bob Thornton and  selected for screening at the Toronto Film Festival back in 2015, it was pulled from the program when the film’s director filed suit against the producers.  Multiple lawsuits later, now late 2017, it’s still stuck.  A disaster for all involved.  Making movies is a risky business, not always the mega-millions machines that get all the press.  After all, no one knew that Star Wars would be an immediate and lasting smash hit leading to an unbelievable series of sequels and prequels and spinoffs and mind-boggling merchandise--until it did.  

Back to Money.  I don‘t recall who wrote the story on which the movie is to be based,  maybe it was John Self, but John and Fielding go about the business of recruiting (conning?) the actors, screenplay writers, investors, extras, and other necessary participants.  Actually Fielding takes care of the investors.  He flashes a lot of money, which serves as irresistible bait.  Success breeds success.  Along the way John Self waterlogs himself with alcohol and pornographic sex (I’m telling you don't read the book for the sex.  It’s about porn without actually being porn).  Plus a boatload of jealousy, infatuation, childhood issues, resentment, violence, you-name-it.  Enough of plot.  It gets complicated and I’m sure I didn’t follow it all.  

But the writing.  Character naming is like Dickens, but more comedic.  Female characters include Selena Street, Happy Jonson, Sunny Wand, Day Lightbrowne, and Butch Beausoleil.  Suggestive, right?  Evocative, almost pornographic.  Here’s an excerpt when John meets Fielding in a bar, to be introduced to Butch Beausoleil.  John is very drunk.  “I took a bit of a toss on a stool-leg and sprinted face-first into a pillar, but stumbled on until I made out my friend Fielding down at the far end.  Dressed in a white tux, he was whispering into the nimbus cast by a miraculously glamorous girl.  She wore a low-cut silk dress in a razzy gray--it rippled like television.  Her ferociously tanned hair hung in solid curves over the vulnerable valves of her throat and its buzzing body-tone.”  Sizzling.

Here’s an irresistible description of London weather.  “You get April, blossom blizzards and sudden sunshafts and swift bruised clouds.  You get May and its chilly light, the sky still writhing with change.  Then June, summer, rain as thin and sour as motorway wheel-squirt, and no sky at all, just no sky at all.  In summer, London is an old man with bad breath.  If you listen, you can hear the sob of weariness catching in his lungs.”  Motorway wheel-squirt?  Where does Amis get such a notion?

One more excerpt, one that dances around the fringes of pornography, but isn't porn itself.  Certainly it isn’t something you’d want your preteen to read, but also not the kind of thing that John Self would find satisfying when trying to pleasure himself.  The scene happens after John has set up a joint checking account with his girlfriend, Selina Street, who has insisted that having her own checkbook would give her dignity and self respect.  “That morning she went to bed in black stockings, tasseled garter belt, satin thong, silk bolero, muslin gloves, belly necklace and gold choker.  I made a real pig of myself, I have to admit.  An hour and a half later she turned to me, with one leg still hooked over the headboard, and said, ‘Do it anywhere, anything.’  Things had unquestioningly improved, what with all this new dignity and self respect about the place.”

The writing is undeniably energetic, vibrant, creative, and often clever.  It’s just so scumbaggy.  The story makes an excellent point about the power of money and what people will do if they believe.  But it’s so smarmy.  Looking back now I don’t feel like the positive teachings of the book were worth the grime.  Does that make me a prig?  Maybe so, but there you have it.  

Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf

This is another step in my journey to fill in major gaps in my reading. The name Virginia Woolf is probably known as much for the Edward Albee play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” as for her own works.  Browsing my favorite bookstore, The Ivy, I came across a section of her books and picked up this one, only later realizing that it was the inspiration for the movie, “The Hours.”  The movie does not follow the plot of Mrs. Dalloway, but features two women who had read and were deeply affected by the book, along with Mrs. Woolf herself.  I figured this out about two thirds of the way through the book.  I kept trying to place events in the book into what I could remember of the movie, which I had seen fifteen years back.  Nothing fit.  Finally I googled the movie, read the summary, and then understood why I wasn’t seeing any connections.

Mrs. Dalloway is not easy reading.  It isn’t long, at just under two hundred pages, and there were not many words I needed to look up.  Tokay, for instance turns out to be a wine from a region of Hungary and Slovakia known as Tokaj.  The expression “come up to the scratch”, apparently common to the time and place of the novel, means to “be good enough” for whatever is called for.  There were other expressions not familiar to me but context generally provided sufficient clues for me to grasp the meaning.

Set in post-WWI London, the story traces one day in the life of an upper crust wife, Clarissa Dalloway, along with numerous other characters who brush up against her life in ways that range from insignificant to profound.  It opens with her purchasing flowers for the party she was having that night, and ends that evening as the party is winding down.  

Much of what the reader gets from the narrative is implied rather than stated.  For instance, the opening sentence reads, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”  From this and what follows one infers that she is wealthy and would ordinarily have one of her employees get the flowers but for some reason she had chosen to do it herself.  The reader may wonder why.  Is it because there is so much to do to prepare for the party and her servants are busy with other tasks?  Is there something special about this party with respect to the flowers chosen?  Maybe a particular guest with whom she shares a memory about flowers?  Maybe she just wants to get out of the house into the world for a while.  

This speculation I’ve just done is a tiny glimpse at the way Woolf tells the story.  It’s at least ninety percent interior, that is, interior to the mind as opposed to actual events.  Think about how the mind works when uninterrupted.  It flits from one thought to another, maybe settles on one train for a while, catches on a memory that leads elsewhere, then another, then wonders how it got to this point and tries to backtrack, retrace the links to the first thought, and then, “what shall I have for lunch?”  Woolf tells the story through these interior monologues which I found difficult to follow and often required me to re-read to get the meaning.  Her punctuation is complicated too, with lots of commas and semicolons, and absences where it seems some punctuation is called for.  But then how would you punctuate your rambling thoughts?  Even more confusing are moments when two women are together and ‘she’ and ‘her’ appear in numerous thoughts, and it becomes unclear which person is which.  I’m sure that if I re-read the book now in its entirety much would become more clear to me.  

So with all this confusion and difficulty, why bother?  Is there redeeming value that makes it worth the trouble?  My answer is yes.  For one thing there is much beauty in the writing itself.  For example, when Big Ben strikes she writes, “First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.  The leaden circles dissolved in the air.”  For me that conjures the image of a pebble tossed into a still pond, or a drop of water falling from the tip of my oar onto the glassy surface of the river, making a perfect circle that expands ever outward from the center growing fainter until it vanishes.  Her choice of the words “warning”, “irrevocable”, and “leaden” color the thought with a darkness, a sadness, again leading the reader to wonder why.

Beyond its stylistic merits, the story reveals important insights, such as about the resentment between the wealthy and the poor, obscured beneath the polite surface.  For poor, ugly Miss Kilman her hatred is like a pressure cooker, a plain metal pot on the outside but superheated with rage on the inside.  Clarissa feels hatred toward Miss Kilman too but maintains the appearance of serenity.

Septimus Warren Smith is a war veteran who survived physically intact but is shell-shocked, a condition we would now call PTSD.  As his madness grows, his thoughts become more disordered, he sees apparitions, hears noises, a woman morphs into a bird, paranoia sets in, his interior monologue grows increasingly remote from anything in the real world.  It’s a sympathetic treatment of the condition which is needless to say a major concern for returning veterans today, and is still only imperfectly understood.  The nature of the interior monologue of the deranged and struggling Mr. Smith has special credibility because Virginia Woolf herself descended into madness in her later years and at age fifty-nine, committed suicide, as does Septimus Warren Smith.  

The main story line (okay it took me a while to get to it) is the love between Mrs. Dalloway and Peter Walsh.  Long ago they had fallen in love, exciting, turbulent.  They talked, they argued, they fought, but it was when together that they felt most alive.  Clarissa had rejected Peter’s proposal.  Why?  Did she want to hurt him?  Did she allow her head to overrule her heart? Now, decades later, they have lived separate lives, both married, both pretending their lives have been good and satisfying, though it is clear they regret not having been together.  The love still burns but is smothered by the thought, as Paul Simon put it in “Slip-Sliding Away,” “She said a bad day is when I lie in bed and think of things that might have been.”  Regret.  It’s an emotion we’ve all felt at some time or another, maybe about some little thing that we soon forget, or maybe about the biggest decision of our lives.  I think Virginia Woolf has something to say to us all. 

Mrs. Poe, by Lynn Cullen

I picked this up in an independent bookstore in Decatur, GA while my three year old grandson ate an ice cream cone outside.  Edgar Allan Poe is said to have lived his last years in Baltimore, and our football team is called the Ravens, after Poe’s famous poem, so I was curious.  

The first couple of pages grabbed me.  I’ll often read the first sentence or two to test the pull of a story.  This one tugged pretty good; I was on page five before I knew it.  In the first paragraph reference is made to “girls who troll the streets of Corlear’s Hook,” an area of lower Manhattan frequented by sailors on the prowl, revealing the derivation of the term “hooker”.  Interesting.  The next page has a character, an editor named George Pope Morris, boasting that his book on flowers had recently been published by Mr. Harper, referring to the founder of the famed publishing house.  A quick check of Wikipedia revealed that Mr. Morris was also a real person, best known for the poem “Woodman Spare That Tree.”  One of the things I like about historical fiction is that it is informative.  This story is packed with recognizable names from the mid-nineteenth century, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Louisa May Alcott, Samuel Morse, Horace Greeley, and Phineas T. Barnum, all of whom were contemporary with, and acquainted with, Edgar Allan Poe.  

Now we come to the story’s narrator, Frances Sargent Osgood, who we learn was also real, a poet, and who was famous for carrying on an exchange of romantic poems with Poe, which were published in a popular periodical of the day.  It created a bit of a scandal as both Osgood and Poe were married.  Cullen portrays them as madly in love but unable to act on their desire, other than through stolen glances and secrecy, because of their marital obligations.  That sounds like a banal plot device, but Cullen enriches it by presenting a complex picture of their respective situations, and what adult’s situation is not complex?  

Frances is married to a fairly talented and successful artist, a painter of portraits, mostly of wealthy attractive women.  His work takes him away from home and out of touch (no cellphones, no phones at all) to unknown places for unknown periods, leaving Frances with no financial support and the appearance of having been abandoned.  Frances works to make a living off her poetry.  Her wayward husband is handsome and charming, and Frances once loved him, and could again, if he’d just come home.  He is also the father of her two daughters.  

Poe is married to his first cousin, Virginia, more than ten years his junior, strikingly pretty but sickly.  He lives with her and her mother, a common woman not well suited to the stylish and insular drawing rooms of New York City.  Virginia’s poor health is a constant burden for Poe, a burden that is also freighted with guilt from feeling romantic love for Mrs. Osgood.  Then there’s the shortage of money.  Despite the success of “The Raven”, Poe struggles to earn enough money to warm a shabby house in a shabby neighborhood of New York, while trying to keep up appearances for the rich movers and shakers and literati of the city, who make up his paying readership.  

It’s a well rounded story, engagingly told.  The romantic feelings seemed a bit overwrought to me, as in, “The sight of his beautiful fingers, so sensitive, so intelligent, made me want to weep.”  Expressions like ‘Spare me’ and ‘Get over it’ and ‘Suck it up’ occured to me. But Poe lived and wrote in the period of Romanticism, and I feel certain Ms. Cullen wrote in that style on purpose to cause the story to fit more perfectly into its nineteenth century setting.  Well done, Ms. Cullen. 

Thus Bad Begins, by Javier Marias

I am surprised now that, not only have I never read any works by Marias, but I had never even heard of him, never heard his name before.  I was browsing the new fiction table at the Ivy Bookstore, picked this up, read the first page or so, and was grabbed by the language, the depth of insight slipped casually and unexpectedly into otherwise straightforward statements.  The very first sentence contains the following: “...and how brief a life is once it’s over and can be summed up in a few sentences...”  That opening promised a story with memorable insights about ordinary people, which is my kind of story.  

The novel is set in Spain in the time following the death of the dictator, Francisco Franco, in 1975.  The narrator, Juan De Vere, is a twenty-three year old writer, employed as secretary to Eduardo Muriel, a moderately successful film producer.  Beatriz Noguera is Muriel’s wife, early forties, attractive, unhappy.  We don’t learn the source of that unhappiness until near the end of the book, when much else has happened, events that lend color to the story and threaten to become the main thread, but fade into insignificance, “...leaving only ashes in the memory, ashes that crumble at the slightest touch and fly up with the slightest gust of wind...”   Of course the inevitable punch of the story is the narrator’s story, and the reader doesn’t learn how that is until the final chapter, which is a long time to wait (439 pages), and because Marias’s chapters are short, typically only four to six pages, I wondered how it could be wrapped up in such a short space without leaving annoying loose ends.  But it is wrapped up, satisfyingly and gracefully.

The era of the Franco dictatorship casts a long shadow over the events in the novel.  Franco came to power in 1939 following a vicious civil war, and he ruled with a cruel fist for thirty six years until his death in 1975.  I was in my mid-twenties then but don’t remember anything of Franco; my interests in politics must have been filled and overfilled with Vietnam and Watergate.  In my mind I have always thought of Franco in terms of the thirties and forties, and World War II, not anything as recent as the seventies.  

In the story, there were rumors of atrocities committed by, and against, the regime, acts of violence and unequal power relationships, such as a supporter of the regime threatening to denounce an opponent, or even a non-political  bystander, and extracting sexual favors in return for his silence.  In the words of one of these characters, “...nothing gives one more satisfaction than when a girl doesn’t want to do it, but can’t say no.”  

Marias describes the decades following Franco’s death as a time that everyone just wanted to forget, to put it in the distant past, not to be dragged into the present by accusations, recriminations, trials and punishments.  A law, the Spanish 1977 Amnesty Law, passed only two years after Franco’s death, shielded any Franco-era crime from prosecution.  It violates international human rights law, but remains in force to this day.  

This wish to forget shows up in the novel as secrets, memories impinging on current thoughts, and recognition of current events, thoughts, and images as future memories.  On a couple of occasions, the narrator imagines his future self, much older, saying to him, “Remember this experience and note every detail, experience it with me in mind....grasp it firmly, take a long look at this woman and keep that image safe, because later on, I will ask you for it and you will have to offer it to me as consolation.”  Rich, very rich.

It wasn’t easy reading, but not terribly difficult either.  There were few, if any, moments when I had to set it aside and look something up, but several when my curiosity about real events and characters was piqued enough to propel me to do a little research.  It's a thoughtful story, very well crafted, and I can see myself seeking out another of his more than a dozen novels that have been translated into English.  Glad I read it.