Berta Isla

Product Information

And that strange qualification at the end, “or perhaps some other feline”, sounds bookish and absurd. Upon graduation, because of his great ability to speak many languages and imitate many accents, he is recruited by the British secret service and thus begins his life as an underground agent. When Berta takes over sections of the narration, she expresses herself in the same voice, with its tendency towards repetition and digression.

He doesn’t tell Berta, and she accepts his absences unquestioningly, until a threatening encounter with a creepy pair of IRA sympathisers forces her to recognise that Tomás is involved in intelligence work.Alone in the park with their baby son, she’s buttonholed by a pair of Irish diplomats – so they say – who claim Tomás is an MI6 agent “invading” their country, as one of them spills lighter fluid on the baby’s pram, ready to spark up. Marías’s characters tend to be preoccupied by philosophical and epistemological questions about the nature of reality, rather than their emotions or jobs. Marías is often praised for his discursive, ruminative style, and has been compared to Henry James, Montaigne, Proust, Laurence Sterne and Sir Thomas Browne – he translated these last two into Spanish. Marías weaves a thrilling and desolate meditation on the psychic costs of the deep state's dark arts. When Berta Isla was a schoolgirl, she decided she would marry Tomás Nevinson–the dashing half-Spanish, half-English boy in her class with an extraordinary gift for languages.

Tom now embarks on a double life, posing as an embassy employee and raising a family in Madrid with Berta while frequently travelling abroad to take part in undercover operations. Berta Isla is a companion piece to his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, set in the world of the British intelligence service; many of the themes and some of the characters recur. For instance, Tomás’s tutor “looked straight at Tomás with his blue eyes slightly narrowed, and so penetrating they were like sparks, as if they could not help scrutinising everything with a degree of suspicion, to the point that the blue seemed to metamorphose into yellow, like the eyes of a sleepy, but very alert lion, or perhaps some other feline”.Powerless to influence him, often unable to contact him, Berta’s love and patience are tested over decades, as the turbulence of the 1970s gives way to the Falklands war, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. With meticulous insight and understanding of the human soul, Marias examines the urge to change our destiny, and the hopeless exile we bring upon ourselves. Tomas is determined to evade the agent’s attentions but his fate is sealed by an escalating series of events that will affect the rest of his life – and that of his beloved Berta. Tomás is determined to evade the agent's attentions but his fate is sealed by an escalating series of events that will affect the rest of his life - and that of his beloved Berta. His work has been translated into forty-three languages and has won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for A Heart So White.

Judging by Javier Marías’s new novel, I dodged a bullet, not least because of the havoc that a career in espionage wreaks on those closest to you. A brooding tale of lives darkened by separation and deception … As usual, Marías propels his philosophical debates with the urgency of a thriller, including a bravura plot twist … Skilled and provocative, as always. As a result, identity and deceit take center stage in this narrative along with other recurring topics in Marías’s fiction. At the same time, Berta Isla is a subtle reflection on the nature of fiction and the novel’s ability to serve as a tool to explore the many nuances of human nature.He declines their offer, which is made through his tutor, Peter Wheeler, but then finds himself a suspect in a murder inquiry. He held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University. A man, or woman, who knew how to omit would release a much improved novella from this 544‑page tome.