"Don't wait for a writer to die and read him", but unfortunately, many readers may not have read Javier Marias and are about to say goodbye to him. The Spanish novelist died in Madrid on September 11, and it is long past a long-lost number of precious people we have lost this year.
Fortunately, when a good writer starts reading, it is not too late. Today's single reading and sharing Ofaré's review for Javier Marias, "The White Stain" (in the Guide to Elysium Life), is a tribute to this wonderful novelist.
Traveling between Javier's So Pale Heart, Hitchcock's films, and Shakespeare's Macbeth, Conyaré excitedly shares the subtleties of Javier Marias's novels with the reader: how he places seemingly fragmented pieces of story in a mutually appealing "celestial system," and how he penetrates the secrets of love and betrayal in the depths of the human heart.
White smudge
Author: Kong Yalei
Like many writers, in Javier Marias's study in the center of Madrid, there is a photograph of his idol. The picture shows a fat man with smooth skin—it wasn't a writer he admired, it was Hitchcock as a young man. If you are familiar with marias's work, you will not be surprised. Because his novels are full of Hitchcockian suspense, betrayal, and murder, and this black hole mystery often appears at the beginning of the novel in a super long sentence with Marias's personal style, stretching for several pages and full of pleasure (which has become his literary brand label, like some kind of highly recognizable, seductive logo). In "Fascination", a female editor of a publishing house discovers that a strange man who eats breakfast in the same café as her every day has been shot and killed on the street; In "Tomorrow's Battlefield Don't Forget Me", a man is having his first affair with a married woman when the woman suddenly dies in his arms; And this is how his most prestigious masterpiece, "Such a Pale Heart," which won the IMPAC International Literary Prize in Dublin, begins like this:
I didn't want to know but eventually did, one of the two girls, who was no longer the so-called girl at the time, walked into the bathroom shortly after returning from a honeymoon trip, faced the mirror, opened her shirt, took off her bra, and pointed her father's pistol at her heart, while her father was having dinner at the restaurant with the rest of the family and three guests. About five minutes after the girl left the table, they heard a gunshot, and the father did not immediately stand up, but stayed there for a few seconds, he was motionless, his mouth was still full of food, neither daring to bite nor swallow, let alone spit back on the plate; Finally he got up and ran to the bathroom, and those who followed him noticed that when he found his daughter's body lying in a pool of blood, with his hands clasped around his head, he was still constantly moving the flesh in his mouth from side to side, not knowing what to do. ...... [1]
It's a brilliant, long, unobtrusive sequence—a five-page long section that forms the first part of the novel. There are only two "I' in this startling opening. The first was the first word of the first sentence, and the second was the last: "Everyone says Lance, the brother-in-law, the husband of the deceased, my father, is so unlucky, this is the second time he has become a widower." ”
The secret is ready to be released. It is so eerie and beautiful that you can hardly help but be attracted to it, cannot help but desire it to bloom. However, the next step will be a long wait. This is another literary label of Marias, or a masterpiece: digressions and interpolations. He is passionate and adept at abruptly but incomparably naturally changing the direction of a narrative, ignoring the mysteries that have unfolded and turning to another story that, at least on the surface, has nothing to do with it. Thus, after the bizarre suicide scene at the beginning, Marias, with an incredible agility, in just a few words, both foreshadows the relationship between the characters ("my" mother is the other of the "two girls", the sister of the deceased) and completes the time-space transition (and then we are taken into another story, an adventure that takes place on "my" honeymoon trip— notice, the same honeymoon trip): "Those were all a long time ago, when I was not yet born, and there was no chance of being born." And it was from that moment that I was able to come into this world. Today, I am married. ”
A similar "breaking narrative" occurs several times in the novel. This is reminiscent of many postmodern novels or movies (such as Bolaño and David Lynch). At first glance, Marias's novels seem to be made up of parallel juxtapositions of short stories (and likewise exude an almost overly intense, branded personal style), but when you read the whole novel, or when you read it a second time (which is necessary), you will realize why the picture in his study is Hitchcock, not David Lynch. For his work, though cloaked in a postmodern façade, is classical, Hitchcock-esque in nature, hiding an elegant and precise correspondence, balance and completeness—like a closed universe: we can think of these seemingly unrelated stories as planets, independent of each other, collectively subject to some invisible, invisible dark matter, and it is precisely because of the strong gravitational pull radiated by this dark matter that they can each suspend themselves in mid-air and center on it. Constitute a perfectly functioning celestial system.
This dark matter is the secret that appears at the beginning of the novel. In addition to this core secret that existed from the beginning but loomed, the novel is full of many other secrets, large and small. This is a book of secrets. Backstage at the narrator's "I," Juan's wedding, his father Lance gives him a piece of advice: "If you have any secrets, don't tell her." At the same time, he prophesied—in the tone of a passer-by—"I guess you and Louisa will have secrets." ...... Of course, you will only know your own secrets, and if you know her secrets, it is not a secret. In the most dazzling scene of the novel (which we will talk about later), when many secrets converge at one point, the father's words, like the thunder of a delayed arrival, echo in Juan's mind again. Marias went on to write that secrets have no personality of their own, that they are determined by concealment and silence, or by caution and forgetting. Here we can add that it is also determined by waiting. Because all the secrets are both trying to hide and expect to be revealed. Because there is no secret without waiting. Yes, "if you know her secret, it's not a secret". But if you don't know she (or he) has a secret, it's not a secret. Secrets and waiting are like two sides of the same coin. This is a book of secrets, so it is also a book of waiting. In fact, a little observation reveals that through the beginning and end of the novel, it is the three stories about waiting—and these are three real, practical waits.
The first wait was the "honeymoon encounter" mentioned earlier, or, more precisely, the "wrong encounter": in Havana in the twilight, a sexy woman waiting on the street (who had been waiting for an hour) mistook Juan standing on the hotel balcony for another person, the one she had been waiting for, and began to yell at him ("What the hell are you doing there?"). "I'm going to kill you bitch!" ）； And now, behind Juan, his unwell new wife, Louisa, is sleeping in a darkening room. Soon, the misunderstanding was finally clarified, and she was waiting for another man who lived in juan's next room, and then, with the fragments of the quarrel that passed through the wall, we learned with Juan that they were a pair of lovers, and that the woman named Miriam was anxiously waiting (so, here are the double waits) to be upgraded from mistress to wife.
Movie "The Beautiful Legend of Sicily"
The second wait took place in New York. After his honeymoon, Juan spent eight weeks in New York as an interpreter for a United Nations international conference. During that time he borrowed to live with his old friend Bertha. They had slept several times in college, but now the relationship was more like a pair of brothers and sisters who didn't say anything. One night, in order for Bertha to meet bill, a mysterious lover who claims to be "working in a high-exposure field", Juan had to spend hours on the street below the high-rise apartment, waiting until Bertha issued a secret signal (turned off the lights) before he could go up. ("Time to wait," Marias writes here, "you can feel the minutes and seconds, every second seems to be an individual, and it is solid and solid, like one pebble after another slipping from your hand to the ground.") After waiting for more than four hours, Juan became increasingly uneasy (he feared that Bertha had been killed), and just as he was about to go up desperately to look at it, the mysterious Bill appeared at the door of the building—and the lights went out.
The third wait is the most brilliant moment in the book—if we think of the whole novel as a gorgeous fireworks display. This time in Madrid, on a rainy night, Juan had only been back from New York for a week. He had just finished making love to Louisa and then went into the study for a while. He looked out the window, "looking at the rain shining on the beams of light of the curved street lamp, and the rain was flowing down in a silvery white." Then he found a man at the corner of the road, under the eaves of the opposite building, looking up at the window of their bedroom.
Movie "The Exorcist"
Although his face could not be seen clearly, Juan immediately recognized who the man was—his childhood friend, his father's old friend, and the first to reveal to him the mystery of the suicide at the beginning of the novel: Gustar dody The Younger. Is he waiting for some sort of code? Could it be that during Juan's eight weeks in New York, what happened between Little Gustardo and Louisa? Immediately after, Marias once again showed us his incomparable method of time-space transfer:
He waited and inquired, like a man in love. A little bit like Miriam, a little bit like me a few days ago. Miriam and I were in different cities on both sides of the Atlantic, and little Gustardo was on the corner of my street. I haven't waited like a guy in love, but I've waited for the same thing as Little Gustardo.
That kind of thing is darkness. Perhaps little Gustal Doryi was also waiting for the lights to go out, Hu thought, just as he had been waiting on the streets of New York that night for Bertha's apartment to go out. The next dozen or so pages are the most subtle and shocking parts of the novel: from the perspective of Juan's stream of consciousness, the three waits (or, so to speak, all the waits in the book) are intertwined, entangled, and fused, as if some kind of holographic image, and every fragment—every scene, paragraph, and even sentence—refracts each other, mirrors each other, and reflects the whole. Juan decides to give little Gustardo easy darkness, and he turns off all the lights in the house:
So I knew that all our windows were in darkness without lights. I looked out of my window again. Little Gustaldo was still looking upwards, his face raised high, white smudges facing the dark sky. Despite the eaves, raindrops slapped him and landed on his cheeks, perhaps mixed with sweat rather than tears. Raindrops that fall from the eaves usually fall in the same place, loosening the soil there until the rainwater penetrates into the soil, forming a hole or turning into a ditch. The holes and ditches are like the private parts of the Bertha, which I have seen and recorded; Or Luisa's private parts, where I had stayed just a few minutes before. I thought to myself: Now he'll leave, and as soon as he sees that the lights are off, he'll leave. Just like many days ago, when I saw the lights of Bertha go out, I stopped waiting. If so, it's a secret code for a convention. I was also on the streets of New York for a while, like little Gustal Doryi now, and like Miriam a long time ago. It was just that Miriam didn't know that there were two faces or two white smudges and four eyes on her head looking at her—me and Guillermo's eyes. Now it was the case that Louisa didn't know that there were two eyes on the street peeking at her, but she couldn't see her. And little Gustal Doyi didn't know that I was looking down at him in the dark, spying on him from above; At this time, the rain flowed down like mercury under the glow of the street lamp. Instead, in New York, Bertha and I knew where we were, or could guess. He's going to leave now, I thought to myself.
Marias's excellent depictions of scenes are often reminiscent of Hitchcock's cinematic scenes. Miriam, who wears a low-cut crewneck yellow shirt and white skirt, is much like Judy played by Kim Novak in "Dizzy", isn't it? They were equally plump, equally sexy and vulgar ("Her legs were so thick and so striking that the heels looked like they were wrapped up in them;" Whenever she walked left and right and returned to her original position, her legs seemed to be firmly embedded in the ground, like a folding knife stuck on a wet wooden board."). Juan, who waits on the streets of New York late at night, is reminiscent of Bruno, the anti-horn of "The Train Freak" ("glued to a street lamp like a witty drunk" and "read with a newspaper in his hand in the light of a beam of light"). The rainy night in Madrid mentioned above is a typical Hitchcock-style shot: silver and white rain under street lights, the figure of a man in a hat on a street corner, peeking down from behind a dark window. But what Marias did was not only learn and pay homage to his idols, but he was also transcending. Even Hitchcock (or any other good director) can't make such a light, multi-layered, subtle and wonderful transition between consciousness and time and space. Given the novel's sales and impact (it sold millions of copies in Europe) and the fact that it has not yet been – and certainly cannot – be made into a film, we might say that it was a small triumph for literature in this age of images.
Movie "Dizzy"
***
Such a Pale Heart is Marias's seventh novel (written in 1992, when he was forty-one years old) and perhaps his most perfect work to date. Full of whimsy, half-banter, half-serious super-long sentences and super-long paragraphs, delicate depictions of the character's psychology like miniatures, and highly pictorial multi-angle scene scheduling - I don't think anyone would object to calling Marias a showman. But it must be stated: the "showmanship" here is completely positive. For his novels, though linguistically complex and well-structured, swaying and stunning in their use of technique—but even more astonishingly, they all seem so natural and far-fetched that there is hardly any trace of fabrication (even though we know it must have been made up). Perhaps this is because the fabricated materials he uses are not "episodic coincidences", but "emotional coincidences", the former of which is easy to make us feel false and designed too strongly, and the latter is more ingenious and solid.
The three waits mentioned earlier are the best examples. The reason why these three waits are so delicately and naturally strung together, and eventually resonate and echo subtly with the mystery of suicide at the heart of the novel, in addition to the particularity and continuity of time (they occur sequentially during the honeymoon, during a long business trip after the honeymoon, and returning from a business trip), because they have several emotional commonalities. They are all related to a certain secret. They are all associated with love—or rather, with the betrayal of love. They all happen in the shadows. And, more symbolically, they all contain some kind of distance gap (both material and spiritual): upstairs and downstairs, looking down and looking up, misunderstanding and suspicion. This symbolism is even clearer when one considers the professions of several of the main characters in the book.
Juan, Louisa and Bertha all worked as translators and interpreters, mainly for conferences and international offices of various international organizations. Not only is the job less interesting and important than it sounds, however, but it is also "extremely boring" because— Juan tells us sarcastically — "all heads of state, ministers, parliamentarians, ambassadors, experts, and representatives of almost all countries of the world, without exception, use incomprehensible, immutable jargon." All the speeches, the appeals, the protests, the inspiring speeches and reports are also sleepy and sleepy" as ever." This satire, in the form of a black comedy, reaches its culmination in the description of Juan's acquaintance with Louisa (and one of the best episodes in the book): Juan is interpreting two high-ranking British and Spanish officials, and Louisa is the so-called "overseer" sitting behind him. Translated as "May I ask, do the people of your country love you?" Subsequently, it was Precisely because of Juan's mistranslation that it led to the reference of Shakespeare's Macbeth by a british high-ranking female official.
Movie "Translation Doubts"
The title "Such a Pale Heart" is also from Macbeth. After Macbeth murdered the sleeping Scottish king Duncan, his wife smeared the blood of the dead on the faces of the servants next to him to frame them, and said to Macbeth, "My hands are the same color as yours, but I am ashamed to let my heart turn white like you." Eventually, you'll notice a vague correspondence between the bizarre mystery at the beginning of the novel and Shakespeare, the classic murder story that has become the archetype. (When the mystery is finally revealed at the end of the book, it produces an effect comparable to the best detective novels: both unexpected and expected.) It is like a strong light that penetrates the entire book, illuminating every sentence, every detail, every digression and interpolation from the first sentence, making their existence more fresh, deep, and necessary. You will also gradually realize that it is not the heart that is really pale, but the translation. "Translation," like "secret," is another central word in the novel. Everything is translated. Everything needs to be translated. Whether it's love, affection, friendship, politics and international conferences. The nature of translation determines its limitations and incompetence, so everything is doomed to be full of misunderstandings, betrayals, and losses. This translation, or the paleness of communication, pervades every corner of the novel: Lance says goodbye to his son Juan's desires; Those symbolic waits; Bertha had to find her lover by exchanging video tapes; Even the final reveal of the secret is revealed in the form of eavesdropping. Everything is translated, and nothing can really be translated.
Macbeth movie
But we still have to translate. Just like although there must be a death, we still have to insist on living. Although there are inevitable misunderstandings and betrayals, we still can't help but seek true love. Despite the politics dirty and intrigue, we continue to meet, vote, and sign agreements. This paradox is the way in which life — and the whole world — exists. Or, in the words of another film director, Bresson, "It's precisely because we can't really communicate that communication is possible."
***
White is often used to symbolize purity. But in Marias's description of the three waiting scenes, the word "white smudge" appears prominently several times. It is used to describe the face of the little Gustaldo easy to look up in the rainy night, and the face of Juan and her lover in Miriam's eyes. It's a fantastic metaphor— very cinematic and at the same time meaningful. White smudges? It is reminiscent of the "white lie"—what we call "white lies." Everyone has told a white lie. Everyone has their own secrets. Everyone's face, and heart, is like a white smudge. Nietzsche said that a mature person will find that truth is related not only to beauty and good, but also to evil and ugliness. The same goes for true love. True love may also be— probably — contain stains, lies, and secrets. Of course, as Lance says, "You'll only know your own secrets" So we are always only interested in the secrets of others, and will only wait and suffer for the secrets of others. Did anything really happen between Louisa and Little Gustardoë? Juan wanted to know, and we wanted to know (but neither we nor Juan knew). However, we inadvertently learn another little thing, another secret.
That happened during Juan's business trip to New York after her marriage, just before Bertha was ready to go on a date with her mysterious lover Bill, before the second wait began. Bertha, while applying makeup to the mirror, asked Juan if he had any condoms to lend her. Condom? Juan's reaction to the narrator "I" was that he replied without hesitation and naturally that I should have it in my bathroom bag! - "As if she wanted a pair of tweezers."
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