Book Review: "Tomás Nevinson" by Javier Marías

Tomás Nevinson (2023)
Javier Marías (1951-2022)
Translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa
643 pages

In his final novel, Tomás Nevinson, the late Spanish author Javier Marías explores questions of identity and morality, including the profound connections between them and the ways in which they guide our decisions and actions.

He writes in the book’s Acknowledgements that the story represents “not so much a continuation as a ‘companion piece’” to his 2017 novel Berta Isla (my review linked to at right), in which the eponymous title character struggles to deal with the repeated disappearances for long periods of time of her husband, Tomás – only slowly coming to realize that he works as a spy. When he finally retires, she cannot bring herself to allow him back into the family, to rebuild the connections that have been broken.

The new novel opens some years later, at which point Tomás, now the protagonist, has settled back full-time into the embassy position in Madrid that had been his cover when active as a spy. Living just a short distance from his family, his relationship with them remains tenuous at best, and he has settled into an unassuming routine, one far more prosaic than his previous adventures.

When his former handler, Tupra, asks to meet him, Tomás warily agrees. His hesitation proves warranted, as Tupra asks him for a favor: take on one more job using his talents as a spy. The assignment involves going undercover to identify from among three women living in a small city in northwest Spain the one who had been involved in bombings a decade earlier and has since gone into hiding under an assumed identity. Though he half-heartedly resists agreeing to Tupra’s request, the pull to reenter his old career becomes difficult to ignore in the face of the mix of boredom and melancholy he has felt since leaving behind his former work.

Once he accepts the assignment, however, he faces an unexpected twist: if he can’t find sufficient evidence to incontestably convict the woman he identifies as the terrorist, he will have to kill her to make sure she does not go on to potentially commit another such act. While accepting in principle that secret service work can involve such extra-judicial killings – he himself had killed two people during his earlier career – he has never killed a woman and struggles with the idea of doing so now. As the mission proceeds, with his handler ramping up pressure on him to identify the terrorist and eliminate her, will Tomás bring himself to carry through on the actions to which he’s committed himself?

As has been the case throughout Marías’s many novels, however, the plotline here acts as a simple scaffolding upon which he layers ruminations about myriad aspects of the human condition. The action, such as it is, proceeds slowly, any particular event interspersed with Tomás’ introspection about his life and the lives of those around him. And, as always in his novels, it’s hard not to take these internal monologues as Marías using his protagonist as a conduit for his own thoughts.

I recently read a description of Marías’s writing as prolix. Although I understood the gist of the meaning from context, I looked up the word, which Merriam-Webster defines as “unduly prolonged or drawn out: too long” and “marked by or using an excess of words.” It’s not hard to see why those put off by Marías’ writing might characterize it this way. In any given scene, even in his short stories, the action and dialogue are accompanied by long stretches of the protagonist’s or narrator’s thoughts – which can be driven by that action or dialogue, but can just as likely be stream of conscious digressions triggered by events often tangential to the plot.

So it is in the present novel as, after a couple of dozen opening pages that set the moral stage for the novel’s climax, the meeting of Tomás and his handler that kicks off the action lasts nearly a hundred pages. Their exchanges are interspersed with long stretches of Tomás’ thoughts of his past life with Tupra as his handler and contemplations about his current situation as a retired spy unable to fully reconnect with his family – and, throughout, running commentary on the anonymous public around them.

Even for me, having read a fair number of Marías’s works and come to enjoy his style and his observations, this latest – last – novel took things to a challenging extreme. During the conversation referred to above, for example, I gradually came to feel that it was never going to end. And then, deeper into the novel, the climax that had already been set-up in the opening pages seemed a long time coming, only finally occurring at nearly the end of the story. Unlike every other of Marías’s novels I’ve read, in which I’ve generally found myself hoping they wouldn’t end, I have to admit that I found myself grinding it out a bit to finish this one.

When I combine that with what seemed to be bits of repeated text (or, at least, I had this feeling at various points – I didn’t go back to try and check, I admit, but I tend to have an overdeveloped antenna for such things), it opens the possibility that perhaps Marías didn’t have a chance to polish this work, which came right at the end of his life. (As the Stefan Zweig wrote in The World of Yesterday, “in my work as a writer, the most useful for me is actually the act of leaving things out.”)

But all that aside, I lament the loss of this great writer, and I certainly look forward to going back and finally reading those of his books that I haven’t gotten to yet.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
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