Berta Isla

"Javier Marías only died in 2022. He is considered the great laureate of late 20th-, early 21st-century Spanish literature, particularly of the novel form. He’s written a lot. His books are quite difficult, but they are wonderful. I’ve picked Berta Isla because in it he is as human as he is philosophical, which he doesn’t always manage to do. It is really long. It’s the story of a Spanish woman called Berta Isla, who, as a student during Franco’s dictatorship in the late 60s, early 70s, meets and falls in love with another student, a man called Tomás Nevinson. He’s half-English, half-Spanish—with a Spanish first name and an English last name. Tomás goes off to Oxford and gets recruited to be a spy. All he wants to do is go back to Madrid, live with Berta and have a good life, but he’s trapped into becoming part of the British secret services and has to live a double life. It’s about a couple living this double life. You see the character of Berta through the book. Initially, she finds it absolutely unbearable. She doesn’t understand why her husband has to go away and do all these things. He works on the Iranian embassy siege, he infiltrates a cell of the IRA, he works in the Falklands. He’s just not there and she finds this deeply, deeply hurtful. Then there comes a time when he simply doesn’t come back. And we find out later in the book that he’s lived this entire double life as a history teacher in Leicester. It’s extraordinary. But Berta is just there in Madrid, waiting, not knowing. I love it because it feels real. We never know anybody. That’s slightly nihilistic of me, but life is this navigation of realizing that we have all these interactions with people, but what do we really know? Where are the boundaries of knowing and understanding and truth and lies and all of those big things? How are they enmeshed? And if you’re faced with this, as Berta Isla is, how do you navigate it? They know that they are meant to be together, they know that they are the loves of each other’s lives, but he’s just vanished, and he doesn’t live with her for 20 years, and then he comes back. And then what do you do? So that’s the story. The spy thing is a massive metaphor. Lots of Javier Marías’s books are about the shadiness of human relations. For me, Berta Isla is the one that I like best because she’s a wonderful, wonderful character. I love her, her resignation, her fury—all of those things. Javier Marías just does it brilliantly."