Juan is a contemporaneous translator, working to facilitate communication between politicians and government officials. But he knows, too, that communication, the revelation of the inner thought, is no simple matter, and that the difficulty of translation is predicated on the difficulty of ever successfully saying what is true: "Sometimes," Marias writes, "I have the feeling that nothing that happens happens, because nothing happens without interruption, nothing lasts or endures or is ceaselessly remembered." On his wedding day to another translator, Luisa, Juan's father Ranz--a rakish art dealer with connections to known forgers--give him a piece of advice: never tell your wife your secrets. Of course, no one says this if they don't have secrets themselves, and Juan goes on to uncover, somewhat reluctantly and with Luisa's help, the secrets of his father. These secrets have to do with his three marriages, and the suicide of his second wife--shockingly depicted in the novel's foreword--who was the sister to his third, Juan's mother.
This secret, and its unveiling, form the spine of the novel. You can see the influence of detective fiction on Marias; there's scenes of following and watching from afar, though unlike detective fiction, it's never clear what these stakeouts accomplish. In a detective novel, the revelation of the killer results in their arrest and conviction, but here, the only victory is the truth being known, and as Marias writes, that's a more equivocal victory than it may seem. But what interested me most about the novel were the various scenes and mysteries that crowd around this "central" mystery, ones that are never really resolved. On their honeymoon, Juan and Luisa overhear a man in an adjoining Havana hotel room agree with his lover to kill his wife. In New York, Juan helps a fellow translator and friend arrange a tryst with a mysterious video-date who makes increasingly lurid demands. Juan even has an inkling that this man and the one in Havana may be the same--which would be a shocking coincidence, but not one that's unheard of in the cheap paperbacks the novel is riffing on--but this inkling goes nowhere. The date happens, and Juan's friend clams up; she's gotten what she wants, and nothing is left to be revealed. Nor do we ever find out if the man from Havana ever really killed his wife, or intended to.
It's these scenes that give the novel its satisfyingly unsettled nature. Oddly, the central mystery is revealed quite clearly in due time, but we leave the novel with a sense that we have learned very little, that the "whole story" is not out there to be found. I also really liked all the material about the father's life as a dealer in art forgeries, which you think is going to be part of the grand mystery, but which isn't. I loved the story about Ranz, walking through the Prado, seeing a security guard about to take a lighter to a Renaissance painting. He's grown sick seeing the scene every day, how it never changes, how the characters in the margins never seem to reveal themselves. It's an image, maybe, of that hope that things will be revealed, and that revelation will put things right; it's also just a great scene on its own, and something that I myself was thinking about--oddly enough--as I toured the Prado on my trip to Spain. How crazy it must drive those guards to sit there every day and stare at the same art, even the most celebrated art in the world! Oh, or maybe, it's an image that shows us that even normal people, driven to extremes by the most ordinary mechanisms of time and life, will from time to time give into their most violent impulses.
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