Exhaustive and self-contradictory while suggesting some core of consistent purpose ... He’s...interested in the tropes of the genre, like a writer of westerns using the frontier as the setting for a morality tale ... A tension you can feel throughout Marías’s work: between the need to fictionalize the world so you can bear it, and the need to realize what’s going on so you can act.
Central to all Marías’s effects is his style. This is an interior novel, less about deeds than the guilty turmoil of thought, portrayed in long fluid sentences ...Seductively conversational and glinting with slantwise humour...as well as contradictory and grandiose, the torrent of reflection sweeps away the thought that even a closely printed novel of more than 600 pages might start taking care of itself when the writer gets into this kind of groove. And as the tale at last reaches its action-packed denouement, there’s something inescapably poignant about all these drawn-out deferrals, the never-ending clauses and caveats. Keep them coming, you think, knowing there’s no more left.
The narrative moves backward or spirals on the spot in a sequence of repetitions with variation, each return bringing us back to a slightly different present. This is a spy thriller, but it reads like one transposed into music by Philip Glass ... Readers may sometimes feel as impatient as Tupra does, longing for forward movement. But then Marías mesmerises us again and we are swept on by the long, powerful swells of his prose, flawlessly translated by Margaret Jull Costa, and the circling currents of his thought.
His later novels of espionage, subterfuge, masquerade and betrayal...connect our subtle, ever-shifting thoughts and words to the visceral or violent drives and impulses behind them. That pulpy undertow of genre intrigue – stronger than ever in this, his final novel – channels a sort of shared narrative unconscious ... The novel benefits from another wonderfully supple and companionable translation by Margaret Jull Costa ... Rolls forward with a satisfying momentum ... Sink into the tidal flow of Tomás’s monologue, and it tugs you along fast. The suspense stems not only from his quest to uncover a butcher of innocents, but from the creeping, then cascading, nature of his trains of thought.
[An] engrossing valedictory novel ... Dense ... Nominally a thriller, but not as defined by the bestseller lists. There is no whizzbangery, no car chases, little to no sex and violence. The action, such as it is, takes place mainly in the narrator’s head ... Mariás demonstrates why so many of his peers believe him to be among the greatest of contemporary novelists. Like a secret agent, he is an observer and an eavesdropper, and an inventor.
A magnificently evocative English edition by Margaret Jull Costa ... Typically for Marías, the book picks at the moral and aesthetic conventions of the spy-thriller though a succession of (often historical) digressions; the style is Sebald meets John le Carré ... [His] fogeyish, backwards-looking demeanour also made Marías a superb chronicler of his own generation ... In a typically ambiguous detail, Marías put one of the most resonant passages of his final novel into the mouth of one of the terrorist suspects that Nevinson encounters in Ruán ... Nothing would be more alien to the spirit of Marías’s work than an attempt to distil a straightforward moral or message from it.
With such a weight of ethical turbulence at the centre of the book, it is perhaps forgivable that Marías, having held his measured tone throughout the novel, gives way to some Yeatsian sentimentality at the end.
With Marías, it doesn’t help to get too hung up on credibility. His novels are games in which a universal vocabulary of baddies, portents and tropes allows him subtly, and over hundreds of pages, to investigate more complex ideas ... Circumlocutions and repetitions more naturally create a kind of melody against which the larger themes are played ... Marías can be very funny, despite his weighty themes, especially in his descriptions of the inhabitants of Ruán. Among the different tones in this novel I also detected a querulousness, a yearning for the twentieth century, before the tyranny of mobile phones and the internet.
Although the book is a page-turner, it’s also the case that Marías is a great philosophical novelist ... His characters brood obsessively, and one of Marías’s great skills as a novelist is to make that brooding completely compelling, hypnotic, and exciting at the same time ... It’s like watching a chess game where we are good enough to see how good the moves are, who is willing to sacrifice which pieces to defend the realm and save the king, and what a grandmaster the confabulator of that game, Javier Marías, is.
A novel that revels in extraneous detail and mooning about at will; that so relentlessly upends or ignores its genre conventions you can go whole chapters with nary a whiff of the central whodunit... and that, for better or worse, points up some of the pitfalls of relentlessly aestheticizing the genre ... When the novel is at its best, the sub rosa and parastatal maneuverings of intelligence organizations... become a sort of metaphor for evanescence broadly considered ... Early reviews have noted the book’s slow, deliberate approach to its subject matter, which is a nice way of saying the pace is magmatic ... When Marías’s prose falls flat... his characters thin out ... In terms of baseline fictional quality, then, Tomás Nevinson is a regression, though to call it that isn’t really to condemn it. After all, it’s a regression from one of the most notable high-water marks in contemporary fiction.
