...Marías’s narration has a deceptively aimless quality, circling round apparently minor or inconsequential details that are gradually revealed to be integral to an extremely taut structure. As ever, Margaret Jull Costa translates his long, winding sentences into beautiful English prose, both erudite and conversational – a considerable stylistic feat ... a fusion of a coming-of-age story with something like a conspiracy thriller. As ever, with Marías, it is an arch and sophisticated entertainment animated by a probing moral intelligence, a demonstration of what fiction at its best can achieve.
...[an] erudite, strange, hypnotic and beautiful, frustrating book ... one doesn’t really read Marías for plot. One reads him for the language, the elegant hypnotic voice, the philosophical digressions and observations, for his long and winding sentences ... I found myself most loving the book for its pages, brilliant observations, its musings and its suspenseful elegant voice, rather than the overarching story. And I could not put it down.
The noirish plot detail provides a satisfying framework and counterpoint for a different type of novel, one full of philosophical speculation and digression ... one of Marías’s most enjoyable and accessible novels. The trademark digressions, fascinating reflections on the psychological effects of civil war, are harmoniously balanced with the events of the narrative ... If there is a criticism, it is that this is a particularly male view of the Franco years and their sequel. Acknowledging that the dictatorship tried to disempower women, Marías enacts this on the page by making Beatriz all but voiceless.
It is in Marías’s portrayal of two completely different ways of being in the world — Eduardo’s vengeful and intellectual stance, as compared with Beatriz’s self-abnegating stoicism — that we see what a novelist can do best: relish opposing viewpoints and play them off against each other ... Unfortunately, Marías squanders most of his firepower by circling the mystery of Van Vechten’s crime and shaking it down for meaning ... Marías has a problem, which critics have seemed too reticent to discuss: that of lapsing into universal-sounding banalities, almost as a tic ... Melodrama can be an advantage for the modern novelist but it doesn’t always meld well with Marías’s bloviating prose and Shakespearean soliloquies ... it is when Marías gets to the true source of Beatriz’s pain that the novel, dormant for 400 pages, suddenly explodes.
At its best, Thus Bad Begins rolls on like a great spy story played for (comparatively) low stakes. Juan becomes Muriel's ears and eyes, investigating the sordid past of Dr. Van Vechten ... The narrator is trustworthy because everything feels like a massive unburdening. Like Old Juan is finally telling a whole story out loud that he has had in his head for years — the pace of it as familiar as his own heartbeat, the reveals all polished smooth by long, silent practice. Which is, in a way, unfortunate because for all of Marias' gorgeous, looping, carefully structured sentences — and for all of his tales of sex and death and revolution — what Thus Bad Begins could've really used was a little bit of the bravado and rawness of youth.
...a tale that is brilliantly muddied so that it can, like the history of nations, be read in many ways. In doing so, he has perhaps written the book that defines his oeuvre as one of Spain’s most celebrated contemporary writers ... Marías creates a symphony, stylistically uniting his themes with repeated images: our taste for certain stories; the need to disinter the past, which is inevitably about regret, and wrong-doing; and time, which continuously resets memory.
Thus Bad Begins delivers all of Mr. Marías’s trademark qualities—chewy philosophical meditation, prose of fastidious elegance and the suspense of an old-fashioned potboiler ... This is the 12th of Mr. Marías’s books that Margaret Jull Costa has brought into English, and it’s now clear that the two have forged one of the most fruitful author-translator partnerships in current literature.
The final revelation about the troubled Muriels and the sinister Van Vechten, when we finally arrive at it, is both shocking and utterly disappointing. The crime seems not only predictable but unforgivably banal, especially after four hundred pages of buildup. One wonders if the blunt impact of the revelations is a result of our own jaded, scandal-saturated present. Or, perhaps, Marías is simply demonstrating the nature of secrets ... If novels can be calls to action, then this one is a clarion for open dialogue. Brought to light, the unspeakable immediately becomes banal. Perhaps this is Marías's hope for Spain — that one day it will confess all its secrets, and in doing so, let them go.
...with Thus Bad Begins, Marías’s method seems more scattershot, the narration windy, the means of construction strangely hackneyed. There’s a fine line between adhering to manner and just mailing it in; creative unoriginality, even when it’s intentional, still risks familiarity and its deflations ... some of the strongest passages here deal with the generational collision of the time as roles and the underlying power structure shifted ... In Thus Bad Begins, Javier Marías’s game of espionage gives away its secrets all too easily—and they are disappointing when they arrive.
Juan de Vere serves as Marías’s unsentimental yet wisely humane narrator, dusting off freshly excavated secrets and revealing them decades after the fact in this masterful novel, which has been seamlessly translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa ... Thus Bad Begins is an absolute pleasure to read, and Marías is arguably one of Europe’s finest living writers ... Marías’s ability to examine the morality and motivations of the handful of characters populating Thus Bad Begins is as clear eyed as it is nuanced. The tapestry of richly sophisticated themes and startling truths gradually revealed in this novel are not nearly as harrowingly episodic as the themes woven throughout some of Marías’s other celebrated works; however, his insights, illuminations, and astute observations keep the reader thoroughly invested.
At 450 pages, Thus Bad Begins is certainly elaborate and sometimes over-elaborated ... Those who don’t read James and Faulkner with pleasure may be impatient with Marías’s slow-developing and unpredictably ramifying plots, but his barbed wit and Nabokovian puzzles entertain as Thus Bad Begins slouches forward, lurches sideways, and winds back upon itself.
...[a] superb novel ... This is what’s most interesting about Thus Bad Begins, that Muriel and other chief protagonists aren’t opposed to falseness per se, but against inconsistent or imperfect falseness ... Juan’s narrations?—?as well as the colorful dialogs he enjoys with various members of Madrid’s literati?—?are remarkably approachable and inviting, if only because they contain so many observations and insights that the reader will find recognizably?—?if lamentably?—?true of life ... the challenging, comical, profound, and even sometimes erotic Thus Bad Begins rises up as one of the most intriguing novels Marías has written to date.
