Berta Isla: A novel

By Javier Marías and Margaret Jull Costa

WINNER OF SPAIN'S NATIONAL CRITICS AWARD • From the award-winning, internationally bestselling author of The Infatuations comes a gripping novel of intrigue and missed chances—at once a spy story and a profound examination of a marriage founded on concealment. • "A masterly premise ... worthy of a Hitchcock adaptation." —The New York Times Book Review

When Berta Isla was a schoolgirl, she decided she would marry Tomás Nevinson—the dashing half-Spanish, half-English boy in her class with an extraordinary gift for languages. But when Tomás returns to Madrid from his studies at Oxford, he is a changed man. Unbeknownst to her, he has been approached by an agent from the British intelligence services, and he has unwittingly set in motion events that will derail forever the life they had planned. 

With peerless insight into the most shadowed corners of the human soul, Marías plunges the reader into the growing chasm between Berta and Tomás and the decisions that irreversibly change the course of the couple's fate. Berta Isla is a novel of love and truth, fear and secrecy, buried identities, and the destinies we bring upon ourselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9780525521372

Reviews for Berta Isla

[thorold_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Berta Isla takes Marías back to his exploration of the damage done by the secrecy and deception of espionage, begun in Tu rostro mañana, and links it to the idea of a character who comes back from presumed death after a long absence, previously explored in Los enamoramientos. It's a spy-story where all the actual espionage happens offstage and in secret, and we are left only with its indirect effects on those involved. Berta discovers a couple of years after her marriage that there is more than meets the eye to her husband's job in the British Embassy in Madrid. She has started to get used to not being allowed to ask where he goes or what he does when he disappears for months at a time; but then he goes off on a mission at the start of the Falklands War and never comes back. It's a bit like what Le Carré did in The spy who came in from the cold, only more so. Much, much, more so.And it's also classic Marías, taking us though a rich landscape of obscure corners of modern history, word-games, philosophical digressions, doorbell-scenes, B-movie references, a famous Oxford policeman, sex, some minor characters from earlier books, and more literary texts than you can shake a stick at: apart from a book-length riff on T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding", a seminar-level discussion of a couple of scenes from Henry V, there's a comprehensive quick-fire anthology of "recalled to life" texts taking us from Martin Guerre and Colonel Chabert right through to the opening of A Tale of Two Cities on which the book ends. No time for nodding off in the back row!I think this is possibly Marías's best to date, certainly at least on a par with the Trilogy. But then I always seem to think that when I've just finished one of his novels, no matter what order I read them in. In any case, Berta is interesting as a character and felt like a more convincing and more rounded female narrator than María in Los enamoramientos, and she made a refreshing change from the oversexed Juan who narrates Así empieza lo malo. But he wouldn't be Marías if he didn't tease the critics by killing off a female character in the first 100 pages...