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Would it be morally justifiable to murder Hitler before he became the Fuhrer? In Diary of a Man in Despair, the author Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen recounts the time he chanced upon Hitler dining alone in 1936 and his regret at not having murdered the man although he had a loaded gun. In his defense, Reck-Malleczewen acknowledges that he could not have known the monster Hitler would become. Had he known, he surely would have pulled the trigger.
Another could-have-been is portrayed, this time in fiction, in Fritz Lang’s movie Man Hunt. It is 1939, and British Hunter Captain Alan Thorndike, hiding behind a bush with a rifle, entertains the idea of assassinating Hitler, but just as his determination sets in, he is captured by a guard. Without that moment of hesitation, the captain would have saved millions of lives.
These two instances are repeatedly mentioned by the narrator in Javier Marías’s new and final novel Tomás Nevinson (Knopf), who often reminds himself that “nothing is certain until it happens.
Nevinson has reason to repeat the truism. A retired British secret service agent in his forties, he has been living quiet and uneventful days when his past superior Betram Tupra reconnects with him. One last job, Tupra says, trying to recruit him for a new mission: assassinate a suspected terrorist before she plots an attack with mass casualties. The scene depicting the initial conversation between Tupra’s methodical speech to lure Nevinson out of retirement, and Nevinson’s deliberation on whether or not to accept, consumes the first hundred pages of the novel. Nevinson succumbs because he can no longer bear the purgatorial state of his life in retirement; he would rather choose hell where the action is than the safe haven where it is not.
Once on the job, he finds himself in his old world of “assumptions and permanent suspicion, distrust and callousness, of pretense and deliberate betrayals.” Supposedly, his target is an IRA-trained terrorist who masterminded the Hipercor bombing in Barcelona by the Basque Separatist Group ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna: “Basque Homeland and Liberty”) that killed 22 innocent civilians in 1987. But there is one caveat: While there is only one terrorist, there are three female suspects—an unmarried restaurateur, a schoolteacher married to a criminal, and the socialite wife of an aristocrat.
Transferred to the small town where the three women live, he pretends to be a novelist writing about the town, befriending a local journalist, a drug dealer, and a politician, all to winnow down the suspects. Nevinson acquaints himself with the women, cautiously at first, although the restauranter soon becomes his lover. But the hiatus during retirement has impaired his acumen. While meeting these suspects is easy enough, he finds it more difficult to lure them into his vicinity, become a trustworthy companion, and bait the true terrorist into revealing herself.
When Tupra threatens to kill all three women to prevent a bigger catastrophe, Nevinson uses deduction to select a target, a conclusion with a large margin of error, an educated guess at best. The rising suspense culminates in his attempt to assassinate the supposed terrorist, though he worries that none of these women may be the criminal he is led to believe. Nevinson becomes equivocal: if he had been sure of the suspect’s culpability, would he have murdered her with no sense of guilt? Should he believe, as he did so during his active years, that by killing this woman, he is saving many lives? Nevinson comes to fear the consequences of his decision, quoting Macbeth, “‘Tis safer to be that which we destroy, than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.” The novel puts into question Kant’s idea of categorical imperative when the standard of ethics in our world cannot divorce itself from consequences.
Javier Marías passed away last year, and Tomás Nevinson—his last and longest novel at 650 pages—was translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa, who had worked with him for the last 30 years. Tomás Nevinson is a companion piece to Marías’s previous novel, Berta Isla, Nevinson’s wife and protagonist of that novel. Tomás Nevinson continues where Berta Isla leaves off, but from a different perspective. A prior reading of Berta Isla is not necessary, although the emotional impact may be heightened by knowing the couple’s past, which is briefly sketched in the new novel. If Berta Isla probed the limits of knowing in human relationships, Tomás Nevinson explores the limitations of moral certainty. If Berta Isla toyed with the idea of the espionage novel, Tomás Nevinson consummates the genre.
Indeed, it is an espionage novel, which employs Marías’s signature style: digressive reflections, allusion to diverse literary works, and philosophical musings. Once again, his sentences rove with a compass rather than with a map, exploring uncharted psychological and philosophical territories of human affairs. His narrative enters a maze in which every possible route is inspected. Elliptical turns and backtracking are frequent, yet rather than being exhausting, they offer nuances and emphases.
In one sentence, Nevinson contemplates his illogical decision to accept the mission: “[T]he only way not to question the usefulness of what you have done in the past is to keep doing the same thing; the only justification for a murky, muddy existence is to continue to muddy it; the only justification for a long-suffering life is to perpetuate that suffering, to tend it and nourish it and complain about it, just as a life of crime is only sustainable if you persevere as a criminal, if villains persist in their villainy and do harm right left and center, first to some and then to others until no one is left untouched.”
Such sentences progress like blood flowing into all the channels of a vein, supplying the narrative with life and zeal. Marías is one of those gifted writers whose style sets him apart from other writers, whose authorship is apparent on every page he writes.
The plot of Tomás Nevinson includes a few real-life events that transpired during the long political conflict between Spain and the Basque Country, including the kidnapping and the subsequent murder of the Spanish politician Miguel Ángel Blanco by the ETA. Nevinson joins his neighbors marching to the town square in demonstration, perhaps to earn their trust, taking advantage of solidarity forged by the maddening atrocities incurred by the Basque nationalists. To Marías’s credit, a sense of urgency pervades the novel despite his introspective prose.
Endearing scenes between Nevinson and his wife Berta Isla, who have two children together, provide comforting reprieve from Nevinson’s stumbling undercover work. They care for each other, but long years of absence from the household during his active service rendered their marriage void. They no longer live under the same roof; Tomás is more like an avuncular figure to his children. Although they sometimes share Berta’s bed, Tomás does not probe into Berta’s private life, believing that he has no right. But the novel ends with promising notes as he recites Yeats’s “When You Are Old” to Berta:
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
With Marías’s untimely passing, we will never find out whether Berta and Tomás will rekindle their love, and yet as his final work, Tomás Nevinson, with his perennial theme of secrecy and betrayal, Marías has left us a towering works, a rightful culmination testifying to his genius.
*
It starts with a tremble in the stomach, a palpitation in the chest. You may call it intuition, premonition, foreboding. You may press it down with the firm fist of rationalism. And yet it persists, this flutter of feeling — this haunting sense that the future is not about to happen to you, but is already happening in you.
For all the marvels and flaws of our intuition, we expend immense cerebral and emotional energy on repressing these emissaries of our secret knowledge — these deep truths we perceive about ourselves and others, which we would rather not see and not heed in order to keep the surface of our lives unruffled. It is only in hindsight that we recognize their sharp validity, so blunted in the moment by our compulsive rationalizations, our comforting denials, and our willful blindness.
That is what Javier Marías (September 20, 1951–September 11, 2022) explores in some stunning passages from his 2002 novel Your Face Tomorrow (public library).
Considering how hindsight often gives us the clear sense that “everything was already there, somewhere, before it even reached or penetrated the mind,” Marías writes in one of his breathless streams of reckoning:
Everything is there on view, in fact, everything is visible very early on in a relationship just as it is in all honest, straightforward stories, you just have to look to see it, one single moment encapsulates the germ of many years to come, of almost our whole history — one grave, pregnant moment — and if we want to we can see it and, in broad terms, read it, there are not that many possible variations, the signs rarely deceive if we know how to read their meanings, if you are prepared to do so — but it is so difficult and can prove catastrophic; one day you spot an unmistakable gesture, see an unequivocal reaction, hear a tone of voice that says much and presages still more, although you also hear the sound of someone biting their tongue — too late; you feel on the back of your neck the nature or propensity of a look when that look knows itself to be invisible and protected and safe, so many are involuntary; you notice sweetness and impatience, you detect hidden intentions that are never entirely hidden, or unconscious intentions before they become conscious to the person who should be concealing them, sometimes you foresee what someone will do before that person has foreseen or known or even become aware of what this will be, and you can sense the betrayal as yet unformulated and the scorn as yet unfelt; and the feelings of irritation you provoke, the weariness you cause or the loathing you inspire, or perhaps the opposite, which is not necessarily any better: the unconditional love they feel for us, the other person’s ridiculously high hopes, their devotion, their eagerness to please and to prove themselves essential to us in order to supplant us later on and thus become who we are; and the need to possess, the illusions built up, the determination of someone to be or to stay by your side, or to win your heart, the crazed, irrational loyalty; you notice when there is real enthusiasm and when there is only flattery and when it is mixed (because nothing is pure), you know who isn’t trustworthy and who is ambitious and who has no scruples and who would walk over your dead body having first run you down, you know who has a candid soul and what will happen to these last when you meet them, the fate that awaits them if they don’t mend their ways, but grow still worse and even if they do mend their ways: you know if they will be your victims When you are introduced to a couple, married or not, you see who will one day abandon whom and you see this at once, as soon as you say hello, or, at least, by the end of the evening. You detect too when something is going wrong or falling apart, or flips right over and the tables are turned, when everything is collapsing, at what moment we stop loving as we once did or they stop loving us, who will or will not go to bed with us, and when a friend will discover his own envy, or, rather, decide to give in to it and allow himself to be led and guided from that moment on by envy alone; when it starts to ooze out or grow heavy with resentment; we know what it is about us that exasperates and infuriates and what condemns us, what we should have said, but did not, or what we should have kept silent about, but did not, why it is that suddenly one day they look at us with different eyes — dark or angry eyes: they already bear a grudge — when we disappoint or when we irritate because we do not as yet disappoint and so do not provide the desired excuse for our dismissal; we know the kind gesture that is suddenly no longer bearable and that signals the precise hour when we will become utterly and irredeemably unbearable; and we know, too, who is going to love us, until death and beyond and, much to our regret sometimes, beyond their death or mine or both… against our will sometimes… But no one wants to see anything and so hardly anyone ever sees what is there before them, what awaits us or will befall us sooner or later.
With a gauntlet thrown at the reductionist bias of the Western mind and its hasty dismissal of such uncomputable forms of knowledge, he adds:
This has nothing to do with premonitions, there is nothing supernatural or mysterious about it, what’s mysterious is that we pay no heed to it. And the explanation must be a simple one, since it is something shared by so many: it is simply that we know, but hate knowing; we cannot bear to see.
For an equally stirring counterpoint, couple with George Saunders on the courage of uncertainty, then revisit E.F. Schumacher on the notion of adaequatio and the art of seeing with the eye of the heart.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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